Homer, A. D. 1982

For Irving Kizner and his class at Hunter College

Much having traveled in the funkier realms of Ac-

ademe, aboard a grundgy elevator car,

deus ex machina reversed, to this ninth-floor

classroom, its windows grimy, where the noise of traffic,

moAvh\oioforo-daldoons-like, is chronic,

we've seen since February the stupendous candor

of the Iliad pour in, and for an hour and a

quarter at the core the great pulse was dactylic.

We've seen the clash, from those great halls, of light and dark,

the sullen campfires of a brooded-over choler,

Odysseus, rising, sway his peers with storms of logic,

the spurned priest of Apollo shrink along the shore,

and Hector's baby, shadowed by the plumes of war

as we are, pull back from his own father with a shriek.

DODONA: ASKED OF THE ORACLE

The female body, its creases and declivities

leading to the sacred opening, the hollow

whose precincts, here, neither seduce nor threaten:

bee-hum, birdsong, side-oats' leaning awns,

the blowing grasses (one vivid

lizard flickers on gray stone,

is gone); the drifting

down of poplars; harebells,

convolvulus. The triumph-song,

far off, of strutting cocks

no threat, merely ridiculous. Olympus

a mountain range away: huge valleys

charged with gargantuan

foreshadowings, new-minted

laser glints of force.

What lustral commerce

might cleanse the consciousness, hallow the body,

and renew a broken trust? Before Dione,

the dim earlier consort, gave place

to nagging, bitchy Hera (who for her nagging

had, of course, good reason)

would there have been a time

the rustle of earth-nurtured

oaks had meaning-when doves in flight,

as yet unhackneyed by utopian