Untitled
After Elagabalus
Philip Sorenson
a mollusk crawls under
the wood to live so the moon
a meteorite on the shoulders
of a hunched old man
Jupiter it comes always
over the horizon
like a fleet of burning arrows
and stamps out the beds
drawing back the lid
spine
then the towers had
indiscriminately the gold
URANIA
probing probing
far from the hacking and crushing
the blackberry bush where elderly soldiers milk
their frightened dogs
on the frozen river's edge
bag of milk
a baby asleep in a pelican's mouth
grasping her penis she dips a toe an ankle
her whole leg into the lake
fog descending
names are invisible pots
articulated
into grand sewers
remind those who have
only arrived
of the quiet
the armor is clattering
stacked like
glowing fungi
under darkened palms
the long the winter sky
of indeterminate ends and fingers
of all your fingers stuffed inside of me like pigs
saying
truffle and
blame me and
I'm ashamedMIDSUMMER
black stone
mother bent against daybreak's ram
and lingering under rafts of pigeons
doors invite arrows
where white horses march
there is no rider
Elagabalus (born Varius Avitus Bassianus), the sexually ambiguous ancestral head of a Syrian sun cult, ruled from 218–222.
These poems present a re-appropriation of Elagabalus's life and the text into which that life has been subsumed. Earnest Cary's translation of Cassius Dio's Roman History and Anthony Birley's translation of Suetonius's Lives of the Later Caesars provided material for many of these poems. The facts of Elagabalus's reign are unclear. Roman historians largely falsified materials as part of a propaganda campaign. Time and mendacity create a kind of material silence, like spaces before and after a question: a convex or diabolical quiet.
