Poem

Troia


Ruined Troy lay promiscuous among

    findspot and tell, breastworks and ditches

Like nine gold bracelets at a Turkish wedding

        in twenty-two karats, mined outside Pergamum.

Schliemann’s trench was a wound through the whole thing:

    at the Scaean Gate he was off by twelve hundred years,



where the mourning doves sang compulsively,

    vulgar-throated. In the music’s pause

near two stone griffins, a feral tabby

        warmed herself on a broken plinth, almond blossom

made a blizzard in the orchard nearby,

    and the spokes of wild fennel crossed with the sun’s rays.



The Scamander River was nowhere to be seen,

    having wandered off across

the rich alluvial plain. Nothing more would happen,

        that was the spirit and the sum:

nothing would happen here ever again –

    that, a taste of fennel, and the goat bells’ tinnitus.



- Karl Kirchwey