Print This PostAfter Catullus and Horace
only the manners of centuries ago can teach me
how to address you my lover as who you are
O Sestius, how could you put up with my children
thinking all the while you were bearing me as in your mirror
it doesn’t matter anymore if spring wreaks its fiery
or lamblike dawn on my new-found asceticism, some joke
I wouldn’t sleep with you or any man if you paid me
and most of you poets don’t have the cash anyway
so please rejoin your fraternal books forever
while you miss in your securest sleep Ms. Rosy-fingered dawn
who might’ve been induced to digitalize a part of you
were it not for your self-induced revenge of undoneness
it’s good to live without a refrigerator! why bother
to chill the handiwork of Ceres and of Demeter?
and of the lonesome Sappho. let’s have it warm for now.
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Bernadette Mayer is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and prose, including Memory (1971), Midwinter Day (1982), and Poetry State Forest (2008). Her book The Formal Field of Kissing, a series of translations, re-interpretations and poems inspired by Catullus and Horace, will be reprinted by on June 7.
