APOLLO OF WOLVES AND OTHER POETRY by Chris Saitta

The New Stylus: Issue I

Apollo of Wolves
 
Blow, Lyceum grasses, blow, 
From coiled lips of your wolf-god Apollo
Whose dawn-padded paws to starprints roam
This temple-tribute to thought-illumined roads.  

Blow, Lyceum grasses, blow
Of wave upon wave of your brushings-by, 
From staff to sandal-fall to cloak hemline,
For rhapsodes, your song-odyssey to sew.

The Greeks built the sun, 
Upon scaffolding~acrobaticon~  
With pear-skinned lightness to glow, 
Or like leavened bread from the woodburning stove. 

Blow, Lyceum grasses, blow,
The sun lies old on its famine-cracked pillow, 
In spittle of gold and yellowed phosphorous,
With the gods past-blown to ruin.




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Author’s notes:  The Lyceum, known for Aristotle’s peripatetic school (or walking school of thought), served as a temple dedicated to Apollo, who has been known as the God of Light, Poetry, and Wolves, among many other things.  

“Rhapsodes” were verse singers, or stitched-song singers, in the Lyceum and Ancient Greece.  Scholars believe Homer’s works were sung this way.

“Acrobaticon” means Greek scaffolding.

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Oblivion Conquers Us
 
Keep your trees, keep them for your heaven of ashen dusk 
And night like the pale-faced deathmask of emperors, 
No reason that the commoner to oblivion is hushed,
These old-wise woods and leaves, peopled without us.
 
Keep Macedonian dust lightly conquered over the breeze,
So that it shoots its tail like the centuries-sole comet,
The scorched earth left by Alexander’s mapmaker eyes,
Swung wide like his Sarissophoroi over Persian might.
 
Remember the lesser grove of his teacher Aristotle’s tribe, 
They have only slipped their sandals off, to bare themselves 
Of sound and the concourse of the foot’s impulse, 
Caught the lithesome wind, to flow outside our hearing, 
And muse as empire of air and loss and forgotten walks.
 
Keep your trees and the darkening sky through them
That remind me of the passing into the past.
Never is the poem from tongue of spade or plow.



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Author’s notes:  This and “Apollo of Wolves” were meant as a pair since Aristotle taught Alexander until his mid-teens.
 
“Sarissophoroi” were Macedonian light cavalry under Alexander, so named for the pikes they carried (sarissa).

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Summer War of Youth
 
Brother, our young summers held us in a long chain like the phalanx of bronzed soldiers forward flung, 
And the lion was skinned and hung out to dry like the sunned-fur of the beach at Marathon.
Brother, help me to dream again.
 
Brother, our yellowed days shook us like serried Hoplites of an atomic age, 
Shoulder to shoulder, friction rubbed, all ranks split from the fissioned-flanks.
Brother, help me to dream again.
 
Storm-footed Titans of heat, dust, and irradiated wind pry from a ruptured Tartarus,
The flanks are an open pulse; the scorch-song thirsts for its sea-cooling to stone.
Brother, the lion lives that wears your skull around its mane.
 
Brother, dream of me again, of Persian arrows and lances,
And my fallen eyes instead of yours pouring in 
With a sea of lavender water and mists 
And summers of once-were.



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Author’s notes:  A modern-day recounting of the Battle of Marathon during the first Greco-Persian Wars (circa 490 BC), a battle in which the Greeks triumphed.  

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Ancient Roman Coin
 
Fall to me, all you streets of Rome,
With your embrowned oils from torched walls and breccia of shadows, 
The pizzicato of stairways and afternoon slowly closed
Like the thick, leathery-echo from this book of all roads.
 
Fallen, smoldering empire of storefronts and back-shop heirlooms,
Your lupine hills unbound with milk of cur in the wind and woods, 
To your fallow fields rowed deep by a conquest of oars,
To the deepest silence and soot-muted oneness of Pompeii,
And a sky that is an ancient coin, without worth,
But still rubbed smooth at the edges by overfond lovers.



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Author’s notes:  “Breccia” is here meant to convey fragmented, stony shadows.
 
“Pizzicato” means a technique of playing with plucked strings.

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Chris Saitta works as a civil servant (Communications Director) in the Federal government and spends his downtime writing poems for an audience of his two dogs, both of which prefer long walks instead. He earned his Master’s degree in English Language and Literature from Hollins University and studied under George Garrett while earning his Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. The poems here are from his forthcoming first book of poetry, Poems of Ancient Rome and Greece.

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