| | | After Catullus If you, Tom, could see this inflight video map
of the world turning wildly on its axis
you would not, I think, be mad, though it is not
on paper, and that is what you do, but it is
a useful thing to see the earth twisted up like this;
it is our minds that are twisted, and you
are twisted too around a spoon, and drunk, I'm sure
by now, like me, past Newfoundland's shore
with other peoples' wine and dotted lines
to Bruxelles where I will only be
to switch planes, but you, I think, first went
there of all the other places you've been,
gobbling up the light as you went,
sending presents wrapped in maps.
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| Copyright © 2013 by Matthew Rohrer. Used with permission of the author. |
About This Poem "I was fascinated, reading Catullus translated by Peter Whigham, how he writes in several modes that are unpopular today: letters and maledictions in particular. And he calls everyone by name. So I wrote a letter to my uncle. I was also interested in seeing if I could write differently, and Catullus and I sure write differently. Like many of his, this poem is only one sentence."
Matthew Rohrer
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Poem-A-Day was launched in 2006 and features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive. |
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Matthew Rohrer's first book, Hummock in the Malookas (W.W. Norton, 1991), was selected by Mary Oliver for the National Poetry Series. His
most recent book is Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011). Rohrer lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at New York University. |
| Related Poems by Gaius Valerius Catullus by Lisa Jarnot by Marianne Moore |
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