Joe’s Weave

 In honor of Chief Foxs’ Photography

The slaves slept uneasy the night before
The Proconsul’s visit to the Lapialuzuli pool
Marbelized with Grecian Columns
Flaring eagle wings out of bulbous Roman spires.
Here the spices of Egypt soaked in the Vesuvius sun
And the trunks of Lebanon cedars
Were cloaked in silken lace where the Praetorian Guard might raise
Their goblets of finest Etruscan wines
Saluting the Proconsul’s every adjective and adverb
Narrating his recent victories in Gaul and  Germania…
All was blossomed in the delicate webs of venomous spiders
Who lurked in the camouflage of their seductive entrails…
A nervous slave teetered while pouring The Proconsul’s first taste
Of the Emperor’s grape.
The host ordered the attendants to throw him into the pitch pond
Where bloated carnivorous eels were kept
At the threshold of starvation..
How anomalous was the glittering gold and veiny Massa marble columns
In the sinuous curl of the eels sensing the delicacy
Of a Greek slave in his prime…
The Proconsul lowered his palm in a signature of mercy
For the ill fated blunder…
The spiders in the villa dappled and shimmered
With Monarchs who would never fly again.
In vibrating death throes they never looked younger
Or more fit…
Joe has mastered in a photograph
The enigma of healthy white chattering teeth
In a blizzards’ fury.
This Mediterranean vignette ends with the cruelty
Of an insidious death annihilated by a Proconsul
Who was secretly saddened by butterflies that were never more
Monarchial and splendid than in the last moments
Of life.

Ken Siegelman
Brooklyn Poet Laureate, April, 2008