The Poetry Porch

Fagaceae, by Julia Budenz

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

February 7, 2003

Four months have passed
And a day,
Like a day.
The roses in October,
Gold, red, white,
Kept blossoming.
The dying child
Mourns the dead mother
This little less
That the mother living
Did not have to mourn
The child dead.
Those roses are snow.
These flakes making the roses
Might be tears, not hot, very cold.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

February 21, 2003
Feralia

Perhaps not ungently
Though very far from Rome
Diana’s arrow struck
The mother in her winter
In our autumn.
Perhaps as the daughter
In our winter in her autumn
Stretches out her arms
Sensing the mother
Or remembering,
The mother’s arms stretch gently
And memory and sense
Are not lost
And Apollo’s silver bow
Does not clang.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

February 22, 2003
Cara Cognatio

The remembrance or the sensation
Of Soracte’s snow,
Of the gleaming peak in the plain
Not so far out of Rome,
Is or is like the hoary head of the mountain
Like and unlike the hoary head of the mother
Whose hair, shining white and sleek and soft,
Is now not seen,
Who is now not seen.
The children on the hills of the city
Gather and gaze.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

February 23, 2003
Terminalia

Roma o morte.
In Rome Keats breathing.
In Rome Keats ceasing.
Rome as golden end.
Marble Rome as death.
Morte e Roma.
The aqueduct a dinosaur.
The stone inscribed.
The fountain unceasing.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

February 24, 2003
Regifugium

Here might occur
Intercalation.
These children are women. Every
Woman is an island, they sometimes heard
Mother saying.
Italia paene est insula. Insula,
Island, glistens in the glitter of the Tiber,
In the middle of the river of the city.
They all were last together in Manhattan,
On Manhattan.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

February 24, 2003
Cum Tarquinius Superbus fertur ab urbe expulsus

The answer is no.
The question was:
Will I survive?
Papers live in libraries alone,
In tested air, intensive care,
Named and noted like heroes agleam
Before the walls of Troy along the plain.
Watch them from the walls well-founded, wide,
Regard them from the god-built ramparts, high,
As they march silent, shouting, sung, below.
On paper they will live, the city live.
I am a paper soldier.
I am a paper doll.
I am a paper tiger.
I need a paper life.
The library will not share its air.
The curator will not dare her care.
Am I not rare?
Slowly I descend the stair.
Ice lies glinting beneath.
Mud goes spreading below.
Clouds come crossing above,
Showering ticker tape of snow.
Non sum digna.
Sum superba.
Why did my mortal author not,
Promethean, provide, prevent, persuade?
Shall I blame Julia
If when Julia dies
Flora dies, too?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

February 25, 2003
Publish or Perish

They said,
Be humble, please.
Think not of castles, banquets, gardens, fables
Where gleaming marble pillars are grand trees,
Polished mahoganies posh picnic tables.
Flora, sorry, you are seedy.
We regret to tell you,
Your best plot is weedy.
And if she could not market you, they said,
Could not sell you,
You must be worthy to be dead.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

February 25, 2003
Argyrótox’

On the ice there shines a slant of sun.
Let it be the lyre,
And not the bow.
Let it be the plectrum,
Not the arrow.
Let the sound be song,
And long, and long,
Not yet, inevitable, the shriek.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

February 26, 2003

When the great Alexander went
To Troy, in the museum
They asked him: Would you care to view
The lyre played to Helen
By Helen’s Alexander? No,
I’d like to see the one
To which the great Achilles sang
Feats, fames, of epic men.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

February 27, 2003
Equirria

Krishna, I cannot fight.
I asked you to drive
Me between the lines.
I could see both sides.
I could gaze
Both ways.
Was good here and evil here?
Was wrong there and there right?
Was theirs blame and ours praise?
Is a god my charioteer?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 1, 2003
Feriae Marti

Now what destructive and deceitful dream
Has Zeus the son of crooked-counseling Cronus
Sent down to Agamemnon Atreus’ son
Our sceptered and wide-ruling commander in chief?
Are mortals or immortals encompassing our grief?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 1, 2003
Iunoni
Natalis Martis

Only a list, and he not even first
But suddenly recalled as when we met.
I was just seventeen. The hero burst
Into my world. He made mind larger. Yet
It was not from these ranks that he thus came
To me, marked, marking, marvelously. Not
Hera but Juno was his foe. His fame
That in my future fugled, glittered hot,
Bright with Homeric sunlight, moonlit gleamed
Virgilian initiation, end,
Among the horrors, glories, hilltops, gullies,
Where Juno moved from enemy to friend,
Where not Aineias but Aeneas seemed,
Was, Hector, Agamemnon, and Achilles.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 1, 2003
Feriae Marti
Iunoni Lucinae Exquiliis
quod eo die aedis ei dedicata est per matronas

Who weaves a web large as a double mantle
Marbled to gleam and purpled glittering?
She is in Troy, behind the walls of Troy,
Behind the walls of Troy’s high-chambered palace,
Behind the walls of her own palaced chamber,
Weaving the battles and the battlefields,
Weaving the flowers. Deep within the halls,
Fashioning, fingering, art, she does not know
The present future or the present past
Near, close, soon, now, without. She lives within
Her past and future present, memory
And making, feeling fingers fashioning
What mind keeps meditating. She is Helen
Before her husbands’ match, Andromache
After her husband’s death. Messengers come.
Who leaves a web large as a twofold cloak
Purpled to darkly dark and marbled hard?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

03/03/03
Videre Licet

The god creates a shield
And fits a triple rim
Around the figured field
Like brilliant marble trim
But useful. It will hold
The belt on which the grim
Gay picture of the old
New world is held and steeled
As iron turns to gold.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

03/03/03
Variae Lectiones

It surely is not marble.
It maybe is not purple.
It merely is the sparkle.
The readers look. They listen.
In this and in this lesson
They touch a tune, a glisten.
And if it is not color
Or rock it is not filler.
It is the joy, the dolor.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

03/03/03
Videlicet

The Odyssey of life.
The Iliad of death.
The striving and the strife.
Thesis, antithesis.
The final fire and ice.
The simple synthesis.
The simple shibboleth.
The knot cut by the knife.
The long song on the breath.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 6, 2003

The sky stands, looks down,
Holds eyes fixed on the ground,
Waves neither forward nor back
Fagaceous arboreal staff,
Much like a surly person
Without much of knowledge,
Without much of concern,
Without envisagement.
Soon will the flakes of the snows come rushing
Much like the words of the speeches of Odysseus?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 7, 2003
Vediovis inter Duos Lucos

Was it innocent Iphigenia
Whom her father sacrificed at Aulis?
Was it irresistible unresisting Helen
Whom her lover transported to Troy?
Was it their phantoms, their simulacra,
As in revisionist versions?
How do I know? I know
That when you meet beautiful sorrowful Helen in Troy
You have to believe it is she conversing with you.
And when you encounter in Argos
Angry agonizing Clytemnestra
You are certain her daughter went under the knife and is gone.
As for me,
The shell around me,
The shell which you see around me,
The shell which I feel around me,
Is no longer mine,
Is no longer I.
Perhaps it is a grasshopper’s flesh.
It may be a cicada’s body.
It goes on changing like the old immortal body of Tithonus
Or of that sibyl whom some saw suspended in a jar,
And only underneath this fragile shell, this threadbare cloak,
Under it and apart from it,
Am I what I have been,
Am I what I am.
The old men of Troy are sitting on the tower
With old King Priam above the Scaean Gate.
Helen walks out towards the wall from the palace
Leaving her weaving to see the imminent duel down on the plain.
The old men whisper: No one can censure
Greeks or Trojans for warring over such beauty.
Nevertheless let her go back home to Sparta
With the swift black ships and give us peace.
King Priam sits at Troy upon the tower
Over the Scaean Gate, his brothers with him,
Lampus and Clytius and martial Hicetaon.
Where is the fifth of Laomedon’s sons? Is he old?
Where is Tithonus, husband of the Dawn?
For Dawn comes every day. He does not come.
He lives immortal by the streams of ocean
At the earth’s ends. And yet his son will come,
Will come, tall comely Memnon, son of Dawn,
To fall before Achilles under Troy.
The son may die. Tithonus will not die.
He lives old, older, oldest, by the ocean.
He ages at the edges of the earth.
Dawn loved him. Zeus allowed him deathlessness.
He lives forever in his deathless death.
He dies forever in his lifeless life.
And what is the cry of the daughter from the altar?
After this sacrifice the battleships
Can carry warriors and war to Troy.
I too have been sacrificed.
I too have been loved.
I too mingle with mortal and immortal,
Live with human and divine.
For did not Aúos come in golden sandals?
Or did not Aúos come in golden sandals?
Was it Artemis, Aphrodite, Apollo, Zeus,
Who gave me age, required of me the zoic,
Acing and zeroing, from A to Z?
Others loved me. Yes, I have been loved.
I myself have sacrificed myself.
What of that stream of sun, of aether, that illumined and consumed?
What of that chain of fog, of thunder, that battered and clamped?
What of this husk? Whose husk? Could there be more?
Under a cloud that once was a body,
Beneath a shell that once was a self,
Within a phantom,
Inside a simulacrum,
Something is living,
Something that is I.
So I speak, the speaker or the spoken.
The written or the writer, thus I write.
Sibyl, do you wish to die, or will
You take me to and bring me back from hell?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 7, 2003
Sanctae Perpetua et Felicitas
Carthage, 203

Tí thélo? tò kalón, tò alethés.
Idoù he doúle tês aletheías.
Idoù he doúle tês epistémes.
Idoù he hiéreia toû kaloû.
Where is tò agathón, bonum, the good?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 9, 2003
Santa Francesca Romana
First Sunday of Lent
Arma Ancilia Moventur

In Carthage I spoke Trojan but in Troy
Cretan, Laconian, or Mycenaean,
At Cumae Vulgar Tongue or Lingua Franca.
Once you thunder, Light’s Lordship, before you I tremble.
A robin or a blackbird made a sign.
Am I barbarophone or sibylline?
I single all the duals and the plurals,
Signal each ge, each gar, each te, each tar,
Every imperfect, every aorist,
Each future, each subjunctive, with, without,
Its an, its ken, and every potent wow.
Pray, says the sibyl. She is shouting, Vow.
On a height two double temples overlap:
Of Mary and Roman Frances, of Venus and Rome.
In one a bit of body is still kissed.
My lips still osculate, orate, or prattle.
What will I speak in Thule if I reach
Thule before forever losing speech?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 11, 2003
459th Birthday of Torquato Tasso

They asked: What language is your choice
To add before you die?
Was there a quaver in my voice?
I answered: Poetry.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 11, 2003
Two

What number, voice, and aspect disappeared?
I, we, do, did, make, am, are, made, or not.
If dual, middle, gnomic aorist
Have vanished from the language, how shall I
Or we be said to say or say what we
Or I have wished or have been wished to be?
If the abstract or the incarnate word,
The verb, is or has issued from the person,
What number and what aspect and what voice
Suit the persona and the sound, and which
Is mask and which embodiment, or which
Is utterance and which is utterer?
Who is that person, who is that persona,
What is this sound and what this sounding board,
Which is a what and which can be the who?
Where are, is, am I, she, they, we, you, you?
Will Helen, searching for her brothers, see
That even while the twins stay two they share,
Deep in dark Spartan soil, high in pure air,
Mortality and immortality?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 11, 2003
Worlds

Am I the cosmos? Past my micro- find
Our meso- and our macrocosm. Five
Is the book’s number, final are its leaves,
Far larger, darker, uglier its horrors,
Its hopes despairing, glaring, ultimate,
Ruddy as robin’s puff on snow-soaked sod,
Gold through the cold like witchhazel’s rays over ice.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 12, 2003
Wednesday in the First Week of Lent

Into the worldly world
I went after absence,
Abjuring absence,
Prescient of departure,
And listened to the lecture.
It was the intellectuals’ worldly world.
It was no demi-world but universal,
A universe, the university.
It had been a half-absence perhaps
Or perhaps a whole.
It was a semi-presence perhaps
Or possibly less.
I half chatted.
I wholly
Engulfed strawberries, large, no, enormous, crimson, no, mauve,
Large mauve strawberries,
Hard fauve cheeses, and soft beige pâtés,
And the hard-brown-edged and soft-white-centered
Fresh thick disks of bread.
And, as everyone left,
From the plastic glass as from a glass goblet I gobbled,
I gulped, the white wine’s crowning golds
With the gusto of a ghost.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 12, 2003
True Confession

Religious preference?
Before the operation
The nurse had been filling out the form
But the form was for her.
I am very religious, she had said. The pen was waiting.
She was waiting. Roman Catholicism?
Was it her chance to bear witness and go on to heaven?
She could hear the clear bell ringing;
See, in black and white and bringing
Communion, the priest; feel memory clinging.
Her mind was winging, winding. The pen was waiting.
She was waiting. Roman Polytheism?
Should she try to explain? For me everything is gray.
Not black and white, the nurse interpreted helpfully nodding.
The pen was waiting. Her mind was saying, but could she say,
Poetry?
She answered: None.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 12, 2003
Three

What room is there here
For evil and good?
What place is there here
For the false and the true?
What could have crashed
Into the delicate birch?
What could have gashed
The sadly fragile perch
Of the revenant robin
Songless still?
What ugliness
Must beauty fill?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 13, 2003

We step among the falling flakes of snow.
We step upon the fallen freights of snow.
We step between the falling and the fallen.
We fear to fall. Will each keep each from falling?
Are we, we each, we two, we twain,
Are we, are we then, she and I?
Are we, are we then, you and I?
Are we, are we not, I and I?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 15, 2003
Annae Perennae

It would be better
If she were not gone.
It would be better
If her hands were dancing
Along the keys of the upright piano
And throughout the house
The Appassionata
Rang passionately.
What passion that was
The daughter at the desk in her bedroom upstairs
Had not wondered
Fifty or sixty
Lived years ago
And millennia of journeyed miles away,
At the latitude of New York,
Around the center of the century,
On the longitude of New York,
As a window first opened perhaps
To a breath of March,
To a day of less cloud,
To a certain cosmic scent
That mingled with the scent of the cake baking in the oven
And a subtle palpable shift in the inclination of the light outside.
She had not wondered at the wonderful sound of the mother.
It was to the daughter at her desk millennial, perennial.
She wondered later
About the pure power of passion,
About the passionate power of that pure art,
About the sound that had stopped.
The sound resounded. It has resounded.
If it must be gone it is better that it go on.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

Monday, March 17, 2003
Liberalia, Agonalia

Today a sky immense immensely blue,
Tomorrow filled with fullness of the moon,
Thursday enlarged by spring. Eye that might free
These bound aghast glazed gazing at straits unseen.
Aphrodite snatched Alexander back
From battle. Who saves us? Who saves Iraq?
Will we wage war? Where is sage strength in power?
Do we waste words? Where are lost love and horror?
Whom in the world must one divide as us?
Who are we multiplied in the universe?
Does subtraction lurk below the query?
Must an addition of measures corrupt the story?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 18, 2003
Plenilunium

Though there be a jingle,
Though there be a jerk,
Truth and beauty mingle
In desperate play
By cloudy day,
In misty moonlit work.
Could some
Good come
And be and stay!
It may
Be better to have gone
Not berserk
But beyond the moon.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 19, 2003
Quinquatrus
Feriae Marti
Minervae

The world will wane
And all must age:
Ares, Athena,
Argos, Athens,
Mars, Minerva,
A minished moon
Turning above the mounds of Rome.
Turn, Minerva,
Among the leafy olive branches
Silvery on the quiet Aventine,
From winning wars
To weaving words.
Turn the page.
May words, may wisdom, come
Of age.
May none be Cain.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 20, 2003
Equinox

It is not a starling.
This purling
Of melodies, this pealing
Louder and louder of carillons into the breeze,
Means that the mockingbird can sing
Once more of spring
About to touch the trees.
This equinox
Is equivocal.
Someplace our day is their morrow, and spring in our air
Is elsewhere, in another’s where,
Fall.
Today, tonight, tomorrow, the bright pearling
Of the clay or the papyrus or the vellum
Of this wide world is once more bellum,
Not pax.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 21, 2003
Equinox

Some talk with Zeus.
Where you are,
When you visit the sun,
Whether you fly or are flown by or have flown,
Whether you throw or are thrown at or are thrown
May produce or seem to produce
Seeds of malice,
Buds of solace.
I am not sure about Thule.
Here,
After the past night’s rains,
The bark
Of oaks and even of beeches is still dark.
In seas of pallid grass
The blackened remains
Of the last islands of ice
Erode less slowly.
At parliament in front of Zeus’s palace
The gods forgathered on the golden floor
Sit sipping nectar and debating war.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 22, 2003
Saturday

In seas of sallow grass
Even the horses of the sun or the horses of the ocean
Might sink unwilling
Or, worse, unwilling stick.
What sweat I have sweated, said the queen of the gods
To her husband, and my horses have worn themselves out
As I worked hard herding the armies,
To the enemies evils.
Clouds hang heavy stuck above the traces,
The ruts of rims, the vestiges
Of chariots of nights, of dawns, of carriages
Of babies.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 23, 2003
Tubilustrium

Which trumpets have been purified and polished
And pointed at the prize, the skies, the sky?
Will I not stick? Will I not sink but sing?
Must I have not, once stuck or sunk, once sung?
What will have been, what be, what be abolished?
Will there have been, be cries, be ayes, be I?
If you have heard, forgive me, for I die.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 23, 2003
Sunday

In cloud came Homer unto me and spoke:
Touched by Apollo one must make the song
Until one’s hand falls and one’s breath has failed.
I gazed at him. You were, then, and you are.
He answered: I am what of mine you hear.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 23, 2003
Twilight

Sun had suffused blue noontide from blue height.
Roseate dawning of my mental day,
Homer at sundown came to me to say
Azure and gold and rose and brune and gray
Unite, part. White stars stare still from stark night.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 23, 2003
Lutatius quidem clavam eam ait esse
in ruina Palati incensi a Gallis repertam
qua Romulus Urbem inauguraverit

Is it the churning pyres that light the sky?
Pardon me, Homer, for I choke.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 23, 2003
Quinquatribus Ultimis

By the exact meridian,
I guess, occurred an interspersion
Of white clouds and of gray clouds even
Among the remnants of celeste.
And was that a breeze or a wind?
And some securely sacrifice to Mars,
And some prefer to sacrifice to Minerva,
Observing the fifth, by later interpretation,
Of the quintet of festival days of one or of the other
Or of both.

***

BIRTHDAY CARD

March 27, 2003
Mary Anne Miller

Giving and grieving in the midst.
Living in the smile and in the laughter
Of the expansive universal life.
Bent above the depths of the disaster
Of narrowing unnecessary death.
Oh, once again the chestnuts will arise
In their long leafage and fine flowering.
Bobwhite and whitetail once again will feast
With joy fed by delicious offering
Of bronze and golden generous sweet sweets.
Oh, all around the chestnuts will surprise.
Seeing the seedling and the seed.
Hearing the horrors, hugeness, smash, crush, curse.
Hearing the harmonies, light largeness freed.
Grieving and grieving for the universe.
Giving and giving to the universe.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 31, 2003
Lunae in Aventino

The month of March has always been a long one.
The hill is still.
The temple is empty.
Even if it changed
From first to third,
This month was one of the long ones.
Unless the measurement
Was hindered by the chill,
Except for the coming and going of the snow
The month has not changed
The morphology of how
That beech buds above
The iron thorns of those rose bushes below
At the edge of the penumbra.
The buds are winter’s, long, still.
They could be empty.
Was, as some have said, the rose grotesque?
The moon became a god.
The tree, whether beech or oak,
Became an oracle, a lightning rod.
Should we have discussed
Religion and politics,
Death and taxes?
The buds all might
Be full of fight,
Be full of life.
How many deaths were counted
After the
Gods’,
After the
God’s,
After
God’s?

***

BIRTHDAY CARD

March 31, 2003
Rose Shawfeng Wang
Mother Fidelis, O.S.U.

What date on the calendar of the moon
Was that day in the north of your vast land
Seventy years ago when you were born?
In nineteen thirty-three, when I was not,
We—though I was not yet one of us—
Called your city Peking or Peiping.
You they called Seamist,
But when you crossed the sea
We called you Rose.
To a deepness as of the sea,
To a vision as through the mist,
To a profound loveliness witnessed in the rose,
To your calling,
You have been faithful,
Whatever you have been called.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 31, 2003
Monday

On Day Twelve of the Iraq War . . . ,
The BBC broadcast began.
It is fourteen hours.
Here it is nine.
Here flecks of snow
Like flakes of moon descend.
In other places, where the sandstorms stopped,
From opened heavens other things are dropped.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

March 31, 2003
Pridie Kalendas Aprilis

This little bit of consciousness
Is like a little star
Set somewhere in the universe
Not too far from, too far
For, general experience
And sharp particular.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 3, 2003
Thursday

It was dark at dawn.
When will Homeric Eós
Come with her touch of rose?
And when will Sapphic Aúos
Come with her step of gold?
Will Aurora, Virgilian,
Leaving her saffron chamber reach
The crocuses?

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 4, 2003
Ludi Matri Magnae

It was dark again at dawn.
Below, new white roofs glistened on cars
Between the avenue’s fresh white bars.
Something was seen out there in the sleet.
Something was seen down there in the street.
But why is Hannibal a danger?
Must Rome breed friend and Carthage stranger?
I turned the radio on.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 6, 2003

Then she closed those blue eyes.
Six months is only half a year,
Too short for forgetting,
Too short for remembering.
Life came first.
To the daughter the mother has always lived.
Death was brief.
That sixth of October was also Sunday.
The daffodils are living in the long laving of the sun.
The daffodils are dying in the short stabs of the cold.
Beneath the beech the squills have opened blue.

***

BIRTHDAY CARD

April 6, 2003
Lucas John Palermo

April sixth of thirteen twenty-seven.
The poet’s earthly love stands seen. Oh heaven!
April sixth of thirteen forty-eight.
The poet’s living love lies dead. Oh fate!
April sixth, two thousand three. Oh more!
The mother’s youngest greatgrandchild turns four.
The mother’s calls and letters would be bent
Upon the bettering of government.
Nature is killing some and culture others
And some the sons, the sisters, and the brothers.
Can one feel hope, feel trust,
Above the Lenten dust?
One can, if just
Because one must.
Are Petrarch’s Laura’s smiles and tears?
Are ours the children’s years?
Easy the rhymes,
But hard, oh hard, the times.
Let the wee youngsters laugh. It is their hour.
Let the fair future in its beauty flower.
Reason and poetry, can you forgive
Me? Have I died already? Do I live?
Lucas, forgive me. Lucas, little boy,
Live, bloom, infuse the universe with joy.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 7, 2003

If the ostrich lifts
Her head from the sand,
If the mute swan sings
His song at the end,
If ’tis love that makes
The world go round,
I can find
Our bond
And the freedom of the wind.

***

BIRTHDAY CARD

April 8, 2003
Joan Ellenbogen Geller

She is in Rome. The clear
Sound of the song surpasses even that
As it is sung,
Not denying, not rejecting,
Alien and at home in Roman air,
Gathered and gathering,
Extended and extending,
From end to end of history, of being,
And, since an endlessness is sensed existing,
Out of and into even that unending,
While chanted without arrogance, with care,
For caring and for curing and for hearing.
She is in Rome. I hear
A sound, her sound, sound’s sound, her song, yes that,
The song, song’s song.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 12, 2003
Ludi Cereri

How I dreaded
The beginning of battle!
And I know how Homer dreaded it, too,
Postponing and postponing,
Putting off and putting off,
Deferring and deferring
For two thousand three hundred ninety-five lines
Until in Book Four,
After those last similes of bleating sheep and beating sea
And after like the herdsman alone on his hill I heard from afar
Two torrents tumble thundering
Down their mountains and into their deepest ravines
Like battering battle,
Antilochus was killing Echepolus,
A Greek a Trojan,
Both named as known,
Their fathers known,
Their motions known
Of slaying and of being slain,
And everything was very close.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 13, 2003
Iovi Victori, Iovi Libertati
Palm Sunday

I had come at last to battle.
We had come at last to battle.
How I had feared that coming!
How we, how he . . . How can I speak for others?
In his face he fixed it. Its brazen point
Passed to his bone inside. And him,
And both his eyes, the dark enfolded.
He fell as when a tower . . .

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 13, 2003
Passion Sunday

The metal tip seemed brazen when I felt it
Enter my flesh and penetrate my bone.
It was like iron, steel, aluminum
Inside me. It was shameless. It was brass.
It was like adamant, like plastic, glass.
I could have called it copper. It was bronze.
Sensations complicate our lexicons.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 13, 2003
The Ides of April

Can I live yesterday, the day before,
Before this consciousness, before this war?
The squills are blue. The grass is almost green.
The sky is slate. The slate is not yet clean.
The snows are almost those of yesteryear.
Is that the mockingbird I hear and hear?
The sky is blue. The sky is in the sun,
Sun in the sky. The day is almost done.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 13, 2003
Ovis Idulis
Iovis Fiducia

I am grateful
To the great
God who has saved,
Who has rescued,
Me again and again
From dreadful
And dreaded weather.
I have been answered.
Now I have answered
With this act
Of thanksgiving,
Hanging
My tablet
Up on the Capitol.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 13, 2003
Iovi

The oak on the Capitoline
Becomes the oak of Jove of old.
The oak has gone from gold to green.
The oak can go from green to gold.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 13, 2003
Atrium Libertatis

Is the library still open?
Ask Pollio or Ovid. Knock and listen.
Hurry. The books could burn.
Peruse the words of script, the words of stone.
This is not yet the time to sail to Thule.
Rome is not yet plumbed.
Rome on a thousand leaves is barely named.
Hasten slowly.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 14, 2003
Ventus ab occasu grandine mixtus erit

Except, in the afternoon sun, by the wall,
That the purple blue no doubt
And the blue purple of course
And the blue blue in particular
Of curl and curve of hyacinth there standing
In fragrant luster and in lustrous fragrance
If anything meant anything to me
Meant more or less all or nothing
Or less or more or nothing or all.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 14, 2003
Ludi Cereri
Monday in Holy Week

I go on, I go on and on, I go
At least as knowing that I do not know,
At last as knowing that I do not know,
How I am going, whether I can so
Keep going, whether I could ever so.
I go on, I go on, and on I go.

***

DIARY OF FLORA BAUM

April 15, 2003
Fordicidia

I open shades to morning sun.
At last today it will be warm.
At least I love. Shall I say only this?
At most I mourn. Must I say only that?
At least however closed I mourn.
At most however cold I love.

***

“Fagaceae” is Section Six of “Lyre, Harp, Violin,” which is Part Three of
            “Towards Farthest Thule,” which is Book Four of the poem in five
            books, “The Gardens of Flora Baum,” by Julia Budenz.
            Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by Julia Budenz.
            “Diary of Flora Baum: March 1, 2003, Feriae Marti, Iunoni Lucinae
                        Exquiliis . . . ,” appeared in Arion 12.3 (winter 2005) 17.

“The Gardens of Flora Baum” has five books
By the Tree of Life
Towards a Greek Garden
Rome
Towards Farthest Thule
By the Tree of Knowledge
Book Four has three parts
Lay of the Last Monk
Sibyl
Lyre, Harp, Violin
Book Four, Part Three, has seven sections
Tam Lin
Oleaceae
Aceraceae
Sicut et Nos
Rosaceae
Fagaceae
King Orpheus
Book Four, Part Three, Section Six, has sixty pieces

***

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