Cloacina: A Philological Note

Van Gogh, Schoenen / Shoes (1886)

The average reign of a Roman emperor

Reckoned at just eight years, ancient Americans

Set the length of their presidential rule by that,

Split into two sections, the jive and the lame duck,

Until in the twenty-third century, crisis

Brought on the anarchy (of which we learn in school)

After President Valerian, defeated in

Combat  by the Texmexican Ayatollah

Was obliged to serve as a hassock to his foe,

Skinned alive, or forced to drink liquid moolah,

If not all three—thank God  such things are no more done

In 3025!

Derived from the name

Of a river, it’s said, whose waters, drunk, made folk

Forget, their word for “truth” was aptomaine; others

Say aletheia  (the a in both privative,

Of course). The first is undoubtedly correct: ptōma,

Was the ancient Greek term for corpse, and the sacred

Stream that bore dead bodies away (our Cloaca

Maxima) was, at that time, called “the Potomac.”

Only a poet, prophet, or upright president,

Cloacina* had decreed, could vouch for aptomaine;

To them, it sprang directly from the so-called brain,

Which anatomizers now designate as “the head"—

Much prized, it's said, in vivisection of the dead.

*The goddess presiding over the Cloaca Maxima (“Greatest Drain”), the main sewage outlet in that remote era.

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

In 2010

The Best American Poetry 2

O10 includes Updike (who’d died

the year before); John Ashbery, doubt

-ing the approach of spring; and Ann Carson,

“Wildly Constant”; Tom Clark, “excavation

too’s required / Cries out the hungry unborn poem / Within us, demanding to exist as /

If alive”; G. C. Waldrep, “That was the spring

the bees disappeared”; J. E. Wei, “So Long,

my pine, So Long, my pine.” I skim, of course

over Derek Walcott and other fine poets.

Obama was president. A hopeful

year, all in all, for U.S. poetry.

What, then, suppose of 2025?

The Best American Poetry 2O10, edited by Amy Gerstler and David Lehman (Scribner Poetry, 2010).

Thursday, August 28, 2025

Cleome

Sensu stricto—"in the strict sense,”

See the spiny spiderflower,

Whose old Greek name wants recompense.

Pollinated by bats—aloof,

In fact, from spiders [everywhere,

With over 53,000 species—

The genus Cleome has 199],

My specimen's a volunteer

That a sturdy head endowers,

Rebooting on its single stalk

(Verses meant to picture flowers

Can't shrink from orchidaceous talk!)

Time and again, there, bidding fair—

Depucelating maiden air . . .

Note: Cleome does not belong among the Orchidaceae. However, that genus name, the term "orchid," and the adjective "orchidaceous" all derive from ancient Greek ὄρχις orchis, meaning "testicle."

The name "cleome" was probably devised by Linnaeus from Greek kleos, glory.

Wednesday, August 27, 2025