The Zero Suite (11)

Catullus 101


Sometimes you wake up with The Fear
rain pelting down outside
thunderclaps provoking

cat shenanigans
what Simon called
free-floating anxiety

does deconstruction help?
I’m told that speaking through
the words

of other people’s poems
can help you make your own
ten years ago

I might have felt the same
my remedy now
is hanging on

all dressed and shod
and ready for the day

I wait for what will happen anyway


(12/9/22-28/5/23)

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Mosaic from Pompeii (c.79 CE)

Notes:

The reference to the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.84-54 BCE), is to the following poem:

CI

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem,
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi.
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

This has been translated 'aurally' as follows by American poet Louis Zukofsky:

Mulled hosts their countries yet mulled there by a core of wake tossed
I’ve ventured these miseries, brother, our death offerings,
with the past stray more to honor my renewed remorse
that mute and unquickened hollow queried urn, my own:
wandering where fortune ah me hid, dear, eyes you lit up – so soon,
ah who missed her indigence brother than empty mean.
Now do mind inter here our how precious gift more our parent home
traditional trysts tears, my renewed death offerings,
and keep here from your brother mulled many a tear he flawed to,
of their kin perpetual, brother, ever out here fare well.

- Louis & Celia Zukofsky, trans. Catullus (Gai Valeri Catulli Veronensis Liber). 1965 (London: Cape Goliard Press, 1969)

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