The Fire
at Alexandria
Imagine it,
a Sophocles complete,
the lost epic
of Homer, including no doubt
his notes, his
journals, and his observations
on blindness.
But what occupies me most,
with the greatest
hurt of grandeur, are those
magnificent
authors, kept in scholarly rows,
whose names
we have no passing record of:
scrolls unrolling
Aphrodite like Cleopatra
bundled in a
rug, the spoils of love.
Crated masterpieces
on the wharf,
and never opened,
somehow started first.
And then, as
though by imitation, the library
took. One book
seemed to inspire another,
to remind it
of the flame enclosed
within its papyrus
like a drowsy torch.
The fire, roused
perhaps by what it read,
its reedy song,
raged Dionysian, a band
of Corybantes,
down the halls now headlong.
The scribes,
despite the volumes wept
unable to douse
the witty conflagration –
spicy too as
Sappho, coiling, melted
with her girls:
the Nile no less, reflecting,
burned – saw
splendor fled, a day consummate
in twilit ardencies.
Troy at its climax
(towers finally
topless) could not have been
more awsome,
not though the aromatic house
of Priam mortised
the passionate moment.
Now whenever
I look into a flame,
I try to catch
a single countenance:
Cleopatra, winking
out from every joint;
Tiresias eye
to eye; a magnitude, long lost,
restored to
the sky and the stars he once
struck unsuspected
parts of into words.
Fire, and I
see them resurrected,
madly crackling
perfect birds, the world
lit up as by
a golden school, the flashings
of the fathoms
of set eyes.