An Underworld of Elegies

Writer’s Lament

Often I saw you walking across the campus green. Your office was down the hall from where my father lived because he too was hooked on words in Latin and Greek and loved his children and wife as much as language allowed.

Yours was whatever Greek survived the ravage of years; you journeyed long with Ulysses, bore Achilles’ anger. I’ve read and reread poems you wrote in your native tongue although as a child on a bike I knew little of how a lament could be such necessity until I too would stand in a dark room looking out across a darker field and list the names of those who’d left me in their wakes and say: it does no good.

Lattimore was your name, and Richmond was the first— I say them now in praise of all your pain and joy that came from choosing words. Even when death dismays me, when darkness you too faced numbs my will to speak, remind me: light is silence.

Sunt Lacrimae

Touring the Roman Forum, my father led because he knew each stone, restored eroded inscriptions, and raised the walls from weeds and rubble where not long ago sheep grazed. A hot day for September, and I was fifteen, would rather swim with pals at the Foro Italico or mock the fascist nudes—striding marble athletes Mussolini wished he might have been. Bribed with a promise of pizza for lunch, I listened only when a woman whispered to friends about a vestal virgin buried alive; that statue’s noseless face was hers. Death for the young is melodrama.

Taking refuge in a grotto, my father read the mail in his pocket. On a terrace I waited, Rome spread under me, tempting and mine for the taking, since ignorance of history veiled from me how landscape is loss and time’s indifference—suitable place for reading how an old friend had died. Our group plucked fruit in an orange grove, strolled above the circus where chariots collided and whores now strut at night.

In a cave of bending ilex and lizards stretched on ancient tufa, my father held my arm and led me into the underworld of elegies where loss cannot be restored, where he and his friend, young together, certain they would live forever, raced the hallway of their boardinghouse. The friend always won—more swift of foot, taking risks to get there first.

Pictures from Life, 1945

Four hundred miles in a battered Plymouth to distant mountains was two days’ travel on backroads and curves through clots of towns. Who could be carsick when we turned off the engine on hills, saving gas, till landscape held still? On swoops toward valleys my sister and I would chant, Hitler is dead, is dead, until our parents demanded silence, reminding us the war wasn’t over, our uncle was fighting on an ocean. Silenced, we listened to the bald tires’ hum and slipstream of evening air before we found cabins and sleep, folded in musk of new-mown hay where cows were humps of dark.

The second day with no more coupons, We saw ragged peaks rising above pines, and we held our breaths while swerving from cliff to cliff, not daring to brake if we were to reach the summer home, where mice scurried through walls at night, an owl’s fluttering swoop, and shrill cry of rabbit, the August afternoon when sirens wailed up and down the valley, and Dad said, It’s over. The Japs surrendered.

Returning with the tank always full took half the time, while I stared at pictures of rubbled cities and women who walked in their melted flesh till I begged to stop too late, and they cleaned the car while I knelt by the side of the road.