Antiquity
Copyright © 2016 Michael Homolka
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Homolka, Michael.
[Poems. Selections]
Antiquity: poems / by Michael Homolka. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-941411-27-8 (pbk.: acid-free paper)
I. Title.
PS3608.O494436A6 2015
811'.6—dc23
2015027060
Cover design and interior by Kristen Radtke.
Cover image by Brian Powers.
Manufactured in Canada.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
 | This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. |
 | The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. |
for PAJ
Contents
1 1
1 Goshen
4 Fourth Goshen
5 Fifth Goshen
6 Sixth Goshen
7 Seventh Goshen
8 Ode on Quote How to Live
9 Antiquity
10 Anamnesis
11 Circumstances
12 Retreat
1 2
1 Out at the Mall
2 Listen Up Medusa
3 Riposte to Ode
4 Personal Narrative
5 Broken Home
6 Endurance
7 Frame
8 Phenomenon
9 Restoration
10 Unjustified Mood on a Monday Evening
1 3
1 Ruins
2 Modern Sensibility
3 East
4 Villa View Drive
5 West
6 Artifact
7 Transients
8 History Moves in Waves
9 A History of Art
10 Emanation
11 Men on the Road
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The book you are holding in your hands is called Antiquity, and it’s filled with poems as new as April crocuses. Or as old as April crocuses, for as John Berger points out, if poetry sometimes speaks of its own immortality, it has nothing to do with individual genius, but with the fact that poetry “abandons itself to language, in the belief that language embraces all experience, past, present, and future.” The poems in Antiquity very much abandon themselves to language, to the collective poetic endeavor, and they do so in a rich, textured, and sustained voice, though out of a self that is “flexible in its adherence / to a particular time period.” Hence a poem set at the mall but written after Martial, hence “Napoleon off / at boarding school,” hence “Listen Up Medusa,” hence “He who had pretended to be dead / pops up out of the cart.” Like a crocus, we could say. What’s antiquity anyway but a thing that is always lurking beneath the surface, not only in the sense of its influence—then shaping now—but in the sense our now will so soon be a then.
And so: could be Goshen, land of the Israelites, could be Goshen, New Jersey. We have our floods, our epidemics, our wars. “Each of us seems convinced he is the sole member of the family running home from the battle at Marathon bearing / good news We have fought bravely and survived.” Of course no one survives, but the book’s subjects—history, paintings, language—are things that have survived thus far, to the extent we are tempted to ask a question: History, paintings, language, what else is there? Personal experience, that constantly decaying thing? Homolka addresses the question, slyly eschewing experience in more than one poem, slyly hanging onto it in others. Nonetheless, the experience of the reader cannot be denied—if we read at all it is to have an experience—even if that experience is no more (or no less, depending on your view) than to catch the light and “sit and discuss / the reflections.” And what if this book, by virtue of its intelligence and in spite of its exhilaration, leaves us with a sense of spiritual weariness; what if the book leaves us wanting to be gladder and more puffed up? Consider most of all that if such wishes were granted, we wouldn’t have these marvelous poems, poems that remind us how easy it is, really, to talk to Horace.
—Mary Ruefle, 2015
1
Goshen
Everywhere in heaven’s meadows
Aryans jack each other off
under the willows
breezily
The year Jews’ permits are collected
words of consolation