The Eternal City by Graber Kathleen

Author:Graber, Kathleen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Book EIGHT

Remember that as it is a shame to be surprised if the fig tree

produces figs, so it is to be surprised if the world produces such

and such things of which it is productive: for the physician and

the helmsman it is a shame to be surprised, if a man has a fever,

or if the wind is unfavorable.

—Marcus Aurelius

In order that the world may be ever new, my brother & his wife

are going to have a baby. Earlier this month they heard

the tiny heart: out of the whirl of the mother's organs, suddenly,

a galloping, celerity, hooves. And yesterday, they saw their child

somersaulting in the unlit paddock of the womb. It turns

its animal face to the camera it cannot possibly imagine,

raises its arm as if to wave. Gibbon traces the beginning

of the end to Aurelius's brutal son. Aurelius, who turned his back

on the blood of the Coliseum, has sired the Secutor, who straps tight

his helmet & buckler to kill naked, unarmed men before the crowd.

The rarest creatures are released into the amphitheater-

the speedy ostrich, the panther, & one giraffe, the most gentle

of the large quadrupeds-for him to slay. Today my friend,

just in the door from teaching Lear to college freshmen, phones

from across the country: he, too, is going to be a dad. He's known

for months but was afraid to say. What if something had gone wrong?

These sons are noble sons & their sons will be as well. It is a shame

to be surprised if it has been, after all, a good thing to have been born.

We bow our heads, not for fear of what they will become,

but for fear of fever, the crescent-pointed arrow of simply being flesh,

the tender arena within which there is already nothing they can do.

For Levi and Cyrus, Francis and Matt

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