2009 Frost Medalist

Our bus maintains a distance-runner's pace.
    Lurching on tires scraped bare as marrowbones,
It hauls us past a teeming marketplace.
    We shun life. What we're after is old stones.

Pillars the Greeks erected with a crane
    Went up in sections as canned fruit is stacked.
An accurate spear could pierce a soldier's brain
    Before he'd even known he'd been attacked.

Bright fresco of a wild symposium
    With busy whores, nude boys, a choice of wines—
("And where in Massachusetts are you from?")
    Abruptly, snowdrifts clasp the Apennines.

"Wouldn't you think him practically alive?"
    Says someone of a youth fresh out of school
Painted upon a tomb, who makes a dive
    Into the next world's waiting swimmingpool.

Lunch is a belch-fest: rigatoni, beer.
    A sawtoothed wind slices through fat-topped pines.
Weathered white temple columns linger here
    Like gods who went away and left their spines.

From In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems: 1955-2007 (John Hopkins, 2007). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.