LOOKING AT THE ROMANS<\/p>\n
\nin the museum, the heavy marble busts
\non their white plinths, I recognize one likeness
\nas my uncle, the retired accountant
\nwhose mind, like a conquered country, is turning
\ninto desert, into the dust of forgotten things.
\nThe white head of an old man, big as a god,
\nits short curled hair still rich
\nas matted grass, is my grandmother,
\na Roman on her deathbed, surrounded
\nby a citizenry of keening, her breaths rising out
\nof the dark of a well, the orange medicine bottles
\nmassed like an emergency on the table.
\nThe delicate face of the serious young man
\nis another uncle, the one who lost
\nhis friends when a plane hit their aircraft carrier,
\nthe one who dropped pomegranate fires
\non the scattering villagers, on the small
\nbrown people who looked like him.
\nOne bust is of a noblewoman, the pleats
\nof her toga articulated into silky marble folds,
\nher hair carved into singular strands:
\nshe is the aunt who sends all her money home,
\nto lazy sons and dying neighbors.
\nAnother marble woman is my other aunt,
\nthe one who grows guavas and persimmons,
\nthe one who dries salted fish on her garage roof,
\nas though she were still mourning
\nthe provinces. Here is the cousin who is a priest.
\nHere is the cousin who sells drugs.
\nHere is the other grandmother, her heart still
\nskilled at keeping time. Here is my mother
\nin the clear pale face of a Roman\u2019s wife,
\na figure moving softly, among flowers and slaves.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“Looking at the Romans”\u00a0first appeared in Tin House.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rick Barot<\/a> has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall<\/em> <\/a>(2002), and Want<\/a><\/em> (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, the MacDowell Colony, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review,<\/em> and The Threepenny Review.<\/em> He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LOOKING AT THE ROMANS in the museum, the heavy marble busts on their white plinths, I recognize one likeness as my uncle, the retired accountant whose mind, like a conquered country, is turning into desert, into the dust of … Continue reading