The King\u2019s Question<\/p>\n
\nBefore he put his important question to an oracle,
\nCroesus planned to test all the famous soothsayers,
\nSending runners half around the world, to Delphi,
\nDodona, Amphiarius, Branchidae, and Ammon,
\nSo as to determine the accuracy of their words;
\nHis challenge: not to say anything of his future<\/p>\n
But rather what he was doing in his capital Sardis,
\n(Eating an unlikely meal of lamb and tortoise,
\nExactly one hundred days after messengers had set out).
\nThis posed a challenge, then, of far space not of time:
\nOf seeing past dunes and rock fortresses; of flying,
\nFreighted, above caravans and seas; of sightedness,<\/p>\n
As it were, in the present construed as a darkened room.
\nCroesus of Lydia sought by this means to gauge
\nThe unplumbed limits of what each oracle knew,
\nHesitant to entrust his fate to any unable to divine
\nLamb and tortoise stewing in a bronze pot.
\nWhen only the Pythia of Apollo at Delphi correctly<\/p>\n
Answered from her cleft, her tripod just the lens Of the King\u2019s crucial question, however, there is nothing. The play that I was starring in, whose Acts were as yet Trying to resurrect those afternoons that became the years Let just one of those quicksilver hours be returned to me, (After Herodotus, Histories,<\/em> 1:46\u201386)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “The King’s Question” is reprinted from The King’s Question<\/em> (Graywolf, 2008) and originally appeared in The Hudson Review.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Brian Culhane<\/a> was born and raised in New York City, the son of a legendary Disney animator. He attended the City University of New York (BA), Columbia University\u2019s Writing Program (MFA), and the University of Washington (PhD), where he studied epic literature and the history of criticism. His poetry has appeared widely in such journals as The New Republic, The Hudson Review,<\/em> and The Paris Review.<\/em> He has been an Inquiring Mind speaker, lecturing on Frost and Thoreau for Humanities Washington. In 2007, he was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Prize; his winning manuscript, The King’s Question, <\/em><\/a>was published by Graywolf Press in 2008. Also in 2008, he received an Artist Trust \/ Washington State Arts Commission fellowship in literature.<\/a> He received a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 2009. He currently teaches film studies and English at Lakeside School in Seattle, WA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The King\u2019s Question Before he put his important question to an oracle, Croesus planned to test all the famous soothsayers, Sending runners half around the world, to Delphi, Dodona, Amphiarius, Branchidae, and Ammon, So as to determine the accuracy … Continue reading
\nFor seeing into the royal ego, she put his mind to rest,
\nBut not before speaking in her smoke-stung voice:
\nI count the grains of sand on the beach and the sea\u2019s depth;<\/em>
\n I know the speech of the dumb and I hear those without voice.<\/em>
\nWe know this because those present wrote it down.<\/p>\n
\nWe have no word. The histories are silent. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0My analyst,
\nWhose office on Madison was narrow as an anchorite\u2019s cave,
\nWould sit behind me as I stared up at her impassive ceiling,
\nAs the uptown buses slushed all the way to Harlem,
\nAnd I would recount, with many hesitations and asides,<\/p>\n
\nFluid, though the whole loomed tragically enough.
\nShe would listen, bent over knitting, or occasionally note
\nSome fact made less random by my tremulous soliloquy.
\nWhen much later I heard of her death after long cancer,
\nI walked across town and stood, in front of her building,<\/p>\n
\nWe labored together toward a time without neurosis,
\nWhen I might work and raise a family and find peace.
\nFind, if not happiness exactly, some surcease from pain.
\nWhat question had I failed to ask, when the chance was mine?
\nWhen she, who knew me so well, could have answered?<\/p>\n
\nWith my knowledge now of the world, and not a boy\u2019s,
\nWith all that I have become a lighted room. One hour
\nTo ask the question that burned, once, in a King\u2019s throat:
\nThe question of all questions, the true source and center,
\nWithout which a soul must make do, clap hands and sing.<\/p>\n