I could not resist posting this poem from ten years ago as my contribution to Poetry Rehab 101- Away. It seems to fit so well with Mara’s prompt this week. http://maraeastern.com/2015/06/08/poetry-101-rehab-away/

This is the last and gentlest in a series of five very, very loose translations of elegies by the Latin poet Sextus Propertius on the theme of ‘conjugal discord in a context of international conflict’ that I produced between 2003 and 2005. Like the other four ‘translations,’ which are much more vicious than this one, it is written in the voice of an imaginary character who is neither myself nor the author of the original work. The voice I am aiming at here, different from that of the raucous, rough-hewn characters who inhabit the earlier poems in the series, is that of a relatively well educated person who is world-weary and resigned to his fate. The numerical titles of these poems refer to the numbering of Propertius’s poems in standard editions, should anyone be interested in looking them up.

All feedback, as always, is welcome.

 

III xxi

 

Gotta get away.

Gotta get somewhere far from here.

Some place serious with a university

& sort out my serious woman troubles

on the long way.

‘Cos your girl worries only grow & grow

when you bump into her every day;

love fuels itself.

Everything is a temptation;

and the business of it bothers even my dreams.

*

There’s only one thing for it:

change address as often as she changes

mind and mood.

That way

I’ll keep love a safe distance from my soul.

*

& so, off we go again. Let’s launch

off into the air, Captain.

Put our fate in the hands of metal wings,

nose our way through the clouds into a jet-stream.

Let it carry us on our long-haul through the sky.

Cheerio towerblocks! Cheerio friendless city!

Ciao, ciao! Darling whatever you were!

& there I’ll be:

stuck in a seat with a safety belt,

being waited on by stewardesses,

held 30,000 feet up in the turbulent air,

praying there’ll be no in-flight incident,

to the incessant roar

of engines against earth’s resisting atmosphere.

Till they turn them off

& all turns eerily placid and still

& we begin our calm fall

through the air. Touch

earth with a bumping jolt of relief.

Even then, it’s not over.

The airport is a long isthmus

fingering the sky. You sit,

impatient, as the huge, metal pterodactyl,

lithe in the air,

taxis clumsily in from the runway.

Take a bus to the labyrinth of escalators

& queues of Terminal 2.

*

So, there I’ll be. What’ll I do now?

Check out a copy of Adam Smith

& set about putting myself straight

in local libraries. Hang around parks

and gardens of stately homes designed

by Capability Brown. Brush up

on my rhetorical skills in the armories

of Dr. Johnson, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke.

Relish the wit of Coward and Wilde.

& see which Turners or Gainsboroughs still take my fancy

in the V & A. Or better still, bronzes

and objets trouvés in the Tate.

*

& the empty years stretching out before me

& the wide moat of the ocean

& the sky will sterilize and heal

the lesions of love within me.

For, if I do not die, sillily, over a girl;

but quiet and alone in bed:

that, surely, will have been—

a worthier death.