Above the Agora, at Dusk
David Capps
Dusk’s black dress slips down the colonnade.
Heads of headless statues now discernible
from the heatsworn marble steps curving up
the hill of the Muses.
Like children, we begin to joke about treasure
Buried down below the wine-red earth, far
from marriage, far from meaning, annexed
to shadows of history—
even, I would say, gulped down in one big gulp,
as marble eyes unveiled their eternal pause
of victory. There didn’t have to be an answer
to what lay below us.
There are no more ghosts. From the rocky slope
heads collude, reviving philosophies, it feels
the same: to look upon ruins and sense the living,
or to sense the living in the ruins.
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David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming).
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