Two poems from my work-in-progress High Ashes appear in the new issue (Fall 2024, Third Series, 32.2) of the magazine Arion, published by the Center for Classical Studies at Boston University. The first, “Horned God,” serves as a prelude to the book, falling before the first chapter, and, I hope, setting the tone for the book in some fashion. The second poem, “Whitethorn, or the Pit and What They Found There,” is an epistolary horror story, at seven pages surely the longest poem I’ve published since I was in my 20s, when poems of twelve, twenty, or more pages were all I wrote, none of them worthy of preservation. This long poem serves as the true heart of the book, drawing together many strands, themes, and images from the rest of the book.

The new issue of Arion, “one of the most distinguished classics journals and undoubtedly the most original,” has much to recommend it: “Herbert Golder’s epistolary bond with Marcel Detienne; Vincent Genin traces Marcel Detienne’s intellectual development; Claude Calame has a ‘dialogue’ with Marcel Detienne; A Pythagorean cuisine in Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Giulia Sissa; An archaeology of the heart by Josephine Balmer & Elena Theodorakopoulos; Basil Dufallo looks on the bright side of Roman history; Nicholas Romanos reads Virgil with Racine; Seferis’s Mythistory, translated by Avi Sharon; Gary Whited on David Ferry’s farewell in verse; and Suzanne Marchand reviews Daniel Orrells’ Antiquity in Print.” Learn more about the magazine here.

Horned God


A book about Pierre Bonnard 
Across my lap an hour, then back 
To Caesar’s Gallic Wars again.
Your deck has lost the single card
That tells my fate: a key I lack,
A fortress hidden in a fen. 

The Schubert serenade concludes.
Our tabby nonchalantly grooms 
His coat, a terminal moraine. 
The windows fill with tortured moods
Of light to haunt these lonely rooms.
It nears. Outside the sirens reign,

And soon we’ll have the next eclipse. 
It’s in the news. It’s all around. 
And so we go out on the lawn.
Upstairs the rusted faucet drips.
The figure comes to claim its crown
Of holly in an unreal dawn. 

The tide engorges miles of marsh. 
The horns begin. The barges burn. 
Facades come down. New icons rise. 
There’s no way out. The flash is harsh.
The moon aligns at last to turn
The sun to horns. We shield our eyes.