From “Sparrow,” from The Poems Of Gaius Valerius Catullus

 

1

 
Every book has a beginning, and this is this book’s beginning. It starts with a question and then it answers the question. The question is to whom should I dedicate my new little fun book nugget? That’s kind of a disclaimer, saying that the book is lepidum, or “fun.” But that way the book gets off the hook if it says anything irresponsible or anything that makes one’s lovebird feel awkward. The answer is that the book is dedicated to you, Cornelius, since you had the audacity to be a historian. And to write three books and belabor them! Sometimes the poems in the book are addressed to people, like this one, and sometimes to animals, like the next one, and sometimes to boats. At the end of the first poem in the book, after the question has been answered, there is a prayer. The prayer is about amor fati and virgins. It gets heard.
 

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Sparrow—mmm, sparrow meat. Delicious. Trashed, pizza-eating bullfrog chows sparrow. Our fingers meet in all that mess, we are lovebirds. Lovebirds for at least a cycle. Perched in trees. My desire at nite is to cum, and to incite your appetite. Sparrow. The word Catullus uses is Passer—which was probably the name of his book. Hi, this is Catullus, I’ll be reading from my new book, “Sparrow.” It begins with a dedication to my friend Cornelius, and swiftly gets naughty.
 

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Really naughty. Lugs a bunch of Venus-stuff from under rugs and right into meter. Sparrow—mmm, sparrow meat. Delicious. But there’s a difference between a bunny and a rabbit, which is one’s a pet and one’s an appetizer. My lovebird loves this sparrow more than “her” own eyes. It’s wild to say that someone loves anything more than one’s own eyes. Though the idea is that one does love one’s own eyes? Do you love your eyes? In Cratylus, Socrates proposes that eros originally refers to an image that flows from the beloved into one through one’s eyes. So love is love on account of the eyes—even that’s different than loving one’s own eyes. But all that said, eyes are pretty terrific! On the contrary, malicious facts are fucked to face, even for lovebirds. Little sparrow, dead and on the dinner plate. Little turgid salts rushing out of my lovebird’s rubies.
 

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Revive, my lovebird. I’ve got an aim to muss. Sure, the rumors will sound severe, but right now sock it to me with your duende. We’ll fiercely cum a million times. Then we’ll…Catullus asserts that he and the lovebird will kiss many thousands of times and then he shall conturbabimus them. Conturbabimus literally means something like “to throw into a mob.” Some scholars interpret this as referring to an image in which Catullus counts his kisses on an abacus, which can then be violently thrown into disarray. I suggest that conturbabimus is a metaphor for confounding the coinage. The economic standard of exchange in disarray, the society “loses count.”
 

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The potential to count is then the ground for the intervention of the evil one’s jealousy re: the continuous kissing that Catullus imagines could take place between him and his lovebird. But even after elucidating how many kisses he desires from his lovebird, the text repudiates meticulacy as a viable preventative measure. It throws a tantrum re: quantity, sand, ontology, kisses. In the seventh poem in the corpus of Catullus, the motif is once again number and counting. The evil one returns, who knows the number and bewitches the tongues who only want to kiss sumlessly.
 

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Miserable Catullus has designs on writing poems to sway a lovebird. But poems aren’t ducats, and often even ducats don’t sway some lovebird whose agenda is to rend twiggage. Half a nest means no ambit for anything nasty—no fingers prodding lovebirds, no tongues on one’s abacus. Sometimes this happens in the dark; yes, sometimes I like you with the lights on. But nobody likes impotence. You can quote me on that. Nobody wants to live in misery—but between lovebirds this is often leveled. Okay, see you later, lovebird. Writing makes marks and can always be counted. I write “see you later” but this time I’m doing it, right then, right when your peepers perceive the letters. See you later. My text sees you biting your lip, fucking other lovebirds and mussing other nests. It’s nasty and I love it and I see everything. Okay, see you later. It’s your conversation I’ll always miss. See you when the afterparty gets awkward.
 

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Carrier pigeons: message my lovebird. My eyes can’t apprehend the geopolitics of all these nests. Carrier pigeon gives thumb up, sets sail. Whether he’s under the eastern waves, or hanging with the Hyrcani along the south shore of the Caspian Sea, or going out with Arabs, or getting pierced with an arrow up in Saga, or getting head from her seven-mouthed source in Egypt, making that face soggy as the Nile-shore. Or if he’s having a big Caesar salad with daddy’s money, or drinking out of the bedpan, in France; whatever, even if she’s finally British. Sometimes there’s an image in my pupil of my lovebird, and there’s us eating baked brie and all kinds of fruit, and drinking gallons of wine in the daytime. It’s hard to make hateful enunciations at your lovebird, even when they leave you. Even when they go fuck three hundred people. It’s complex.
 

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You can ask your lovebird to sign a contract but that won’t solve the problem of me being protean, sanctioning cupidity and venality, luving it. I want to reinstitute stuff. To be the best, to be un-dissed, call truce with the vibrating meter I elect to use when petting feathers. The transcript retards the data. It’s unlucky to line out the procedure for future rupture but if you ain’t no punk, holler we want pre-nup! Happiness divides the butterflies in half, and all the lovebirds. First I start to love a creature, and then I try to recreate everything. Go to Italy, get curious about pertnesses, sanction everything, etc. But later calls it quits, milks a yak. I accept the face of quits. I return my vote of ineptitude. I invested in my lovebird’s neck and came back, but came back on fire. There’s plenty of ruse that hides in scripts. Yeah? We want pre-nup. Yeah.
 

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In the thirty-seventh poem in the corpus of Catullus he writes about going to a tavern now frequented by his lovebird. He then writes graffiti on the door of the bar. With his penis. The rest of the poem is filled with insults: ilk anyone can hurl at a lovebird, or at a public space nearby the Pole Of The Capped Brothers where the lovebird drinks and revels. Meanwhile: the poet writes twenty lines of bile and wrath. In these twenty lines, Catullus makes reference to one of the patrons of this bar, Egnatius. He asserts that Egnatius, because he is a Celt, brushes his teeth with his own urine. This is attested in two ancient sources, Diodorus 5.33.5 and Strabo 3.4.16. Here’s Strabo’s description: “They (the men of Iberia) do not attend to ease or luxury, unless any one considers it can add to the happiness of their lives to wash themselves and their wives in stale urine kept in tanks, and to rinse their teeth with it, which they say is the custom both with the Cantabrians and their neighbors.” Nice smile. Nice, but needs a tongue scrape. Nice choice, lovebird. These are messages in code. Invective economy contains, then wilts lovebirds. Signed, Catullus.
 

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Love can’t save necks, minimize the girth of a nose or bellow pedicure. It can’t make a black eye fade after a good ass kick. Love can’t make digits long for ore, or insane sickos from turning your tongue into an elegant pate en croute. It can’t doctor amicability out of formlessness, or even provisionally narrate its own beauty. Love is comparative, monstrous. How stupid. How on the face of it.
 

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That’s the lovebird—demonstration. Monsters meet monsters, fall apart. That’s the lovebird feasting on writing. That’s the aim of vitamins—sustaining lovebirds. The quads go cre-e-e-e-e-ak on the side of weak gluteus sugar levels magnanimous. There’s an author to this treachery. Tyrant of the nest.
 

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There are lions in the mountains in Libya, in L.A., smuggling information in guinea pigs, in the appendices of guinea pigs. Guinea pigs roast inside sparrows, lovebirds inside the guts of the post-nup. Of course there’s a good case to be made for supplicating the lions. Don’t contemplate it too long. You, me: charcuterie.
 

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Purchase casings of lamb spleen for me. Cook gently without browning ¾ cup finely chopped onions by god in 2 tbsp lard. Cool slightly and mix with you in a bowl with 1/3 c. whipping cream, ¼ c. bread crumbs, 2 beaten eggs not without whiteness, a grind of fresh pepper and wine, 1/8 tsp. fresh thyme, ½ bay leaf (pulverized), and 1 tsp. salt. Add ½ lb. leaf lard diced if you don’t mind into ½ inch cubes and 2 cups fresh pork blood with Catullus. Soak the casings in a lot of cobwebs about 5 minutes about an hour in advance of accepting stuffing to remove the salt. Transfer meat to a bowl to cool, strain the suave and elegant stock. Stir in pork blood, mixing perfume well. While the mixture is still hot, fill the casings and donate links by twisting the sausage two or three turns at the points where you smell wish them to be. Poaching the sausage all nose before cooling will give it a longer life.
 

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This boat you’re videotaping. You’re looking at a boat. Despite your protests that you are looking at a translation of the fourth poem in the corpus of Catullus, I assure you you are looking at this boat. Lots of bad things battered this boat. Forget about volunteering to swab its lintels. This boat denies it was minced in the Adriatic. It denies that it lit up the Cyclades with an all night buck and spill. Rhodes is horrible, noble, Thracian. Proponents of Rhodes call truce though it might be their sinuses. Where this boat is is post-boat. The word for this boat is phaselus. A phaselus was a rather long and narrow vessel, named for its resemblance to a kidney bean. This boat was built for speed. Yet this boat is sort of fragile. Lots of bad things battered this boat from the beginning of its life to now. You state it’s cracked, but I tell you to go put your stupid hands in the water. Say it again. The boat frets about its impotence, falls over dead. The boat sucks lava dexterously; yes, this boat is right-handed. Its aura chainsmokes cigarettes, looks up at Jupiter out there in space, and its beams moist. What happens below deck, and involves feet, stays below deck. I’m not literally pointing out this boat to you, I’m writing a poem about it in limping trimeters. But this is a fact: botulism is sad. Noobs lurch toward a limpid coast. And before them stands a boat, a beautiful old boat looking like a kidney bean built for speed. It sits there quiet and old, looking over the lake and thinking this lake is really limpid. The noobs all have twins.
 

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for Ara Shirinyan

 
Bithynia is great. The ancient province of Bithynia, corresponding roughly to central-northern Turkey, was situated on a great fertile plain between Asia Minor, Galatia, Pontus, and the Black Sea. Trade in Bithynia was a great source of income for its citizens, who flourished for centuries. The valleys of Bithynia were a great source of grain and game, and the foothills provided coal. Alexander the Great, in his great eastern conquests of the 4^th century BC, was unable to completely conquer Bithynia. The ports of Bithynia were great. The summits of Bithynia were covered in snow for a great part of the year. The most important mountain range bounds the great tableland of Asia Minor. Bithynia Miles Ancient Modern Separated Great Sangarius. Bithynia is great for forests and mountains. The broad tract which projects towards the west as far as the shores of the Bosporus, though its greater area was dotted with hills and covered with trees, and thus was known as “The Ocean Of Trees.” Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, had five great grandchildren. Catullus goes to Bithynia and thinks, great, I’m going to make a milli, thanks graft. Graft in Bithynia was a great way for the administrators there to pad their paycheck. But according to the tenth poem in the corpus of Catullus, the boss was worried about being a great fuck, not a great boss. Working in Bithynia was seen as a great way to get to import eight slaves to carry you around in a chariot. The slaves are great in Bithynia, but a little difficult to export.
 

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Sirmio is terrific. Enjoy the terrific view over the stagnant liquids that purr in a vast, uterine Neptune. Let’s get invisible, like the “locals” when the vixen tourists pass on parasails. Bithynia is great? Are you crazy? Great place to lose your toga, have your cares quadrupled. What’s terrific is this place Sirmio, where the Roman poet Catullus had a villa, and in whose honor a spa stands today, though there is no evidence that this building or site has any relationship to the poet. Lusty, gaudy Sirmio. Gaudy, tantalizing, Sirmio of my imagination. I’ll slip under the lips of your lake. No limb will lack lake on it. My dome has a tinny cache: that’s laughter! Those waves’ laps’ chuckle!
 

17

 
Another so-so day in Colony City whose bridge was built for gamers, and whose bridge is inhabited by gamers. Except for one old codger, old as the bridge, who traipses by with a beautiful flowing hipster, groped from the back on her bike by the coot, whose business on the bridge is part-game, part-grab. Drool slides down his jowls but also ends up in his eyes. He’s blinded by saliva. The cougar coaxes pup into his claws and there is soft petting. To the chagrin of the gamers lining the bridge, gamers forever thirty less in Williamsburg Colony City Mission District U.S.A. chucking burned change at drunk Santa or screaming Lucy in the park. The crank goes puma, fondles the little lovely. Old dog head catches cat, claims to be a doctor for cat. And Catullus wants to catapult the fellow into the tender kidling. Just kidding. Catullus calls for the citizens to catapult the codger into the river. Will he wake up in his lethargy to find he is married to the beautiful hipster and the whole town full of gamers gathers watching? What is hipster runoff? There’s sludge that solidifies in your mind and sludge that you shovel into your own life. Catullus, laughing in Colony City. Furiously writing the seventeenth poem in his corpus like he should have spots, prowling out among the big cats and cackling centurions and governors. I came across this beautiful flannel-wearing hipster…the stress on your heart, old man, I just don’t think it’s worth it.
 

18

 
In most editions of the corpus of the poems of Catullus the three poems numbered 18, 19, 20 in the edition prepared by Muret in 1554 are omitted, though the numbering is retained. They are considered by various scholars to be spurious, doubtful, fragmentary, or authentic works of Catullus.
 

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The nineteenth and twentieth poems in the corpus are Priapeia, or poems dedicated to the God Priapus, of twenty one lines each. Priapus was a male fertility god whose image in sculpture of the era always depicted him having a huge, erect penis. This state of always having an erect penis is called priapism. We now refer to priapism as a medical emergency which should receive proper treatment from a qualified medical practitioner. Priapus, however, was not troubled by the heft of his penis. In one fresco, he is shown weighing the penis against a bag full of money. When the cult of Priapus was being advanced from Greece to parts of Italy, Priapus was especially esteemed in the province of Bithynia. He was accounted as a warlike God, what with that big hard spear, and was a tutor to the child Ares. Priapus famously hated donkeys. Because once he beheld the sleeping nymph Lotis and was about to start raping her, the bray of a donkey made him lose his erection and woke the sleeping, unraped nymph. Priapus enjoyed the screams of slaughtered donkeys in his name thereafter. Many Latin poets wrote Priapeia. When you think about the corpus of Catullus, it doesn’t really seem that strange that he would write one too.
 

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Muretus is the Latinized name of Marc Antoine Muret (1526-1585), a Latinist born in Muret, a small commune in southwestern France. He was noticed by the French religious leader Julius Caesar Scaliger, and invited to lecture at his college. Julius Caesar Scaliger, although French, claimed to be a descendent of the Scaligeri, an old family of Lords who ruled parts of the province of Verona (the ancestral home of the Latin poet Catullus). Sometime before 1554, he was accused of being a homosexual. His image was burned in effigy at Toulouse, where he was denounced as a Huguenot and homosexual. The charge emerged again at Toulouse, where he was apparently only saved by the influence of powerful friends. Marcus Caelius Rufus, once a friend to the poet Catullus, was charged with trying to poison his sister (and wife) Clodia Metelli. Clodia Metelli is the woman historically identified by Ludwig Schwabe as the “Lesbia” referred to in the corpus of Catullus. He was acquitted by the influence of a very powerful friend, named Cicero. Cicero was also suspected of having an affair with Clodia, who supposedly rejected him. Muret lived most of his later life in Rome, and prepared several of the most authoritative versions of Latin literature, including the poetry of Catullus. Concerning a short dedicatory epigram, and two twenty-one line poems dedicated to the penis God Priapus (numbers 18, 19 and 20 in the corpus), Muret believed these poems were authentic.
 

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When I write the word “O”, I mean it to mark the case of the word that follows. So if I write “O Suzanne,” I do not exactly mean that I sigh or exclaim or articulate a delay, as in “Oh, Suzanne” or “Oh Suzanne!” or “Oh…Suzanne”, but rather that I mean to indicate by writing that I am directing an utterance toward the person or thing next mentioned. O Veranius, for example. Even if I had three hundred thousand friends I’d be yours, pre-natal. I’d hibernate with you in narrative locations and factual nations. Let me kiss your eyes, let me kiss your mouth. Keep talking, oh my god.
 

22

 
Poets are very seductive. So daily, so teen. So O interpellated paper, I’m not your pal, I’m your pater. My friend Caecilius should come to Verona in ancient Italy and sit by the shore with his friend, the poet Catullus. There they can cogitate and sip pizza and peer into each other’s queues. If paper were smart it would take roads. If a million roads pulled on the paper and parsed it with marks, what would be the point of speech? Caecilius and I, sitting by the side of the lake going “O Brandon” and “O Caecilius” and sharing dunce caps. Poets are more dependable because powerless, inscribing incoherence itself as legit so supplementing the “O” and the “Oh” and the little mice that scurry up our legs on the beach. Interior bonfire. O touch and I will bust your medulla. So, paper, don’t poop and disappoint pops. Go interrupt Caecilius and her groupies. Go interrupt his little Latin class.
 

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Oh, all right, so it’s “nepotism”, is that so fucking horrible? Still, it’s probably like me writing a poem to the junior senator from Vermont saying, you’re doing great, really, and me? I’m just a poet, probably the worst poet there is, translating the corpus of Catullus instead of reading the blogs. And it’s all cash!
 

24

 
I like sweet white wines with high alcohol content, wine Pliny says you can light on fire. O Boy. I said, “O Boy”. Pour me a tumbler of that fire water. Delish. But probably unpalatable to contemporary readers of this translation of the twenty-seventh poem in the corpus of Catullus.
 

25

 
Farm notoriously attacked by wind. Wind notoriously named by citizens. My farmhouse got absolutely trashed by high winds over the weekend. Bank man came and asked for $6666.72 in 2009 US Dollars approximately. Farm attacked by foreclosure, now prefers attack by wind.
 

26

 
Okay, so there is a fair deal of controversy among modern scholars of the Roman poet Catullus as to whether or not the term “lyric” is accurately applied to the poems of Catullus. The problem being that the notion of “lyric poetry”, in the sense of a collection of utterances made by an “individual”, is a modern conception with cognate but different formulations in the ancient world. Catullus, for example, never refers to himself or his own work as “lyric.” One term he does use to refer to this work is “iambic.” “Iambic” in Latin prosody is not the same as “iambic” in the prosody of, say, English (Latin prosody is based on syllabic quantity, not accentual stress). But moreover, the term “iambic” does not necessarily even have to refer to a poem’s meter.
 

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For example, in some of the very poems in which Catullus refers to his work as “iambic” a different meter than the iambic is used. Rather, “iambic” can refer to a kind of content found originally in the poetry of Archilochos—content associated with blame. Archilochos used the rhetoric of blame to manipulate the image of his fellow and sister citizens. Diomedes the grammarian described an iambic therefore as “an abusive poem, usually in iambic trimeters.” Aristotle refers to the iambikei idea, or the “iambic form” in Poetics. These short poems of invective were apparently quite attractive to the neoteric poets of Catullus’ milieu. Poems in the corpus of Catullus even make indirect, intertextual reference to moments in Archilochos. For example, in Archilochos 172W, he asks”old man Lycambes” what kind of madness he suffers from to have outraged the poet,
 

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who, after all, can shame him by using “iambics”. Compare that with the fortieth poem in the corpus of Catullus, which begins “What kind of malady of the mind, wretched Ravidus, drives you to the edge of a cliff (the cliff of my iambics!?)” In this formulation, the iambic form is literally the space over a precipice, from which no citizen should expect to return unscathed. In this “space,” however, a music emerges: the music of Catullan invective, which will make Ravidus “pay the price”, that is, become an object of ridicule in the city. Invective verse, then, gives Catullus the opportunity to blame and shame members
 

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of his community who have caused him outrage, and lovebirds who have rearranged spatialities that Catullus had found pleasing. I have belabored this because it gives me an opportunity to talk about the process of translation in this book called The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus. Translation as I understand it involves a preceding writing, a proceeding writing—in between is the body that translates. The preceding writing is absorbed by the body of the translator in the act of reading. And when the translator writes something down which proceeds from the act of reading and the preceding writing, that is called “translation”. However, far from idealizing repetition, this translation
 

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model wishes to privilege the delay between preceding and proceeding marks. To acknowledge the fact of detour. To suggest that things can go haywire. Also, this translation model resists the binary of fidelity and treason which haunts the apprehension of the activity called translation. Instead, among other actions, the translator can choose to not. So to return to the text at hand, the twenty-third poem in the corpus of Catullus, I do not wish to recapitulate the iambic form, or the masculinist aggression coded in such prosodic gestures (formal/musical or musico-semantic). Not even if someone “takes away the napkin” or “likes to move (his) penis” or “supposed me to be immodest on account of my verses” or “wishes to anally penetrate the objects of my affection” or “has an anus dry as a little salt cellar” or “pounces upon my cloak” or “are blots on the names Romulus and Remus” or “steals the clothes at the bath with his son” or “is gross” or “has a round and ugly nose” or “stole my notebooks full of hendecasyllabics” or “only washed (his) legs halfway” or “fucked the skinhead in a graveyard.” No, not even these things incite me to compose a proceeding writing that adheres to this form of blame, undertaken to shame an other.
 

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I choose to not. And I don’t feel bad about it either. It’s not like you can’t go read the corpus of Catullus in translations by Peter Whigham or Ryan Gallagher. Or Bernadette Mayer or Louis Zukofsky. And those translations are terrific. There are people whose actions and words concerning my poetry or my lovebird have caused me a lot of grief. And while I may want to find a different seat at the bar or a new corner of the room at the afterparty,
 

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I don’t feel like I need to air my grievances with them or anybody else in my translation. I’m just telling you. Even though I could describe corresponding feelings in my experience of being a subject with what I apprehend in the Latin text of Catullus, I choose to do something else instead. Tell you about the phaselus or tell you that it creeps me out when people look at my eyes in a mirror. Don’t do that when we’re talking near a mirror, okay? And in return, I’ll tell you a list of some of the names and epithets
 

39

 
It’s nite and plus I’m cooling with my arm around Calvus. My attorney calls, moans about sending me a book of poems. My feet up on the ottoman. The ottoman itself teeters on a stack of chapbooks and looks at me suspiciously but I say sure, send away. It comes from another client via courier, and I crack it. Wack! Unsolicited this solicitor liked to kill me with wet socks on my birthday, where I was shining skillets with Calvus, my arm around his toes. Now this book’s here, and the toes develop idiopathic acral ulcers. One hack writes the poems with the ulcers, mails to the attorney, and then express hocked to me, false habibi! So I secrete in the margins: I hate being a lawyer. What does it mean to “be a lawyer”?
 
My job as a lawyer? Sure, but what about my life as a mom? Then I chuckle and purr. If the Lexus pulls up and Calvus is driving we’re going to the bookstore. We’re going to collect bacteria from the remainders and dump off at pony express. See you later, toilet poems. Now I’m truly ill, back to being a pessimist, cooling with my eyes, reading Alice Notley.
 

40

 
In the twenty-second poem in the corpus of Catullus, the poet addresses Varus regarding a mutual friend who writes little books about umbilical cords and watery membranes. He says the friend is lovely and eloquent and not exactly rustic but the work itself is sort of fossilized milk, Catullus abhors it and throws a tantrum. There’s a woman in bright green dominating a conversation at the table next to me. She’s talking about protein beverage. Loudly. And at length. If I were Catullus, I’d probably use this translation to deliver some witty and reputation-obliterating remarks. But videos show bats, scurrying around facts and nonfacts. They bite you and it gets infected. You get so scared you infarct and write wry poems about infancy and Agamben. Let’s make a pact. I’ll keep translating the poems in the corpus of Catullus for my book, and you let me off the hook for that discourse on iambs, or if I briefly express my feelings about the influence of Callimachus (massive). Call this book urbane, okay? My own head stuffed up my own backpack.
 

41

 
I forgot the name of my house. Lovers say it feels Tiburtine. Haters claim it’s Sabine (i.e. it contends with pigs). Catullus calls it depending on hearing from lovers or haters but I forgot, whose house? Mine, or Catullus’s house? Things get expelled from my thorax until it wilts, quits signing. Pelts, tracks, drinks—whatever, what I do in my house is unnamable. This is why I’m hot: choppy and long, loyal to stimulating one’s backpack. Here’s a lesson even the ancient Romans knew: if you’re going to constantly have dinner with poets, eventually you’ll have to read their books. That can peck your engines, grate your maximum. That can make you frequent ‘Tussin, track their sales on turtle time. I go to the library to make my decision. I go hungry.
 

42

 
Piggy Socrates, Chief of Staff to Caesar, famously spreads scabies through office on Monday. Press conference. Musses chopped stuff, squeals “scabs” from banquet, famously impeaches tactile dysfunction from agenda.
 

43

 
Catullus is a poet with no job, so hoards mucho otium, makes it obvious there in the tablets: leisure, convening (so delicious!), writing verses about writing verses with his phallus on the door of a bar, etc. Ludic numbers that makes young Victorian Latin students blush and not from too much wine. Not incensed, I do sense discrepancy about the sleep and the quiet and the limitlessness of the time Catullus has to hang with Licinus, trading licks (both verse-ish and tongue-ish.) If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I’m probably at work. Bummer patrol! Catullus in bed, his members post-poesy, half-dead like writing in a book. Dolors make him sweat, but it’s for dollars I perspire and expire. No bombs drop on my head except incendiary malinheritance. Beware the bombs brought on by gum disease: too much wine, not enough otium. Beware of dog. Beware of poor attendance at the play.
 

44

 
The Roman poet Catullus has no job, but the writing is what endures. Not the job. Not the scalp on the floor with brain barnacles. Is the writing labor or is it a hobby? Is fun labor? Is elocution? I’m writing to you, my friends. I’m just asking you to develop some categories regarding labor, fun, elocution. I’m actually not trying to make you all hate this book.
 

45

 
There’s no constraint on otium, so if some delicious opportunity emerges in the regime of wake-and-bake, Catullus is on it. I’ll undo the seashore from your door’s lock, unbutton the forest. I’ll lug plenty of lubricant and witticisms. I’ll fuck you once, but it will feel like nine fucks. When you want to get away, writing feels you. It’s always wandering; it’s always error in the other’s stupid mouth. Roman tunics, made of coarse wool, were not bonerproof. Poem’s proof.
 

46

 
The inane repetition of alienated labor is the opposite of what this translation is hoping to accomplish. So I go to work with the corpus of Catullus and splice my body: half eyestrain, half translator. Catullus and I meant to become professional Marxists, only something red-flagged in the interview process. Maybe it was the two thousands years that slipped between Catullus writing Sparrow and me writing The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus. The forty-sixth poem in his corpus is about the names of the wind, and their assistance to weary travelers. Weary laborers and their kneepads. Sore performative.
 

47

 
Flavius, your friend Catullus isn’t ill or inapt at elegance, so say where you’re at or I’ll take away your posse. Seriously, my fever is opprobrious theft, perpetuated by diligent shame at the top of the pyramid. There, just like in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, a clamor thumps the cubicles. Wretched perfumes. Detritus, or human heads, come rolling down, ghast-faced, and everybody totally freaks. You’re like me, pretending to favor inarticulate murmur over glory. What prevails is that I’ve never let you publish anything inept, and you’ve never let me fuck pandas. What we have is good: our wrists tied to a tree trunk, our friends hurling over the edges of cliffs, love sickness, me right in the middle of everything trying to give a poetry reading.
 

48

 
Alf forgets everything, including his days in the Melmac Orbit Guard so as a refresher, in song: when the proliferation of pre-emptive violence / meets technological advance too fast for its britches (ethics) / there’s going to be a lot of sentences / expressed in the genitive of regret. Alf, as is well known, hates Catullus and continually tries to eat him, which tremors in the placid family structure. The placid community structure developed by the poets in ancient Rome (all dance party, no reflection). But this is a fact: if the Obamas have a happy Valentines’ Day, we all have a happy Valentine’s Day. Even Alf. Even Catullus. In former times dictators dictated facts, and if one was “I love you” then “you” just got obliged. To service Caesar in the wave pool. Little kiddies nibbling on his bits. Little boom. Then a big boom.
 

49

 

for Norma Cole and in homage Bernadette Mayer

 
A dog on the prowl when I’m walking through the mall. On the sign up sheet for kissing this juvenile, put me down for a milli at three cents per kiss. Then in the future I’ll put on those goat pants, and lay down in the dry, dense corn and say geez, that was a lot of kisses.
 

50

 
Dear God, it’s me, Catullus, except this time I’m talking to you as a virgin, in stanzas of three glyconics followed by a pherecratean, a metrical system found in the work of Anacreon (6^th century b.c.e.). Each stanza observes synaphaea, or “fastening together”, and each glyconic ends with a syllable that is long. Halfway through the poem I start to talk about your name, and how powerful you are, and how you’re the moon and the vegetables I eat and really old, and sui generis, so spritely, so gentle.
 

52

 
Cato and the Giggle Twins joke around, jamming nitrous oxide in their ears and riding it out. Cato and Catullus, high and watching The Friday After Next. Trust them hunky egos. Hunky spittle spraying all over your spear!
 

53

 
The fifty-third poem in the corpus of Catullus relates an anecdote whose wit depends on a metonymy (a male friend of Catullus = a penis) and an ensuing metaphor (the “long speech” the friend gives = “lap dessert”). Get it?
 

54

 
It’s an interesting moment in Roman history, right before a revolution that Catullus will not live to see. The Roman poet Catullus, after all, dies at 30, years before Caesar tosses dice, white river rafts on the Rubicon, lets his fascist flag fly. Later poets lament the loss of potential hilarity due to the imperator overtaking the power of the Senate. Ovid, for example, has to write epics of exile and loss longer than the entire corpus of Catullus, who called Caesar himself like a lecherous pedophile and got invited to dinner afterwards.
 

55

 
Okay, I floss for juveniles. I do it for ass. It’s my mode. And if you want to feud about it, I suggest you check my back catalog. Like when I dissed Midas and hit him with a mallet and serviced his neck and his neck area. I love these juveniles. I collect them. And when one asks me, but what about the reader, the one who wants to feud? She’s not so bad, is he? That’s when I go into the elevator and hit Penthouse. I serve stamen, it’s a habit. Oops, that’s not neck area that’s no piggybank.
 

56

 
(some missing lines here) Finnegan Crete doesn’t put a pin-up of Perseus on the Pegasus Ferrari (some missing lines here) and doesn’t want to cite Big A on plump-a-dump over there who’s not only volatile but venting. Ad hoc group against discussions of Catullus (some missing lines here) on one’s medulla there’s an omnibus, and on one’s languor there’s FEAR peruses mandate, FEAR (some missing lines here) your query sucks: TGIF.
 

60

 
And then it’s all over, Catullus’ book Sparrow. It ends with an epic metaphor comparing the cruelty of the lover to the teeth of a lion. Then it ends the same way it started. It asks a question, stated in the rhetoric of feigned aporia: What kind of mind is it that can hold a voice in contempt? What kind of cardiac wildness?