Just before, or Right after, the Fall of Rome
       

Lately, I have been thinking again of the fall
Of imperial Rome—
N ot the fall itself, not that precise moment,
But the preceding hours, even minutes
Of which few reports survive
(Recall, it took weeks to break through
The main aqueducts, axes, spikes
Going at it in rolling shifts),
As well as the hours, minutes
In the immediate aftermath, about which
More's known—though much remains speculation,
A piecing together of wild tales
As out from the hemlock forest
Legionnaires staggered unhorsed purblind
Not realizing they had truly lived past Rome's fall
Whose date every schoolboy knows
Or used to know (history not being
What it once was).

Just before or right after,
When a girl could be found still humming in her bath,
AV of geese seen fleeing south,
A sprig of thyme spied wilting on a table,
A pile of decrees burnt in the Forum,
The word for surrender mispronounced—

That's what's most alluring:
The hours, minutes, just before and right after
The catastrophe,
When something important,
Even life changing, seems so imminent

And then not, almost here,
Then nearly gone,
Like so much of our lives,
The mere seconds before and after, the talk
Of battering rams, dragonflies, small beerWorrying
endlessly, and then not,
No sooner predicted than lamented,
Waiting for some ironical Gibbon
To remark on page 753
That such and such killed
So and so, or was killed
By so and so, who then slipped
On the Senate steps
And became a nobody
In the eye of history
In the eye of the whirlwind
Whose Gorgon-pupil opens wide
And admits no wrong.

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Copyright © 2019 Brian Culhane All rights reserved
from The Cincinnati Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission