by Larry Smith<\/p>\n
The sculptor who accompanied Alexander the Great to the Peshawar basin muses on the triumph of the Hellenes\u2026\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n .<\/p>\n Undid the Aspasioi<\/p>\n undid the Assakenoi<\/p>\n undid other Assakenoi at Aornos<\/p>\n undid the Asanenoi at Attock<\/p>\n then with Ambhi to Archosia<\/p>\n Alexander poked so far through<\/p>\n to this underbelly or heart of you<\/p>\n that our imaginings make of you and yours<\/p>\n all that can be seen of ourselves in the same sun<\/p>\n risen once in ancient days from the primal night<\/p>\n which first we further poked past Issus<\/p>\n where the Achaemenid satraps started their crumble.<\/p>\n It was I scion and messenger<\/p>\n gave your god his face<\/p>\n transformed your darkling<\/p>\n so east will be east again nevermore<\/p>\n nor need ancient suns ever rise anew.<\/p>\n Behold your redeemer,<\/p>\n I\u2019ve him lying as if with Alcibiades and Aristophanes,<\/p>\n I have given folds to his robe, Apollo\u2019s braids atop his head.<\/p>\n I have cast alpha all along and on and on<\/p>\n so nevermore the primal night again;<\/p>\n your darkling yearning primal night for good<\/p>\n lives now for good in the conquering light of a defining day,<\/p>\n is reborn forever and again in the glare of my sunlit eye.<\/p>\n Your god, my creation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n .<\/p>\n What sights on way to this the eternal day<\/p>\n the white mountains to the south and east that seemed to crush heaven,<\/p>\n to the west a desert like the sky itself stretched to the limits of all that is<\/p>\n above,<\/p>\n the river to the north rejoicing through hushed waste \u2013<\/p>\n everywhere this same earth yielding the same fruits we used to know,<\/p>\n maize and peach and wheat and grape.<\/p>\n Only olives were missing.<\/p>\n Dandelions,<\/p>\n the outcry when he married her your princess our queen,<\/p>\n she smelled like dandelions for miles and miles around her,<\/p>\n we smelled her coming every time she came<\/p>\n when he\u2019d her ensconced at Susa, her a fifth column of the East or so our<\/p>\n infuriated generals bewailed.<\/p>\n When he died it was as if it was some dark mystery in the perfumes of a<\/p>\n rising moon or setting sun<\/p>\n to which he succumbed.<\/p>\n Roxana then murdered Staeira straightaway, and Drypteris, and Parysatis<\/p>\n too.<\/p>\n (Roxana was Bactrian but that murderous way was of course a<\/p>\n Macedonian way anyway.)<\/p>\n One boy he\u2019d been given in Taxila, I personally hid;<\/p>\n no political threat to her yet she would have sensed the passion he would<\/p>\n have had and would have had him killed for the fury of it.<\/p>\n I hid the kid inside one of those odd oblong containers they have here for<\/p>\n domicile, fondled him too<\/p>\n as a kind of toast to joy on the day I finished it, my first standing Buddha,<\/p>\n the lovely one with the great Greek hair.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n When I created his face,<\/p>\n I did think of you<\/p>\n but not so much of your kindness,<\/p>\n not that itself.<\/p>\n not of your learned devotions,<\/p>\n not your great gestural significations,<\/p>\n not so much that, the Fear Not,<\/p>\n or the calling upon the mother, or the pantomimed wheel,<\/p>\n none of that,<\/p>\n I did think of you in a general way, sort of,<\/p>\n I wanted to come up with a face many men might venerate<\/p>\n including those who like you abhor ontology<\/p>\n and would rather not dream when you sleep.<\/p>\n Anyway, I hope you like the hair and the soft furrows in the hard stone<\/p>\n though it means the sun shines now forever in consequence of our<\/p>\n merciless clarifications.<\/p>\n In any event, most people do seem to like the face<\/p>\n which is good to know, especially now as new forces are at play,<\/p>\n Ambhi being dead, murdered, as in Taxila a new power on the rise<\/p>\n bears now this image, the very face I made, across the continent.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Am I in error<\/p>\n is the world somehow round<\/p>\n such that all east is finally the west and all west is finally the east<\/p>\n and the city Odysseus razed from his horse was itself Athens somewhere<\/p>\n elsewhere \u2013<\/p>\n and what of these seafaring Canaanites in purples woven from the east,<\/p>\n the new city they build on the northern shore of the southern continent<\/p>\n confronts the new temples of our risen city they\u2019ll attack from the north<\/p>\n \u2013 the north! \u2013<\/p>\n in an utter outflanking of the sun,<\/p>\n or man as measure of things disrobed and disarmed by Eastern queens<\/p>\n who, riddle this, lo and behold be Macedonian at last, such be the flooding<\/p>\n infestations of Roxana\u2019s inexorable blood,<\/p>\n her Bactrian coagulations in queenly future bodies.<\/p>\n The generals were right, he should never have married her<\/p>\n howbeit he\u2019d swoon soon enough allowing some other such infestation.<\/p>\n Meanwhile these Mauryans seeking new empire bear the very face I made,<\/p>\n worship it across the continent,<\/p>\n seeking new empire seek in the very face I made the eternal dreamless<\/p>\n sleep which ends all empire.<\/p>\n I should return to Arcadia where my parents used to live,<\/p>\n I should reorder my thinking,<\/p>\n I fear the omens of this moon<\/p>\n which waxes now prouder and whiter in its unreasoning darkness than a<\/p>\n thousand shooting stars,<\/p>\n and what man is hero enough to never gaze on the moon<\/p>\n and let tumble the sun he carries from its zenith?<\/p>\n Greeks don\u2019t die easy but die they do.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Larry Smith The sculptor who accompanied Alexander the Great to the Peshawar basin muses on the triumph of the Hellenes\u2026\u00a0\u00a0 . Undid the Aspasioi undid the Assakenoi undid other Assakenoi at Aornos undid the Asanenoi at Attock<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1452,77],"tags":[1453,1123,1485],"class_list":["post-13441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-66","category-english","tag-egophobia-66","tag-english","tag-larry-smith"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6DakB-gandhara","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13442,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13441\/revisions\/13442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}