Crone,
old meat,
once, this town was your home;
now you’re living on the street.
The bottom line has put you there to rot.
You can’t
pay the rent.
Every seven years
it doubles. Now shelter is too dear
for you, since who you are is what you’ve got.
It takes
six weeks to build
a cabin, six months to make
a house, but thirty years won’t pay
for either, the banker and the landlord say,
so nightly
in TV dreams
the pyramid of paper
mounts in piles, it gets a purchase
on your back and towers and sprawls and sags
till what
you’ve got is what
you are – your family
‘s gone, the neighbors all rank strangers:
a shopping-cart of newspapers and rags.
Crone,
caryatid
broken under your stone,
the full weight of the pyramid
crushes down on your shoulders anonymous as brick.
—Jim Powell
Jim Powell is the author of It Was Fever That Made the World and
the translator of both Sappho: A Garland and Catullan Revenants.
