DAVID RIGSBEE David Rigsbee is an American poet, critic and translator who has an immense body of published work behind him. Salmon Poetry has just published his translation of Dante’s Paradiso, and Black Lawrence Press will bring out his Watchman in the Knife Factory: New and Selected Poems in June, 2024.
David Rigsbee
Still in Love with You I keep coming back to a poem of Cavafy’s. It expands my mind in ways most other poems don’t. How it achieves this effect has to do with what it wills into being, namely the gods, or more precisely, Hermes, the messenger among the Olympian gods and the intermediary between mortality and immortality. Naturally, he is associated with the arts. Here is the poem: Ionian
That we’ve broken their statues, that we’ve driven them out of their temples, doesn’t mean at all that the gods are dead. O land of Ionia, they’re still in love with you, their souls still keep your memory. When an August dawn wakes over you, your atmosphere is potent with their life, and sometimes a young ethereal figure indistinct, in rapid flight, wings across your hills. (translated by Edmund Keeley)
In Cavafy’s world, he is a handsome young man, someone glimpsed once but remembered forever. Cavafy’s personal fantasies are not the point here, however. They are not our memories, but the image is ours. It is such a verbal sketch that we don’t come away with a clear picture so much as the feeling that what we are being presented we must behold, if only momentarily.
© David Rigsbee 2024 February POETRY & WRITING © liveencounters.net
