Inspired by actual graffiti unearthed from the ancient city of Pompeii, these poems are a diverse series of vignettes that flesh out the characters and backstories. Just like the voices of the graffiti writers themselves, the poems assume different tones, moods, and perspectives. These ancient words still taunt, lament, provoke, philosophize, and astound. Many are simple, timeless messages of the self: “Antiochus hung out here with his girlfriend Cythera” or “Come drink with us, Oceanus.” Connecting the words between the writers and their readers across centuries, The Graffiti of Pompeii reveals how alike we are and how time does little to alter our basic humanity.
Ross’s language “swallow(s)/ us in like dizzied bees,” at times, intoxicatingly, synaesthetically lyrical, at times, winkingly devolving into mathematical tabulations, crosswords, and other wordplay in an exhilarating quest to utter life’s unutterable multiplicity. Graffiti is, when you get down to it, a reaching toward immortality, an effort to take sanctuary in the permanence of the written word. In these erudite, character-rich linked lyrics, Ross brings a novelist’s keen powers of psychological penetration to bear, resurrecting the doomed dwellers of Pompeii, prostitutes and confirmed bachelors, slaves and slave-owners, arguing that just as these motley people once attracted Vesuvius’s dark attention, they now merit ours: their graffiti shows them to have been bawdy, boastful, and blindly desirous, cruelly hedonistic and savagely carefree, but they were also human in the same timeless ways we are, and they were once— albeit briefly— “enviously alive.”
— Jenna Le, author of A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora
xiv. (Bar of Salvius; over a picture of a woman carrying
a pitcher of wine and a drinking goblet)
This wine’s cut with water. In Pythagorean proportions.
Let all the Greeks raise their goblets.
Hail to mathematical scholars.
To the greatest philosophers. To architectural splendors.
Only barbarians drink undiluted wine.
Let all the Thracians raise their goblets.
Hail to everything beautifully uncivilized.
To the gods who likewise need no dilutions.
Romans have the most enchanting whores.
Let the Gauls raise their goblets.
And the Scythians. And the Thracians.
And the Germanians. And the Celts. Hail
to dice rolls and scattered knucklebones. Cast my lots.
Bring me olives and bread. No tantrum
or bloodied fist will land you
double sixes, Inebrius— only Venus herself,
but not in this reeking Hades.
Leave your empty amphoras on Neptune’s
altar, your crockery and bronze.
This barmaid’s sending us down to the sea.
Maybe the mermaids will satisfy your fetish
for fish, Tyberius. But, be wary:
that fermented mullet sauce in your beard will draw sharks.
Those floating lanterns of jellyfish
are Medusas with electric hair.
You can paw the sand over your
defecations like a cat, Marcellus.
Your gonads will float like an avocet.
The sea is a great equalizer,
Quintus, no, not a great elixir.
Leave some coins by these drained goblets,
lest we wake tomorrow on the rasping beach pebbles,
with seawater, sharp and scolding, on our shriveled tongues.
xxx. (in the basilica)
Everything has an epicenter,
a single point of origination
from which an impetus keens
open, chases itself in ripples that cease
to touch until they are dead as foam—
a tremble disassembling. See this town
square, these men and women navigating
in folds— tunic and familia, both
a tight weaving of threads. Look
at the faces of the crowd. Can you see
a howl gone dormant in their molars?
The instinct for flesh. To lie down next to
To penetrate. To be penetrated by.
These mountains are god-fisted. The sea
teems with a mercurial underpinning,
and at that shop I can buy seven
different kinds of olives, and at this one,
leather to lace my hobnailed soles.
No pole star necessary; I am oceaned
with humanity and imperatives.
If I let go of this stone door well,
I will swirl and eddy into the drift.
But loneliness, Sarra?
It is marrowed inside of us like air.
(first published in Mudlark)