VANISHED CITIES

1. ROANOAKE

The day they dropped from sight it snowed.
Small white flakes newly around like a thousand
unseen strings had come untethered.

My eldest, by the water's edge, rinsed a flayed
rabbit in the ebbing surf. The others huddled
leeward of him, skirting the reddening foam the sea returned.

2. POMPEII

It wasn't snow, but pumice, cinder. Like a plague
of insects: explosive. People clung to the temple thresholds
while smoke coursed the streets like breakers at high tide.

A crate of loosed chickens squabbled whitely and scattered.
Collapse strewed stone and marble, thundered up paler
plumes. On the beachhead, rope-burned hands hoisted sail.

3. ATLANTIS

To where do you sail when the world's an ocean?
For days the waters rose, but quietly. The waves sibilant
in the palace halls, like a slipper-shod guest passing back to his bedchamber.

When the tremors started, no one could run. The maids hiked dresses up
past the waist in panic. Outside, waters cold at the nipple, we watched collapse
send out white dust like a lapidary with his chisel.




PERVERSION

She bought a hatrack as tall as he,

and stark naked but for one rakish
necktie slung over a central knob
like some makeshift Adam's apple.

She had stuck it back in the corner
where his bureau had been, having
sold the bureau and the clothes

inside, all except for that one
necktie which had been a birthday
present he never wore. And some

late evenings when she knew that
they were there, were hunkering down
on their bellies on her lawn, or

lapping at her window with their blotted
breath, all to catch a glimpse, she would
dance with it, her shoes scuffed off

on the carpet, padding slow steps
in her slip and sticky nylons and
dipping down low with her hips.

The shapes outside would make small
cries like children. In the morning,
the grass or by the driveway zagged with

gravel tracks spit from the ten-speeds
racing away. And she was left to wipe up
the window smudges, and the thousand

bleary handprints on the glass, the door,
even the one she was sure was a kiss-print,
one mouth mark awed open, that phantom

warmth she could still feel wrapping
its hand around the handle, like someone
locked outside and helpless to come home.




Caroline Whitbeck is mostly a poet, a former (collegiate) Classicist, occasionally a magazine writer/editor, and only once a playwright. She pretends to live in New York, but she can actually be found in Providence, Rhode Island (and usually napping at that).


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