Roman Economics

Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.

God came out of the sky with his little golden fingers
and the Romans
never knew it. Sleep, sleep now, he said
swagging his magic watch on a chain,
I will count to ten,
but the Romans didn’t hear him,
engrossed in their commerce and public baths, wrapped in their togas
with the purple hems.

A bird reclined on the Arch of Titus, and the people said, A sign!
A bird lay on its back and died on Trajan’s Column,
and they said,
It will be bad for us on the Danube.
The tribes will paint their faces
with all our ground up taxes.
And God just waved his watch
above their heads, said, Sleep, sleep,
said, Lo, a Day will come
when you look into the Watch Spring and know your Time is past—

which the Romans never minded.
Commerce was a pastime and the downfall
of the citizenry,
who lolled in the lovely gardens at the Forum’s center.
The senator slept
in a glorious golden box on the shoulders of eleven healthy slaves.
The emperor napped in his ivory bed and scrolls.

The watch chain slipped over the city like lightning and God said, Rain!
The Romans,lacking umbrellas, ducked into the many shops.
God said, Hear me!
God said, Look! Said, Lend me your Ears! And the storm accosted the paving
like coinage.
The live bird rose from the Arch of Titus
and the dead one slept in a puddle.
The watch ticked on its chain,
but who could read it? Not the Romans, who loved the luke-warm air
of the tepidarium,
who sank, one by one, into the lovely baths.

Kevin Prufer is the author of ten books, including the novel Sleepaway (Acre Books, 2024) and the poetry collections The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023); Churches (Four Way Books, 2014), named one of the ten best books of 2014 by The New York Times; How He Loved Them (Four Way, 2018), which was longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from an American literary press; Churches (2014), In a Beautiful Country (2011), and National Anthem (2008), all from Four Way books, and Fallen from a Chariot (Carnegie Mellon, 2005). Prufer’s work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, AGNI, The Paris Review, The New Republic, * * and elsewhere. He is Professor of English at The University of Houston, where he also directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to rediscovering great, long-forgotten authors. (updated 10/2024)