Standing Where the Colossus Stood

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

To be an ancient wonder, you have to be able

to disappear. Take the Colossus: nine tons
of silver transmuted into legendary bronze

that stood for less than a century on an island

just off the coast of Asia Minor where Helios
still reigns—invisible rays bursting forth

now luring sundry tourists by the boatload

to partake in whatever remains of his glory—
bodies kissed by winter soon burnished

into something the world can love—Adonises

in Speedos riding in tandem on the backs
of Vespas rumbling zigzag down Orfanidou

to nightly bacchanalias, oblivious to forces

in the earth that’d shake our god to his knees—
crushing houses that stood in his shadow

as he collapsed, then carted off by Persians

piece by piece over the centuries, our hero
melted down to myth and redistributed

throughout the world, no longer the god

straddling a harbor nor reclining on his side
in a field where the acropolis still stands

among weeds—four Ionian columns enough

to reconstruct a temple in the mind as we
crawl among the ruins, ant-like, disposable

cameras and the latest digital technologies

burning our poses into history, trying to make
the moment last, all of us wanting to show

how we obeyed when the god called our names.

Timothy Liu, also known as Liu Ti Mo, is the author of twelve books of poems, including Down Low and Lowdown: Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues (Barrow Street Press, 2023), Luminous Debris: New & Selected Legerdemain (1992-2017) (2018), Polytheogamy (Saturnalia Press, 2009), Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse (Talisman House, 2009), For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), Of Thee I Sing (2004), selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year, Hard Evidence (2001), Say Goodnight (1998), Burnt Offerings (1995), and Vox Angelica (1992), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and was reviewed in AGNI 39 by Christopher Davis. Translated into nine languages, Liu’s poems have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Grand Street, AGNI, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry and Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches at SUNY New Paltz and lives in Woodstock, New York. More at www.timothyliu.net. (updated 10/2024)