Above the Agora, at Dusk 

David Capps


Dusk’s black dress slips down the colonnade.
Heads of headless statues now discernible

from the heatsworn marble steps curving up 
the hill of the Muses.

Like children, we begin to joke about treasure

Buried down below the wine-red earth, far 
from marriage, far from meaning, annexed 
to shadows of history—


even, I would say, gulped down in one big gulp, 

as marble eyes unveiled their eternal pause 

of victory. There didn’t have to be an answer
to what lay below us. 

There are no more ghosts. From the rocky slope 

heads collude, reviving philosophies, it feels 

the same: to look upon ruins and sense the living, 
or to sense the living in the ruins.  

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David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming).

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