HOME / poem: A weekly poem, read by the author.

"Ode"

By Maureen N. McLanePosted Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2006, at 7:27 AM ET

Click here to listen to Maureen N. McLane read this poem.

Sad in bed you read Horace
the ode in which an aging lover pleads
not to be inflamed again
by a perishable love

and a tear escapes his eye
and a tear escaped your eye.
I was wild for you and heedless
I am glad love to say this

I was afflicted and afflicted you.
Be careful what you wish for
you warned. I was not careful
nor in the end thank god were you.

The charms I recited
the songs I sang
were lit by a light
almost completely impersonal.

Yet what are we but vehicles
of waves we never directly perceive
except those days the light bending
around our bodies becomes our body
—the lovers ablaze on the pyre

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Maureen N. McLane teaches in the Committee on History and Literature at Harvard and is the author of Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species, as well as a poetry chapbook, This Carrying Life.

For Slate's poetry submission guidelines, click here.

Click here to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.

Click here for an archive of "Poet's Choice" columns from the Washington Post.

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES