Robert Bagg
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Robert Bagg was born in 1935 and grew up in Millburn, New Jersey. After college he spent two years living in France and Italy, received a Ph.D. in English in 1965, and taught literature at UMass from 1965 until his retirement in 1996. He has received Prix de Rome and Guggenheim Fellowships, as well as NEA and NEH awards.
He is currently writing (with Mary) a biography of Richard Wilbur. He has translated seven Greek plays by Euripides and Sophocles. The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles (Massachusetts, 2004) was co-authored with his wife Mary Bagg. His translations have been staged in 60 productions worldwide. He has also published several books of poetry; the latest is Niké (Azul Editions, 2006).
He has two websites: www.robertbagg.com and www.staginggreekdrama.com The latter is a collaboration with the poet and translator James Scully.
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Three Poems by Robert Bagg
CONTRASONNET
––for a friend who writes nothing but sonnets,
one hundred thirty-some and still counting.
Buddy, you’ve bought one beaut of an addiction.
Now every working day you get high on it––
snort fourteen lines empowering disquiet.
We know you love sonnets to distraction.
The sonnet form’s fine, used in moderation.
It’s great for chatting up a lady friend
or fixing moments you don’t want to end.
But binge sonneteering demands intervention.
So with the full support of family and friends
swear off sonnets that clamor for closure:
Take them the long way home, practice dis-closure.
Start a poem, like Ezra’s, that never ends.
When the Sonnet Ref yells, Poem Over! Stop!
tell him politely you’re just revving up.
BODY BLOWS
For George Amabile, Rome: Winter 1962–63
You hang tough on a Roman street corner
shaking your thick dark head to clear it
from a punch to your mind no one saw land,
whose force you shrug—as a dog
throws water from drenched fur.
A quarrel with your wife before dawn
sends you barreling north on via Cassia,
the night air cold, your anger hard.
You steer by moonlight down the centerline—
so does the man you hit head on
shot from his Vespa, his head
a rock, crunching the windshield, his body
bouncing over the roof and gone,
his Vespa pummeling your bumper
as you slew sideways churning gravel.
You grope for a dying body, but
find an indignant throbbing man
whose neck from a lifetime booming
soccer balls has stopped this great one.
You help him to a cinder bank,
you feel that Miura neck
pulse under blood-clotted hair.
No one believes this man survived.
Carabinieri comb the bushes and rubble
for the real dead—you’ve hired Rocco
to save your rich American neck.
But Rocco is persuasive: It’s his Vespa,
his own neck’s gorgeous muscle,
your million Lire in his mind.
When the police subside, you and he
link arms, throw grappa back,
enter each other’s lives.
You buy him a new Vespa;
he sells you mantis-thin
Etruscan bronze his brother bathes
in acid so it ages fast,
gaunt green gods you give to friends
as brilliantly authentic fakes.
Before you vanish into Vecchia Roma,
you send pregnant Prudence to Little Rock.
Weeks later in a bar you tell me
what happened: “I was lifting Pru
like Pluto lifts Persephone
before ravishing her in Hell—
she felt my fingers like the god’s
denting her thigh—at that
she freaked and yelled,
‘Get out!’ I did.”
“Don’t say a word” (you pummel me,
you hit me with your palms
weaving them like a boxer).
“Put dents in your own poems, Man,
let ’em take life’s best shot.”
Later, in the Piazza Navona,
empty at midnight, you halt
blocking my way with these words:
“My head took a worse shot once—
from a kiss that touched down like a moth
on my cheek while I crashed from beer—
it was a kiss from Him, the great
kind man you and I loved and loved,
but never with our bodies, as he wished.
That kiss lit up the abyss.
I’m still falling.”
You fall while you speak, calmly and backward.
Your head pounds ancient paving stone,
its bone hard blow delivered loud
to churches and palazzos
and to my gut. You stand up,
shake that black skull one more time,
go off to douse it in Bernini’s
brimming tub of reveling giants
still after centuries raucous, splashing
shine over their stony beards
and bellies, gaunt knees and huge balls.
Nightwater greets our plunging faces—
spouting and drinking and shaking
the chill off among those other battered,
already frozen beasts and gods.
THE WORST KISS
I ask you for it.
You look unhappy and surprised
but lean forward to touch my lips
with a reluctant brush of your own.
I say: “That is the worst kiss
I’ve had since I was seven.”
The moment veers toward a smile,
we say goodnight.
A night later by Grasmere in rain
your mouth buries in my sweater,
hiding. “The worst kiss?” you say,
unwilling to part with another.
But you do. Your kissing is tireless,
expectant, as though you woke up
from walking all day through London, still
overflowing with its pleasure, and so loving
every morning we nearly miss breakfast.
The facts of our lives flow freely,
we’re guides to our own arrested pasts,
wondering whether we still live there.
We do. Our last kiss
holds nothing back, except our lives,
which empty of each other as slowly
as rain dries from damp wool.
