Ben Philipps: Two Poems

I would not have been so fidiussed
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[Coriolanus speaks.]

\

No, that wasn’t how it went at Rome.

That poetaster warped it all. He changed

the actual facts, the forms; he made the thing

a yarn of dreary politics and blood.

Well. First you’ve to grasp the city right,

a rich, intimate place. As children we

met the same patrician cliques most days:

the boys grow up in one hot heap. You learn

to fight, and that night fall asleep, brisk swords

knotted, aglint along the floor, breathing

another’s breath, or dreams. A certain closeness

takes. I despise all pomp, all froth—that play,

so-called, had quite enough—but when you know

the stink, the ferric tang of some man’s blood,

a kind of silent understanding grows.

So he and I were—crimson friends.

Tullus, I mean. We grew as one, in peace:

our states, as boys, weren’t yet bare enemies.

That was to come. He fought, back then, better

than I, or wilder; during our bouts,

his skin became a slick and stinging gold,

his eye the wind. None other rivalled us.

Then we were men, and there were wars, and then

it was all phalanxes and haste. I won’t

rehearse my bloody record, but know this:

in battle there’s a solitude, and I

sought it, and loved the loss, the quiet

in that crash, the screams of fresh widows…

Their pain inventoried my own. A few

occasions rose for us as opposites

to meet, renew contact—combat, rather;

resume, I mean, our skirmishing. Not many.

The time I spent beyond the gate, my brief

and raging exile, we hardly spoke.

I hope to face him once before I die.

I hope—let me be plain—in hate; I want

to force him to the penetralia

and slake my fury in his breastplate.

It would be well to see him from the parapets.

a

Theorem

                                  And wondrous things without number. —Job

Euclid did it: in that white silence his rod alone

moved in dust, scraping unimagined forms.

Sun blared. He drew past limit things,

heat and scrub, terrors, the sparse known struck

and clung to like those gods from the quarry.

Rigid in calm, he sculpted a rule from bare furrows.

They stood before the principle

until, as if he made a gap in given air, they saw.

a

Zhang in a later garden smoked.

He saw deer, placid in tobacco shade.

He saw smoke rise.

The ocean thought hung out of sight

but just: the heave was behind, the salt

all around in that brim abeyance.

It would come from inside the stillness,

pearling clarity, and he did not move.

a

No proof, as the bell piled

and, awake, I tallied each number, thinking of bounds.

In the slow turn of those hours,

so unlike a theorist, out at the dark edges,

I counted the finite in a clangour of bronze.

/

[Note: We’ve known since Euclid that there are infinitely many prime numbers. It is still unproven whether there are infinitely many ‘twin primes’, that is, primes separated by two (for instance, 3 and 5). In 2013, Yitang Zhang proved that there are infinitely many primes separated by, at most, 70 million. Collaborative work has since lowered that bound to 246.]

a

Ben Philipps is a critic and poet living in Oxford.