Two by Georgios Arkadios

by George Economou

Two by Georgios Arkadios
     I am occasionally visited by this halftavistic persona who has
     one foot set in the Hellenistic world and the other in our own.
     Though he knows he’ll never make it into The Greek
     Anthology, he can’t stop trying.

Count on “Air Charon,” your express carrier,
no matter how or where it happens to happen,
crushed like a bug in your high–speed car–smash,
breathing your last in your bed or under the knife,
it’s sure to honor the reservation
it made at your zero birth–hour sentence to life
on the solo one–class one–way flight from wherever
direct, non–stop to Hades forever.
                                   *
If one man’s poetry roll becomes another’s junk
in a rubbish mound at Oxyrhyncus,
then on to funerary wrappings for another,
with immortal lines napping on mummy cartonnage,
could it synch us to a new, elating Sappho?
Only if the artifex of fact who fuses paths
with long dead word–eating book worms,
his work not exactly up the same alley
as that of Mary Beard or Gregory Nagy,
can hear the distant giggles of laughter–loving Muses.