Casa Dei Dioscuri

Consider, reader,

          the east portico of the great courtyard

of the Casa dei Dioscuri,

the Casa dei Dioscuri,

facing west on the Via di Mercurio,

Pompeii (excavation code no. VI ix 6/7),

            the Casa dei Dioscuri,

           owned at one point

by the family Nigidii,

the source

of whose great wealth

(as often is the case)

            is not readily apparent.

But there was great wealth, reader,

Mercury Street

availing

one lavish house after another.

           M. Nigidius Vaccula

           gave as a gift to the Pompeiian baths

a large bronze brazier supported on legs

shaped like calves’ legs,

with small calf heads

at the top of each.

            He gave other bronzes,

            shaped like calves, like sphinxes,

just before the volcano opened.

            of the viridarium

are in factory plan.

The street was quiet.

            At the northern end

toward the city wall

the street was blind.

Its southern end

opening to the forum.

            In the house’s entrance corridor,

            two paintings, one each of the Dioscuri,

Castor and Pollux, gods of commerce and the sea,

the Dioscuri, each beside a horse,

each with the wide eyes less of the heroic

than of the blind or frightened.

             Consider the Casa dei Dioscuri,

the east portico of the great courtyard,

where was painted in strong browns

and reds, pale blues and grays

Medea contemplating her children.

The painter, unidentified, has painted Medea

with a broad nose, a strip of light running to the tip.

            The folds of Medea’s skirt

are like the reeds of a swamp.

Medea, dressed in calamus,

holding a sword. As is the way of time:

the blade has vanished.

            Ghost-blade. The wall’s

Nucerian tufa, lava-rock.

Consider the Casa dei Dioscuri,

in whose great courtyard

Medea (holding, not holding a sword)

            contemplates the children beside her,

            lanky as Parmigianino babies.

Their sex, undecided.

Presume, as from Seneca,

they are boys. Two sons.

The difference in age,

likewise, undecided.

            Would she kill the older one first?

Or younger? And how to tell?

And which more terrible for her?

And which, more to the point, for Jason,

standing in the painting

            beneath a doorway

flooded with the sunlight of a different myth altogether.

Who to kill first? The children,

leaning on a cube,

don’t understand.

             In contrast to Medea’s strong browns

             and reds,

they are already vanishing.

(The sword. Survived only as a hilt.)

             Consider, in the courtyard

             of the Casa dei Dioscuri,

these children

fading

from the walls

              of a house

              of a city

that had survived Vesuvius.

These children.

Who are important now

only in that one must die first,

               and then

the other.

Beyond this,

they are fading,

painted in the moment of their twin deaths.

They have outlived

their own story.

            Or are condemned, always,

to the cusp of it,

in the Casa dei Dioscuri.