Lawrence at the Etruscan Tombs — Blackbird Archive

← v7n1, Spring 2008

He swaggers with feverish grin,

frail tyrant rasping at the guides:

To the tombs! Now!

(Rude opener of cans of worms,

young addict of the female clasp.)

A stiff dog, sunning, shakes himself No,

sighs; men descend

into a night, a cold.

Down, down dirt steps the lanterns gutter;

flame unsheaths tufa beams,

furls out redbody and blacklock—

Rise! laced foot on a wakened road!

A syrinx cry of Battle . . .

Old heroes bat their eyes,

wrench hands loose from the paint

to shade their sight—

waked in this shafted night

disturbed, transfused,

with David’s short long glory.

history art mortality

Eleanor Ross Taylor

Eleanor Ross Taylor (1920–2011) was the author of six volumes of poems: Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press, 2009), which won the 2010 William Carlos Williams Award; Late Leisure (Louisiana State University Press, 1999), which won the 2000 Library of Virginia Literary Award in poetry; Days Going/Days Coming Back (University of Utah Press, 1992); New and Selected Poems (Stuart Wright, 1983); Welcome Eumenides (George Braziller, 1972); and Wilderness of Ladies (McDowell, 1960). Her awards included a 1968 fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 1998 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the 2001 Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the 2009 Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry, and the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 2009 she was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Photo by David A. Peterson