Mosaic Floor with Combat Between Dares and Entellus

  Unknown artist, A.D. 175–200

 
After Anchises speaks the name of Aphrodite
on the mountain, after lightning bites his tongue, 
after death, after dirt is lifted by the wind 
and seasons pass, after his son Entellus
steps to the younger fighter Dares on the anniversary
of his father’s death, after their knuckles
are wrapped in leather, in iron, after beads of sweat glitter 
across their skins like pageantry, after the blood, 
the bruising, after Entellus is named the victor
and he strikes a bull there with the brute force
of his fisted hands, after the sacrifice of shattered skull
and later, after an artist takes this scene of naked boxers
to the workshop floor with his own sweat, his own secrets, 
after the larger bits and smaller bits, the final shard,
after the work is set and cleaned and polished, 
after it is uprooted and relocated, the mosaic moved—
and time moves too—centuries, millennia—
battle after battle after battle after battle after—
medicine and factories and farms, after bulls 
grow fat with bermudagrass, after dinner, coffee, sex, 
after families are made the way they’ve always been made,
and after a family member somewhere in my own lineage
leaves the island, his home of humble fighters,
after his son, and his son after that, my brother then me,
after I grow into my skin, grow into man, after I too
travel west, and west again from a house I rent online,
after the traffic downtown, taking one of the numbered routes,
driving through Santa Monica (and a song called “Santa Monica”
that ends just as I pass the pier), after I park the car 
and take the path toward the galleries, after roaming 
several rooms of antiquities, after viewing nudes 
at every turn—Statue of Hercules, Fragments 
of a Water Jar with a Masturbating Satyr—
after another doorway, another dim-lit room, 
after more guests enter and a field trip 
of kids slalom around large marble busts, after 
the side-eyed side-winded security guards, 
the gossiping moms, and finally,  
after the last of the patrons empty 
from the hallway of the upper peristyle, 
I am able to take it all in, to look, gaze in full glory
and step close to the timeworn heat radiating off Dares 
and Entellus, the boxers bare in their bare skins, 
and though I am prohibited from touching 
the artwork, from standing too close, 
one of the men in the mosaic 
removes his gloves and invites me
to step forward, to take his hand, to bear witness 
to his success in battle and sacrifice, but first 
I have to remove my clothes as well, 
and then they are there on the floor, and then 
it is the three of us in Ancient Rome, the three of us
alive, dancing with a dead bull at our feet, and we examine 
each other, examine how fractured pieces 
make up everything in this time-wound existence, each 
of us constructed in parts, and how ancient gifts 
of our distant sun can shine gently through windows 
found all the way across the world, and how 
their light will find us wherever we are—here even—
in ways that are loving and timeless but also, mostly, brutal.

ADAM GIANFORCARO

Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the poetry collection Every Living Day (Thirty West, 2023). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work can be found in The Offing, The Harvard Advocate, Poet Lore, Third Coast, and elsewhere.