Old Joke

By Alan Shapiro b. 1952 Alan Shapiro

Radiant child of Leto, farworking Lord Apollo,

with lyre in hand and golden plectrum, you sang to the gods

on Mount Olympus almost as soon as you were born.

You sang, and the Muses sang in answer, and together

your voices so delighted all your deathless elders

that their perfect happiness was made more perfect still.

What was it, though, that overwhelmed them, that suffused,

astonished, even the endless ether? Was it the freshest,

most wonderful stops of breath, the flawless intervals

and scales whose harmonies were mimicking in sound

the beauty of the gods themselves, or what you joined

to that, what you were singing of, our balked desires,

the miseries we suffer at your indifferent hands,

devastation and bereavement, old age and death?

Farworking, radiant child, what do you know about us?

Here is my father, half blind, and palsied, at the toilet,

he’s shouting at his penis, Piss, you! Piss! Piss!

but the penis (like the heavenly host to mortal prayers)

is deaf and dumb; here, too, my mother with her bad knee,

on the eve of surgery, hobbling by the bathroom,

pausing, saying, who are you talking to in there?

and he replies, no one you would know, sweetheart.

Supernal one, in your untested mastery,

your easy excellence, with nothing to overcome,

and needing nothing but the most calamitous

and abject stories to prove how powerful you are,

how truly free, watch them as they laugh so briefly,

godlike, better than gods, if only for a moment

in which what goes wrong is converted to a rightness,

if only because now she’s hobbling back to bed

where she won’t sleep, if only because he pees at last,

missing the bowl, and has to get down on his knees

to wipe it up. You don’t know anything about us.

Source: The Dead Alive and Busy (The University of Chicago Press, 2000)

Biography

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Alan Shapiro was educated at Brandeis University. As the author of numerous collections of poetry, Shapiro has explored family, loss, domesticity, and the daily aspects of people’s lives in free verse and traditional poetic forms.

Poet-critic J.D. McClatchy observed in a review of Shapiro’s Dead, Alive and Busy (2000), “Mr. Shapiro is a shrewd and sympathetic moralist. He never trivializes his . . .

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