Poetry Wednesday

Bible Study: 71 B.C.E.

by Sharon Olds

After Marcus Licinius Crassus

defeated the army of Spartacus,

he crucified 6,000 men.

That is what the records say,

as if he drove in the 18,000

nails himself. I wonder how

he felt, that day, if he went outside

among them, if he walked that human

woods. I think he stayed in his tent

and drank, and maybe copulated,

hearing the singing being done for him,

the woodwind-tuning he was doing at one

remove, to the six-thousandth power.

And maybe he looked out, sometimes,

to see the rows of instruments,

his orchard, the earth bristling with it

as if a patch in his brain had itched

and this was his way of scratching it

directly. Maybe it gave him pleasure,

and a sense of balance, as if he had suffered,

and now had found redress for it,

and voice for it. I speak as a monster,

someone who today has thought at length

about Crassus, his ecstasy of feeling

nothing while so much is being

felt, his hot lightness of spirit

in being free to walk around

while other are nailed above the earth.

It may have been the happiest day

of his life. If he had suddenly cut

his hand on a wineglass, I doubt he would

have woken up to what he was doing.

It is frightening to think of him suddenly

seeing what he was, to think of him running

outside, to try to take them down,

one man to save 6,000.

If he could have lowered one,

and seen the eyes when the level of pain

dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,

wouldn’t that have opened in him

the wild terror of understanding

the other? But then he would have had

5,999

to go. Probably it almost never

happens, that a Marcus Crassus

wakes. I think he dozed, and was roused

to his living dream, lifted the flap

and stood and looked out, at the rustling, creaking

living field—his, like an external

organ, a heart.