Poetry by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

​Carthage Must be Destroyed


Certain temples are ceremoniously pulled down,
which we in the West hesitate to class as monuments,
and are cyclically rebuilt on the same ground,
explained the radio while I drove to the clinic 

to have a malformed toenail removed. 
The doctor assured me that the body was good
at resuming its former shape, and the new nail
would grow smooth and straight without a trellis— 

but it is not so good as to deconsecrate a soldier’s leg,
long since removed, of which the pain remains, 
a wet shell hole sound that stalks his civilian stride, 
the inarticulate slosh in a left boot no longer worn.  

So even on this salted beach, drunk until the weightless shine
of the surf is abstracted off the ocean, I convolute my limbs
that retain the ache of when they were involved with yours. 
They bend to mimic the elbows of the kelp that throngs  

up through the streets of some long-conquered Venice. 
All that heft of alleys and alcoves is so much sand, 
which, with the merest shrug, should tumble chastely off the skin,
but your name remains a Carthage enclosed in my hide.

Bio: Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler is a poet and translator from New Hampshire. His latest translation project, Mesopotamia, a collection of short stories and poems by great living Ukrainian author Serhiy Zhadan, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

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