To the Figura Etymologica

1 Minute Read Time

The etymology of etymology is true meaning, but true meaning is not the true meaning of etymology.


Your face is rarely on the surface, 
and your form, firmly polymorphous, 
declines, prim Proteus, to disclose 
the hourglass beneath your clothes.

Cloistered in clauses, kneading dough 
your lord is absent to bestow,
lady, you break the bread of speech 
under the tongue where it can’t reach.

True Meaning, basis of abyss, 
fossil brimful of its fosse,
give me your word, and I will live 
with you in the infinitive,

to have and hold you, and to join us 
on beds rose-riddled and amoenus, 
where chiaroscuro shades the clearing 
hidden in the light of hearing,

and the rabbit hole at the branches’ root 
opens onto the absolute
dissolving as in absolution.
Come live with me; be my solution.

Christopher Childers

Christopher Childers is the author of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, out now from Penguin Classics.

He has published poems, translations, and prose in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, Smartish Pace, and Literary Matters. He is the recipient of an NEA Translators’ Fellowship and winner of the Briar Cliff Review Poetry Contest and the Erskine J. Poetry Contest from Smartish Pace. His poem “Miasma” will appear in the forthcoming edition of Best American Poetry.

Christopher holds a BA in Classics from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA in Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He currently lives in Baltimore, MD and teaches Latin at the Gilman School, but will soon be moving to Los Angeles, CA, where his wife will pursue a residency in pathology.

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