“The lions in his menagerie ate parrots, and he fed his horses grapes.”
—of the emperor Elagabalus, 218–222

And for his human guests, imperial excess straining
all credulity: say a nightingale embalmed in honey
and stuffed in a swan that was stuffed in a tenderized hog
that was levered into a slow-roast ox, the spaces in between
these telescoping boluses made cloggy with impactions
of lamprey, fresh sows’ udders, roosters’ jellies in pike sauce,
and a veritable scree of goose and pheasant livers
elevated by nightlong immersion in mint.
And they didn’t partake of this abstemiously—no,
it drizzled prodigiously down their chins and over
their breasts, it left them lumpishly held to their couches
as if their guts were a fatty magma set on cooling
into the heaviness of stone. Do I understand this? Maybe.
Maybe when I remember my mother refusing even a teaspoon

of the watery broth we offered her—the cancer was
so eminently painful by then, and so obviously
medically unassailable—and when I see her turning
into a project made of fluorescent light and gossamer, ready
to flimmer away on someone’s sigh or a nurse’s cough.
When I think of Phillip opening his chest and groin
like a cabinet door so we could see how his once-renowned
gourmet solidity was scarecrow straw the winds of dying
sang through, in their whiny pitch. And when the tv news is
emaciated—twiggish limbs, and faces all concavity,
and children in these camps who look as if the deathwatch flies
they bear all over them could lift them, in some show
of a ghastly synchronicity, off the earth. And then I comprehend
the urges, or anyway some of the urges, for accumulating