And They Lived

Abstract

And They Lived Taije Silverman (bio) I want a story to keep me company while you stare at your phone in bed. Any story. That a man named Solon planned the whole city of Athens while in love with his mother’s friend’s son. He broke his hand once trying to catch a turtle which had slipped from the roof of a temple is what I want to be told while you play scrabble against any number of people you haven’t seen in years. Exist for forty points links to stop for twenty-five which you drop into tranq for its q worth at least half the house. Slang for a person or thing that will act as a sedative. Tonight after watching three episodes of a television show about Russian spies with perfect American accents I ask if you like peanuts and you say you love peanuts and it’s as if we’ve just met and are fools for each other, still make out on sidewalks at dawn. Plutarch recounted the life of Solon “at a time when history was by no means an academic discipline” wrote someone on Wikipedia, while Solon wrote a law forbidding slaves from being gymnasts because his mother’s friend’s son was a gymnast and a slave and he wasn’t in love with Solon back. “It is irrational and ignoble to renounce what we want for fear of losing it,” wrote Plutarch. Your eyes in a duel with your phone, you ask which dentist I’ll see tomorrow and then two minutes later: did you remember to turn down the heat. [End Page 773] I’m either alone or I’m not alone. I would rather hear a story. Irrational, ignoble, or exist for thirty-two, tranq for a house with central heating. Tell me the one about the peanut that choked Plutarch, tell me about the back-flipping slave. Solon was the inventor of the euphemism. Prisons as chambers, policemen as guards. I love you, I’ve said, enough times to make history, or join it, or quash it, and I mean it, did you remember to turn down the heat. Let’s be civilized, said Solon. And: No man is allowed to sell his daughter unless she’s not a virgin. He made a law forbidding unions that defeat the object of marriage but the object of marriage was an acrophobic turtle which by no means would slip from the roof at that time. Four days from now I’m brushing my teeth when you say, I don’t feel any love from you at all. Solon would answer this usefully. He made a law stating that upon being married, bride and bridegroom must immediately be shut into a chamber to eat a quince. And if not immediately, then four days from now. Count no one happy until he’s dead, said Solon, to the happiest person alive. [End Page 774] Taije Silverman Taije Silverman’s book Houses Are Fields was published in 2009; her poems are in the 2016 and 2017 editions of Best American Poetry. Copyright © 2017 The University of the South