Insistent
Introvert

Persistent
Hypocrite

More moons will rise
Several more mornings

Analyst writer: breaking apart
Artist poet: bringing together

Colleague
Friend

Pretentious prig
Promiscuous gadfly

Several endings
Fewer starts

Of which I am now aware
But I may be hard-of-heart

Husband and father
Lover creator

Unfinished

Twelve full moons
As many imaginary months

Three-hundred and more mornings
Too many twelve-hour-days

At least four seasons
Maybe six

Leaving us uncertain now which way we ought to go. Down
The mountain by which we came or across terra incognito
“Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere…
Et quisquis amores…
Aut metuet dulcis aut experietur amaros”

(Not mine betwixt such rivals to decide…
For whosoever loves…
Tastes what is both bitter and sweet)

Sun failing thunder sounding lightning flashing it begins to rain
Rushing across the tree tops warning of what’s to come
Falling hard on the meadow bending flower and grass
Tumbling down the road in a sudden river washing away
Tracks leading lower into town, bridges to our past

Morning moisture gathers among the mountaintops
Continents of clouds rising into oceans of sky
As the sun ascends islands become archipelagos
Indonesian Aegean Caribbean in titanic collision
Lifting the Himalaya arousing Kala Patthar and Pumori

Mish:
We welcome your creation, demonstration
Or argument for any Good or goods We might
Incorporate but We also depend on your courage
Persistence and persuasion to prove a profit
To justify our adaptation to earn our respect

Tse:
I will make it worth your while
There is a fuller reality a greater love
A better way to balance each with all

Mish:
We shall see

Mish:
Expect or respect?
We are not innately generous
But neither jeer nor cheer
Opening to advantage when
Value is confirmed strength derived

Tse:
I am dismayed at your fixation on strength
Brutality excluding much that is best
Vulgar disregard for the Truth

Mish:
We are you and you are We
Please be yourself but unselfishly
We seek to preserve a constructive
Balance of what is good for each
And – especially – best for all

Tse:
I hear you and know too well smug smiles
Deft dismissals and much worse
Whenever you do not fully expect what I do

Mish:
We shed what does not contribute
To our commonwealth of strength
We mitigate threats to our shared
Sense of tribe team interdependence
All for one and one for all

Tse:
I have not known this gathering round me
Instead you have essentially said to
Deny my self to stop being me

Mish:
We do not require or need your
Agreement We do expect
Your constant respect We do
Require dutiful discretion
We will enforce the social order

Tse:
I am quite aware of your discipline
And while I do not seek confrontation
I have experienced much to controvert

Mish:
We have fed and clothed you
Taught and scolded you
We have inducted you into society
Our sources of order and meaning
Explained how We measure success

Tse:
I have received your instructions
Acknowledge your intentions
But cannot say I fully agree

      III.      Tsedeq and Mishpat

Mish:
We conspire across every culture
Far beyond memory’s reach
We are repository of failures’ formula
Victory’s treasure steward of surgeries
That barely cured us nearly killed us

Tse:
I am who I am here and now
Singular self unfolding only one
In uneasy communion with you

Philodemos:
You do not yet wear the toga.
You have been fed fiction when other
Studies would be far more nutritious
Still your mind is supple even subtle.

I have, however, heard the nickname
With which your chums berate you
Telling me the caution they see and
Know you would be better without.

I am sorry to make you blush
But your anxiety is my own special enemy
Who I have pledged to exterminate
Whoever and wherever he may touch.

I proffer: happiness is absence of pain
Which we may easily even blithely claim
If we learn not to fear: failure, folly or
Death, to celebrate our friends and live simply.

This day in me you have a new friend
Perhaps I will earn your phileo through
Further conversation and by bringing you to
Know realities only mathematics can show.

Philodemos:
Your proposition being there is no universal cause of happiness?

Praetaxtatum:
Cause emerges from context
Where Pericles found his happiness
Is not where Philodemos finds his
Archimedes glad where Aristophanes is sad

Philodemos:
Are you happy?

Praetaxtatum:
Is this a philosophical inquiry?

Philodemos:
Might happiness come of something less frebile
In one chalice of wine instead of nine
In quiet contemplation rather than raucous war
In appreciation contra constant acquisition

Praetaxtatum:
Surely there are alternate states
What makes a boy of thirteen happy
Might sometime strike you as insipid.
You would not be wrong, but neither am I.

Philodemus:
So Roman happiness, it sounds, is prolific?

Praetextatum:
As sand on a windward shore
As maggots on a battlefield
As hangovers following a feast

Philodemos:
A happy marriage?

Praetextatum:
In your Greek I hear what my own Latin
Would claim as fecund, felicitous, fertile.
If so this coupling has been, as you say, happy
But with such sibling strife rather less than blissful.

Praetextatum:
Fragments of a few, but not many
Some names vaguely familiar
Are each philosophers like you?

Philodemos: 
What does that word – philosophy –
Mean to you?

Praetextatum: 
Philo meaning love
Sophis meaning wisdom
Philosophy is a verb
Betrothed to its subject.

Praetextatum:
Herodotus, Hesiod
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides…
Xenophon, Thucydides
Homer of course, some others.

Philodemos:
Gods and goddesses abounding.
What of Thales, Pythagoras
Zeno perhaps, Archimedes of course
Euclid or Eudoxus or Democritus?

II.       Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas

Philodemos: 
I am told you compose Greek verse.

Praetextatum:
Yes sir, but it is, I know, weak poetic pabulum.

Philodemos:
What Greek have you read?

Menalcas. 
I am a market-maker.
I do not bet but bend motion my way.
Life is a game of skill not chance knowing
When and how to play what and who.
(As I am playing now you.)
But – given your predilections – surely we can
Agree what’s a much finer bet: I’ll wager two
Cups of beech wood, carved by divine Alcimedon
To which a pliant vine his lathe has added
Adorned with spreading clusters of pale ivy.
In the middle two figures,
Conon, and – who was the other?
Tracing the heavens for mankind with his staff,
Right time for the reaper, right time for the ploughman.
I’ve never yet put my lips to them, but kept them stored.

Damoetas: 
The same Alcimedon also made a pair for me
Handles twined round with sweet acanthus
Orpheus midst his sacred grove…
I’ve never yet put my lips to them, but kept them stored.
The artist dead two sets will triple the value of each.
Still no way you’d so praise the cups if confident of
Doubling this week’s purse.

Menalcas: 
You’ll not escape now: Let us start at Sydney’s opening bell.

Menalcas. 
Out-bid him? When have you perceived
Accurately much less predicted the market’s
Purposeful pulse? Your results are less than
Random, even worse than bad luck.

Damoetas. 
Well, then, what say we try our skill with
One million each against each? Over one week
What gain might be reached, your bets versus mine?
Loser paying winner equal to whatever difference
Between us the market does leave us.

Menalcas. 
With thieves so daring, what can masters do?
Did I not see you, rogue, in ambush lie
For Damon's Brazilian spin-off, lawyers barking?
And when I cried, "Where is he off to now?
Gather your fund close, Tityrus,"
You hid within your hedges.

Damoetas.
Was he whom I had vanquished to keep the best asset?
Which through artful bidding my wisdom had won!
You may not like it, but that Brazil nut was mine.

Menalcas. 
That must have been when they saw me slash 
Micon's IPO with my keen analysis of reserve cash.

Damoetas. 
Or here with these old blue chips, when you broke
Damon’s three year high; for you grieved
When you saw it rising and rising next,
Cross-grained Menalcas, ay, and had you not
Done some mischief, would have grieved to death.

Menalcas. 
Unhappy investors, unhappy fund! While he
Fondles Neaera, still fearing her choice
Shall fall on me, this commission broker here 
Trades twice or thrice what’s needed to claim his fees
Filching margins, from the lambs-to-slaughter their milk.

Damoetas. 
Hold! Not so loose with your jeers at true men!
We know who once dipped in what after-market –
SEC startled but looking aside – short-sellers sniggering.

          I.    ἐκλογή

Menalcas. 
Tell me Damoetas, who owns these shares? Meliboeus?

Damoetas. 
No, they are in Aegon's portfolio, just recently
Committed to my care.

All seeking equilibrium balance across their continuum
Releasing energy relative to heat pressure movement
Each responding to find some preternatural calm symmetry
Of location action connection deeper substances losing less
Broader surfaces discharging more.

Sweat’s stress and strain being widely scattered
Swept from sea to mountain to high across the plain
Riding atmospheric rivers assimilating transpiration of grass
Tree pond parking-lot puddle farmer 10K runner crook cop
Soccer-playing kid firefighter and inebriated bum.

Eklogē

Heat ascends binding a billion trillion aspirations
Morning dew sad sighs molecules of CO2 perspiration
Rising with the sun into the lower troposphere
Where vapors cool into suffusing cirrus or cumulus
Refracting and dispersing light.