Cloacina: A Philological Note

Van Gogh, Schoenen / Shoes (1886)

The average reign of a Roman emperor

Reckoned at just eight years, ancient Americans

Set the length of their presidential rule by that,

Split into two sections, the jive and the lame duck,

Until in the twenty-third century, crisis

Brought on the anarchy (of which we learn in school)

After President Valerian, defeated in

Combat  by the Texmexican Ayatollah

Was obliged to serve as a hassock to his foe,

Skinned alive, or forced to drink liquid moolah,

If not all three—thank God  such things are no more done

In 3025!

Derived from the name

Of a river, it’s said, whose waters, drunk, made folk

Forget, their word for “truth” was aptomaine; others

Say aletheia  (the a in both privative,

Of course). The first is undoubtedly correct: ptōma,

Was the ancient Greek term for corpse, and the sacred

Stream that bore dead bodies away (our Cloaca

Maxima) was, at that time, called “the Potomac.”

Only a poet, prophet, or upright president,

Cloacina* had decreed, could vouch for aptomaine;

To them, it sprang directly from the so-called brain,

Which anatomizers now designate as “the head"—

Much prized, it's said, in vivisection of the dead.

*The goddess presiding over the Cloaca Maxima (“Greatest Drain”), the main sewage outlet in that remote era.

Tuesday, September 2, 2025