Starling
By Mark Cunningham

I once knew a guy named Starling, but I don't know if he could speak Latin and Greek like the one Pliny the Elder heard. I bet my Starling was more like Ben Jonson's Shakespeare: he knew little Latin and less Greek. Well, I bet he knew "lxnay." I know Roman numbers, I even know that the original for "four" wasn't IV but IIII, but I don't want to get involved with anything over XCLXVIII. Speaking of Shakespeare, I once did Mark Antony as Yogi Bear: "I have come not to bury Caesar but to look inside his pic-anic basket." Just like in Shakespeare, it was a riot. I have read Zukofsky's translations of Catullus, in which the English sounds like the Latin and keeps the meaning; academics say that can't be done, so they ignore it. Enlightenment and idiocy are speechless when truly realized. Catullus is the sparrow. I murmur, murmur, murmur.