The great Achaean kings are dead
who toppled and ruined Ilion.
The swift Achilles is a sod
at the foot of a farmer’s plow. They’re gone:

stolid Diomedes, proud Agamemnon,
Menelaus, Odysseus, asinine Aias—
so many names in a dead Greek’s song.
Glaucus said it: Like leaves we pass.

My car won’t move. It’s old. The snow
descends with a slow, imponderable weight
in a blanket on it. It’s a natural law:
Whatever doesn’t move gets buried: the great

Achaean kings, the swift Achilles,
a Toyota Celica from the Seventies.
It really doesn’t matter what. The press
squeezes out the differences.

Achilles and my car are things
once swift that do not run anymore.
Let the slow snow bury dead cars and kings;
I can walk, if I have to, to a Trojan war.