It’s also useful for reciting poetry. I met buccinator (BUCKS-i-nater), an ancient horn tooter, in the poem “Sissy Aqueducts”* by Brandon Menke. From its outset the poem has a baroque, recitable stickiness. Notice the powerful apostrophe dangling from an enjambment:

Legionnaires loiter on the Via Appia,
Smutty with Visigoth gore & as smug

As frat bros shotgunning Budweisers
With glitter entangled in their pubic hairs’

Michelangelian sprawl. […]

Elsewhere a hyphen brazenly finagles a fifth iamb:

[…] while the fanfares
Of Respighi mount the skies — the spit

Collects at the corners of the six Bucc-
Inators’ lips, like dew falling on hyacinths,
[…]

It’s hard not to use some such term as tour de force or Roman candle for the sheer play and display of wit, musical phrase and allusion in Menke’s cascading couplets. (They begin with old-school capital letters!) Concerning those as-if hyacinths collecting the dew of bugler spit, they are

Racemes moody by the battered racquet,
Or the Rococo, sperm-candle lambency

Of the Lacedaemonian prince, struck
Dead by a tennis ball, his god-beloved body

Immaculate on a cascade of marmalade
Chiffon. […]

The cultural references take me back to lectures of a charismatic gay French prof in college: Arendt, Respighi, Dallesandro circa Flesh, Callas in Turandot, the school of Rococo, Pasolini. Call it Tiepolonian, which mates with Menke’s term Michelangelian for that sprawl of pubic hairs flecked with glitter.

One effulgency leads to another, but ultimately the poem exalts the aqueducts, and resolves to an exclamation with a soupçon of yearning: The arches are “graffitied with all the vulgarities of Pompeii,” and they “look barely able to stand,”

But the waters they bring are so sweet—
They taste of such distant mountains.

*Published in Poetry, January-February 2024.

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