Ars Poetica

To grasp, like Prometheus, the fire — without the power to give it away ... — Betty Adcock At first a silhouette on the horizon, then turning solid, like Schiller coming up the path to meet the adorable sisters, and they, pretending not to watch, their hearts, all the time, pounding, driven by the same spring force (that would tear them apart), the same force that drives the salmon upriver, against the current, the odds, back to the home pool, even as the autumn mind, in spite of itself, turns backward, with the same feverish glow as autumn gives to the summer’s leaves, a deceptive glamour, warming the past with an amber light, like brandy held up to the fire, or the sun sinking at dusk into the water, into the Baltic Sea each night, where, in the mythical depths of Lithuanian folktale, lies the amber castle of the female sun, burning in the dark water, a globe the color of harvest, aglow there in the depths of the past, though the amber, congealed sap of a once living force, is broken into bits, and the mythic castle with it — strung now as beads, and hung, a charm, around the neck of a daughter, like the one in a Greek dream, picking flowers when the earth opened, and in a swirl of violet cape and the pounding of hoofs, the dark god broke out of the earth driven by the same spring force, consequential and mortal, and up there, hanging over the mythic fields of what recurs and recurs (though never the same, and never to be reconciled) — what is that? A hot air balloon filled with passengers who paid to be raised in a basket, to be up there looking down on the ground where they live, a place shrunken now beneath their gaze, while their bloated shadow floats like a jellyfish in a green sea, barely a smudge on the pastures below, the trace of their passage less than a breath of smoke from a coal-fired engine — a blast of tarnished air from the actual past, heavy metal delivered from memory. Useless to warn the girl, whose hand will always be reaching out for the flowers, or the sisters inflamed with Schiller, as he with the tricolor dream of a world he could never inhabit ... useless to comfort the eyeless Tiresias who knew how terrible was wisdom when it knew itself useless, and useless to read the names on the shining black wall of the Vietnam Memorial, the text of exactly what war has accomplished — and look, there, standing high above the tragic scene, not the little figures of the wise ancients that Yeats saw carved into the deep blue stone — but there, standing high above Arlington, against the blank lapis of the sky: a horse with the torso and head of a man, yes, it is Chiron, the last of the hybrids, the wise and terribly wounded centaur for whom immortality was a curse, and he gave it away to Prometheus, who stole the god’s fire and gave it away, as art gives the power to give it away, for that fire is the gift that cannot be held, for it will burn to an ash those (born and born again, war without end) who would hold it.