246 Mythology poems

"With sacrifice before the rising morn Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired; And from the infernal Gods, 'mid shades forlorn Of night, my slaughtered Lord have I required: Celestial pity I again implore;— Restore him to my sight—great Jove, restore!" So speaking, and by fervent love endowed With faith, the Suppliant heavenward lifts her hands; While, like the sun emerging from a cloud, Her countenance brightens—and her eye expands; Her bosom heaves and spreads, her stature grows; As she expects the issue in repose. O terror! what hath she perceived?—O joy! What doth she look on?—whom doth she behold? Her Hero slain upon the beach of Troy? His vital presence? his corporeal mould? It is—if sense deceive her not—'tis He! And a God leads him, wingèd Mercury! Mild Hermes spake—and touched her with his wand That calms all fear; "Such grace hath crowned thy prayer, Laodamía! that at Jove's command Thy husband walks the paths of upper air: He comes to tarry with thee three hours' space; Accept the gift, behold him face to face!" Forth sprang the impassioned Queen her Lord to clasp; Again that consummation she essayed; But unsubstantial Form eludes her grasp As often as that eager grasp was made. The Phantom parts—but parts to re-unite, And re-assume his place before her sight. "Protesiláus, lo! thy guide is gone! Confirm, I pray, the vision with thy voice: This is our palace,—yonder is thy throne; Speak, and the floor thou tread'st on will rejoice. Not to appal me have the gods bestowed This precious boon; and blest a sad abode." "Great Jove, Laodamía! doth not leave His gifts imperfect:—Spectre though I be, I am not sent to scare thee or deceive; But in reward of thy fidelity. And something also did my worth obtain; For fearless virtue bringeth boundless gain. "Thou knowest, the Delphic oracle foretold That the first Greek who touched the Trojan strand Should die; but me the threat could not withhold: A generous cause a victim did demand; And forth I leapt upon the sandy plain; A self-devoted chief—by Hector slain." "Supreme of Heroes—bravest, noblest, best! Thy matchless courage I bewail no more, Which then, when tens of thousands were deprest By doubt, propelled thee to the fatal shore; Thou found'st—and I forgive thee—here thou art— A nobler counsellor than my poor heart. "But thou, though capable of sternest deed, Wert kind as resolute, and good as brave; And he, whose power restores thee, hath decreed Thou should'st elude the malice of the grave: Redundant are thy locks, thy lips as fair As when their breath enriched Thessalian air. "No spectre greets me,—no vain Shadow this; Come, blooming Hero, place thee by my side! Give, on this well-known couch, one nuptial kiss To me, this day a second time thy bride!" Jove frowned in heaven: the conscious Parcæ threw Upon those roseate lips a Stygian hue. "This visage tells thee that my doom is past: Nor should the change be mourned, even if the joys Of sense were able to return as fast And surely as they vanish. Earth destroys Those raptures duly—-Erebus disdains: Calm pleasures there abide—majestic pains. "Be taught, O faithful Consort, to control Rebellious passion: for the Gods approve The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul; A fervent, not ungovernable love. Thy transports moderate; and meekly mourn When I depart, for brief is my sojourn—" "Ah wherefore?—Did not Hercules by force Wrest from the guardian monster of the tomb Alcestis, a reanimated corse, Given back to dwell on earth in vernal bloom? Medea's spells dispersed the weight of years, And Æson stood a youth 'mid youthful peers. "The Gods to us are merciful—and they Yet further may relent: for mightier far Than strength of nerve and sinew, or the sway Of magic potent over sun and star, Is love, though oft to agony distrest, And though his favourite seat be feeble woman's breast. "But if thou goest, I follow—" "Peace!" he said,— She looked upon him and was calmed and cheered; The ghastly colour from his lips had fled; In his deportment, shape, and mien, appeared Elysian beauty, melancholy grace, Brought from a pensive though a happy place. He spake of love, such love as Spirits feel In worlds whose course is equable and pure; No fears to beat away—no strife to heal— The past unsighed for, and the future sure; Spake of heroic arts in graver mood Revived, with finer harmony pursued; Of all that is most beauteous—imaged there In happier beauty; more pellucid streams, An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams; Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey. Yet there the Soul shall enter which hath earned That privilege by virtue.—"Ill," said he, "The end of man's existence I discerned, Who from ignoble games and revelry Could draw, when we had parted, vain delight, While tears were thy best pastime, day and night; "And while my youthful peers before my eyes (Each hero following his peculiar bent) Prepared themselves for glorious enterprise By martial sports,—or, seated in the tent, Chieftains and kings in council were detained; What time the fleet at Aulis lay enchained. "The wished-for wind was given:—I then revolved The oracle, upon the silent sea; And, if no worthier led the way, resolved That, of a thousand vessels, mine should be The foremost prow in pressing to the strand,— Mine the first blood that tinged the Trojan sand. "Yet bitter, oft-times bitter, was the pang When of thy loss I thought, belovèd Wife! On thee too fondly did my memory hang, And on the joys we shared in mortal life,— The paths which we had trod—these fountains, flowers: My new-planned cities, and unfinished towers. "But should suspense permit the Foe to cry, 'Behold they tremble!—haughty their array, Yet of their numbers no one dares to die?' In soul I swept the indignity away: Old frailties then recurred:—but lofty thought, In act embodied, my deliverance wrought. "And Thou, though strong in love, art all too weak In reason, in self-government too slow; I counsel thee by fortitude to seek Our blest re-union in the shades below. The invisible world with thee hath sympathised; Be thy affections raised and solemnised. "Learn, by a mortal yearning, to ascend— Seeking a higher object. Love was given, Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end; For this the passion to excess was driven— That self might be annulled: her bondage prove The fetters of a dream opposed to love.— Aloud she shrieked! for Hermes re-appears! Round the dear Shade she would have clung—'tis vain: The hours are past—too brief had they been years; And him no mortal effort can detain: Swift, toward the realms that know not earthly day, He through the portal takes his silent way, And on the palace-floor a lifeless corse She lay. Thus, all in vain exhorted and reproved, She perished; and, as for a wilful crime, By the just Gods whom no weak pity moved, Was doomed to wear out her appointed time, Apart from happy Ghosts, that gather flowers Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers. —Yet tears to human suffering are due; And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown Are mourned by man, and not by man alone, As fondly he believes.—Upon the side Of Hellespont (such faith was entertained) A knot of spiry trees for ages grew From out the tomb of him for whom she died; And ever, when such stature they had gained That Ilium's walls were subject to their view, The trees' tall summits withered at the sight; A constant interchange of growth and blight!

The suburbs? Well, for heaven’s sake who wouldn’t choose the absolute convenience? Cheap, a quick commute, and close to Lowe’s, a Steak ’n Shake, our own police and DMV, a library, a lake. Esteemed domestic diplomats, we trump conundrums (His and Hers) and smother any fuss that stirs the air of habit habitats. It’s not an easy job; in short, we wear a lot of hats. And so, we’re grateful, from the street you’d miss the issues we’re ignoring: termites and week-old dishes mooring, barnacled with shredded wheat, the bunch of brown bananas stuck with a yellow Post-it:Eat! We dictate chores, but understand the clock moves faster than we do and focus on those old and blue dilemmas of the second hand: inheritance, ill-fitting pants, smoke, rumors, foreclosed land. Winters, we help keep track of taxes, sort copies Xerox-hot in piles, or prune unruly hanging files (a fixture of our weekend praxis). There’s always something. In this house, only the cat relaxes— because the clutter drives a need for more, more room, more hours, food, more use of the subjunctive mood . . . tomorrow, yes, we must succeed in keeping peace and making time to garden, and to read. Still, every spring our porches spawn insects we can’t identify and ferns turned freeze-dried octopi. They spill into the arid lawn with diasporic fliers, clover and choirs of woebegone house sparrows whose incessant cheeping recalls the gloomy Ubi sunt, our soundtrack to the nightly hunt for whatever is downstairs, beeping. (As if the sleepless wanted some reminder they’re not sleeping.) But don’t fret; clarity, if brief, is possible. The best folks see an artfulness in entropy— the rust, the dust, the bas-relief of Aquafresh-encrusted sinks. So when, in disbelief, a lady skims new catalogs, convinced her luster’s fading, faded, and, afraid to end up jaded, doughy in orthotic clogs, she gracefully accepts her fate and rises early. Jogs.

In Chicago, it is snowing softly and a man has just done his wash for the week. He steps into the twilight of early evening, carrying a wrinkled shopping bag full of neatly folded clothes, and, for a moment, enjoys the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper, flannellike against his gloveless hands. There’s a Rembrandt glow on his face, a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek as a last flash of sunset blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street. He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese, and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw, dingy and too large. He negotiates the slick of ice on the sidewalk by his car, opens the Fairlane’s back door, leans to place the laundry in, and turns, for an instant, toward the flurry of footsteps and cries of pedestrians as a boy—that’s all he was— backs from the corner package store shooting a pistol, firing it, once, at the dumbfounded man who falls forward, grabbing at his chest. A few sounds escape from his mouth, a babbling no one understands as people surround him bewildered at his speech. The noises he makes are nothing to them. The boy has gone, lost in the light array of foot traffic dappling the snow with fresh prints. Tonight, I read about Descartes’ grand courage to doubt everything except his own miraculous existence and I feel so distinct from the wounded man lying on the concrete I am ashamed. Let the night sky cover him as he dies. Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven and take up his cold hands. IN MEMORY OF JAY KASHIWAMURA

the deep male growl of the sea-lashed headland —Sophocles, Philoctetes August long ago, the summer Lemnian (not like the deeds of those who killed their men), the self a glowing bead, like Hephaestus falling daylong out of heaven in the old story, the island's interior a forge, a glory hole, the odor of wild thyme borne offshore steadily, the Aegean Sea purple, wine-dark, without epithet; and as I walked on the beach, my mother not long dead, the perfect crystal of my self-regard so lately flawed, and landscape made to echo my own low cry in the island's empty places, I found a pure white bone that wind and salt had scoured of every grief and all self-pity: and so I came to the love of others.

The Inside Out Mermaid is fine with letting it all hang out–veins, muscles, the bits of fat at her belly, her small gray spleen. At first her lover loves it–with her organs on the outside, she's the ultimate open book. He can pump her lungs like two bellows and make her gasp; ask her difficult questions and study the synapses firing in her brain as she answers to see if she's lying; poke a pleasure center in the frontal lobe and watch her squirm. No need for bouquets or sad stories about his childhood. He just plucks a pulmonary vein and watches the left ventricle flounder. But before long, she starts to sense that her lover, like all the others before him, is getting restless. This is when she starts showing them her collections–the basket of keys from all over the world, the box of zippers with teeth of every imaginable size–all chosen to convey a sense of openness. As a last resort, she’ll even read out loud the entries from her diary about him to him. But eventually he’ll become convinced she’s hiding things from him and she is. Her perfect skin. Her long black hair. Her red mouth, never chapped from exposure to sun or wind, how she secretly loves that he can’t touch her here or here.

As you set out for Ithaka hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope your road is a long one. May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to learn and go on learning from their scholars. Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you’re destined for. But don’t hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you’re old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow, How can thine heart be full of the spring? A thousand summers are over and dead. What hast thou found in the spring to follow? What hast thou found in thine heart to sing? What wilt thou do when the summer is shed? O swallow, sister, O fair swift swallow, Why wilt thou fly after spring to the south, The soft south whither thine heart is set? Shall not the grief of the old time follow? Shall not the song thereof cleave to thy mouth? Hast thou forgotten ere I forget? Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow, Thy way is long to the sun and the south; But I, fulfilled of my heart's desire, Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow, From tawny body and sweet small mouth Feed the heart of the night with fire. I the nightingale all spring through, O swallow, sister, O changing swallow, All spring through till the spring be done, Clothed with the light of the night on the dew, Sing, while the hours and the wild birds follow, Take flight and follow and find the sun. Sister, my sister, O soft light swallow, Though all things feast in the spring's guest-chamber, How hast thou heart to be glad thereof yet? For where thou fliest I shall not follow, Till life forget and death remember, Till thou remember and I forget. Swallow, my sister, O singing swallow, I know not how thou hast heart to sing. Hast thou the heart? is it all past over? Thy lord the summer is good to follow, And fair the feet of thy lover the spring: But what wilt thou say to the spring thy lover? O swallow, sister, O fleeting swallow, My heart in me is a molten ember And over my head the waves have met. But thou wouldst tarry or I would follow, Could I forget or thou remember, Couldst thou remember and I forget. O sweet stray sister, O shifting swallow, The heart's division divideth us. Thy heart is light as a leaf of a tree; But mine goes forth among sea-gulfs hollow To the place of the slaying of Itylus, The feast of Daulis, the Thracian Sea. O swallow, sister, O rapid swallow, I pray thee sing not a little space. Are not the roofs and the lintels wet? The woven web that was plain to follow, The small slain body, the flowerlike face, Can I remember if thou forget? O sister, sister, thy first-begotten! The hands that cling and the feet that follow, The voice of the child's blood crying yet Who hath remembered me? who hath forgotten? Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow, But the world shall end when I forget.

There once lived a great king whose twin wives could bear him no children. A wandering sage saw the king’s grief and offered him a magical mango. She who ate the mango would be with child. As he had two wives, the king cut the mango into two perfect halves and offered one half to each wife. After nine months, each wife gave birth to one lifeless half. Horrified, the king ordered these clots of flesh to be left in the forest. A wandering demon found the two lifeless halves and cupped one in each palm. When she brought them together, the two halves fused and a whole child was made in front of her eyes—the demon named the child Jarasandha. Years passed by and this child grew to be an intimidating and invincible warrior. In a fight with Bhim, an equally invincible warrior, Jarasandha was ripped in half by his enemy. But, each time he was ripped apart, his halves found a way to meet up and become whole. Krishna, who witnessed how Jarasandha’s flesh found its own way back to flesh, motioned to his own cousin with his fingers:toss the halves of his body in opposite directions, he suggested. So, when Bhim ripped Jarasandha apart once again, he swung his left half to the right side of the arena and his right half to the left. And his body found no way to return to itself. In the Toronto airport, where I’ve arrived for a conference, I watch an older Punjabi lady—made to sit in a wheelchair behind two lines of customs officials, a security guard, a translator, and a service-staff member—scream that her son is outside the airport may she please just go tell him she is here she is here she is here please. I stand there holding her hand, my own luggage reluctantly traveling in loops on the belt. Beta—child— she says to me: please tell them my son is here and I am here what is the problem let me go let me go to him.

I have hidden your lost teeth in the net of all my famous hair And with foresight promised your umbilicus To several minor gods. I paid your fee in fawn skin & the lightest fringe of tissue, all the quiet noons assembled, In yard stars & the light of phosphorescent pens, The dioramas that it takes to fill lacunae, in ancestral knots That tell the story of our humble people: watchmakers, Mainly, ventriloquists & scholars of quintessence, Amateur lifeguards I meant to surpass. How I loved My green & distant futures! But I love you more From late Holocene out to the farthest buoy, unto Blackmail & a verb that means renouncing Christ Or else describes the path of sap before it’s amber, Before it dimples, just a little, to collect —

If he from heaven that filched that living fire Condemned by Jove to endless torment be, I greatly marvel how you still go free, That far beyond Prometheus did aspire. The fire he stole, although of heavenly kind, Which from above he craftily did take, Of liveless clods, us living men to make, He did bestow in temper of the mind. But you broke into heaven’s immortal store, Where virtue, honor, wit, and beauty lay; Which taking thence you have escaped away, Yet stand as free as ere you did before; Yet old Prometheus punished for his rape. Thus poor thieves suffer when the greater ‘scape.