246 Mythology poems

I So you have swept me back, I who could have walked with the live souls above the earth, I who could have slept among the live flowers at last; so for your arrogance and your ruthlessness I am swept back where dead lichens drip dead cinders upon moss of ash; so for your arrogance I am broken at last, I who had lived unconscious, who was almost forgot; if you had let me wait I had grown from listlessness into peace, if you had let me rest with the dead, I had forgot you and the past. II Here only flame upon flame and black among the red sparks, streaks of black and light grown colourless; why did you turn back, that hell should be reinhabited of myself thus swept into nothingness? why did you glance back? why did you hesitate for that moment? why did you bend your face caught with the flame of the upper earth, above my face? what was it that crossed my face with the light from yours and your glance? what was it you saw in my face? the light of your own face, the fire of your own presence? What had my face to offer but reflex of the earth, hyacinth colour caught from the raw fissure in the rock where the light struck, and the colour of azure crocuses and the bright surface of gold crocuses and of the wind-flower, swift in its veins as lightning and as white. III Saffron from the fringe of the earth, wild saffron that has bent over the sharp edge of earth, all the flowers that cut through the earth, all, all the flowers are lost; everything is lost, everything is crossed with black, black upon black and worse than black, this colourless light. IV Fringe upon fringe of blue crocuses, crocuses, walled against blue of themselves, blue of that upper earth, blue of the depth upon depth of flowers, lost; flowers, if I could have taken once my breath of them, enough of them, more than earth, even than of the upper earth, had passed with me beneath the earth; if I could have caught up from the earth, the whole of the flowers of the earth, if once I could have breathed into myself the very golden crocuses and the red, and the very golden hearts of the first saffron, the whole of the golden mass, the whole of the great fragrance, I could have dared the loss. V So for your arrogance and your ruthlessness I have lost the earth and the flowers of the earth, and the live souls above the earth, and you who passed across the light and reached ruthless; you who have your own light, who are to yourself a presence, who need no presence; yet for all your arrogance and your glance, I tell you this: such loss is no loss, such terror, such coils and strands and pitfalls of blackness, such terror is no loss; hell is no worse than your earth above the earth, hell is no worse, no, nor your flowers nor your veins of light nor your presence, a loss; my hell is no worse than yours though you pass among the flowers and speak with the spirits above earth. VI Against the black I have more fervour than you in all the splendour of that place, against the blackness and the stark grey I have more light; and the flowers, if I should tell you, you would turn from your own fit paths toward hell, turn again and glance back and I would sink into a place even more terrible than this. VII At least I have the flowers of myself, and my thoughts, no god can take that; I have the fervour of myself for a presence and my own spirit for light; and my spirit with its loss knows this; though small against the black, small against the formless rocks, hell must break before I am lost; before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass.

In one dream I am made watchful. In this dream the name we never clearly have heard is spoken, which name, if we knew and could speak it, would call back to us those whom in time we will have come to love and who will die; would bring them back to us like us abandoned again to his terrible consequence, the silence between us forever affirmed. And in whatever might constitute the pardon would come down in a fragile rain the whole matter of all we will ever love, the whole fiery blade of space, ten billions of suns suddenly blossoming small and cool as snowdrops over the opening graves, the world shimmering with the blue delicate membrane of the fallen sky, while above us the forsaken voice calls out come back come back as if calling the name each of us had long forgotten until that very instant not remembered as proper to our hearts.

Pomegranates fell from the trees in our sleep. If we stayed in the sun too long there were aloes to cool the burn. Henbane for predators and succulents when the rain was scarce. There was no glorified past to point the way true and natural for the sexes to meet. He kept looking to the heavens as if the answer were anywhere but here. I was so bored with our goodness I couldn’t suck the juice from one more pear. It’s here, I kept telling him, here, rooted in the soil like every other tree you know. And I wove us a bed of its uppermost branches.

Then there's the Yemeni legend of Eve in the Garden knitting a pattern on the serpent's back, the snake unfinished like the rest of creation, the first woman thinking to add design, a sheath of interlocking diamonds and stripes along that sensuous S, knitting giving her time to learn what's infinitely possible with a few stitches, twisting cables, hers a plan to mirror the divine inner layer that can't be shed no matter what it rubs up against.

Stand close around, ye Stygian set, With Dirce in one boat conveyed! Or Charon, seeing, may forget That he is old and she a shade.

Haunted, they say, believing the soft, shifty dunes are made up of false promises. Many believe whatever happens is the other half of a conversation. Many whisper white lies to the dead. "The boys are doing really well." Some think nothing is so until it has been witnessed. They believe the bits are iffy; the forces that bind them, absolute.

There was a need to be weak and I met it. I appeared in the confusion between strength and surrender, as if out of nowhere, that’s the illusion. I was reared ruminating in a thicket of sorrow with a beautiful string of drool hanging out the side of my mouth like a loose phosphorescent tether. How will I know what to do, I wondered. No one does, my mother said. And then, as the drawing back of the ocean before a tsunami suddenly exposes outrageous fish on the seabed, gasping, a great inhalation placed me here panting on the sacred grass. I feel like a girl in heaven, but I am a beast in a clearing. I came to as the wind picked up and in the bay as the tide came in, what a blow to mankind, an animalcrude wind to war, toward war, untoward toward war took my breath away with it.

41 His classic studies made a little puzzle, Because of filthy loves of gods and goddesses, Who in the earlier ages raised a bustle, But never put on pantaloons or bodices; His reverend tutors had at times a tussle, And for their Aeneids, Iliads, and Odysseys, Were forced to make an odd sort of apology, For Donna Inez dreaded the mythology. 42

Echo that loved hid within a wood Would to herself rehearse her weary woe: O, she cried, and all the rest unsaid Identical came back in sorry echo. Echo for the fix that she was in Invisible, distraught by mocking passion, Passionate, ignored, as good as dumb, Employed that O unchanged in repetition. Shun love if you suspect that he shuns you, Use with him no reproaches whatsoever. Ever you knew, supposing him to know No melody from which you might recover- Cover your ears, dear Echo, do not hear. Here is no supplication but your own, Only your sighs return upon the air Ere their music from the mouth be gone.

1 My ear amps whistle like they are singing to Echo, goddess of noise, the raveled knot of tongues, of blaring birds, consonant crumbs of dull doorbells, sounds swamped in my misty hearing aid tubes. Gaudí believed in holy sound and built a cathedral to contain it, pulling hearing men from their knees as though atheism is a kind of deafness. Who would turn down God? Even though I have not heard the golden decibels of angels, I have been living in a noiseless palace where the doorbell is pulsating light and I am able to answer. 2 What? a word that keeps looking in mirrors like it is in love with its own volume. What? I am a one-word question, a one-man patience test. What? What language would we speak without ears? What? Is paradise a world where I hear everything? What? How will my brain know what to hold if it has too many arms? 3 The day I clear out my dead father’s flat, I throw away boxes of molding LPs, Garvey, Malcolm X, Mandela, speeches on vinyl. I find a TDK cassette tape on the shelf, smudged green label Raymond Speaking. I play the tape in his vintage cassette player and hear my two-year-old voice chanting my name Antrob and dad’s laughter crackling in the background not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus” and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids. Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness — Antrob Antrob Antrob 4 And no one knew what I was missing until a doctor gave me a handful of Legos and said to put a brick on the table every time I heard a sound. After the test I still held enough bricks in my hand to build a house and call it my sanctuary, call it the reason I sat in saintly silence during my grandfather’s sermons when he preached the good news, I only heard as Babylon’s babbling echoes. 5 And if you don’t catch nothing then something wrong with your ears — they been tuned to de wrong frequency — Kei Miller