246 Mythology poems

Accompanied To the Campi Flegrei By a shadow, She listened to voices rise From the darkness, Then recede. Instruments Sustained them. When one had finished Others played. False proportions Sung boldly. Rain on the roof tiles. O selve, o campi.

After you left me forever, I was broken into pieces, and all the pieces flung into the river. Then the legs crawled ashore and aimlessly wandered the dusty cow-track. They became, for a while, a simple roadside shrine: A tiny table set up between the thighs held a dusty candle, weed-and-fieldflower chains placed reverently there by children and old women. My knees were hung with tin triangular medals to cure all forms of hysterical disease. After I died forever in the river, my torso floated, bloated in the stream, catching on logs or stones among the eddies. White water foamed around it, then dislodged it; after a whirlwind trip, it bumped ashore. A grizzled old man who scavenged along the banks had already rescued my arms and put them by, knowing everything has its uses, sooner or later. When he found my torso, he called it his canoe, and, using my arms as paddles, he rowed me up and down the scummy river. When catfish nibbled my fingers he scooped them up and blessed his reusable bait. Clumsy but serviceable, that canoe! The trail of blood that was its wake attracted the carp and eels, and the river turtle, easily landed, dazed by my tasty red. A young lad found my head among the rushes and placed it on a dry stone. He carefully combed my hair with a bit of shell and set small offerings before it which the birds and rats obligingly stole at night, so it seemed I ate. And the breeze wound through my mouth and empty sockets so my lungs would sigh, and my dead tongue mutter. Attached to my throat like a sacred necklace was a circlet of small snails. Soon the villagers came to consult my oracular head with its waterweed crown. Seers found occupation, interpreting sighs, and their papyrus rolls accumulated. Meanwhile, young boys retrieved my eyes they used for marbles in a simple game till somebody’s pretty sister snatched at them and set them, for luck, in her bridal diadem. Poor girl! When her future groom caught sight of her, all eyes, he crossed himself in horror, and stumbled away in haste through her dowered meadows. What then of my heart and organs, my sacred slit which loved you best of all? They were caught in a fisherman’s net and tossed at night into a pen for swine. But they shone so by moonlight that the sows stampeded, trampled one another in fear, to get away. And the fisherman’s wife, who had thirteen living children and was contemptuous of holy love, raked the rest of me onto the compost heap. Then in their various places and helpful functions, the altar, oracle, offal, canoe and oars learned the wild rumor of your return. The altar leapt up, and ran to the canoe, scattering candle grease and wilted grasses. Arms sprang to their sockets, blind hands with nibbled nails groped their way, aided by loud lamentation, to the bed of the bride, snatched up those unlucky eyes from her discarded veil and diadem, and rammed them home. Oh, what a bright day it was! This empty body danced on the riverbank. Hollow, it called and searched among the fields for those parts that steamed and simmered in the sun, and never would have found them. But then your great voice rang out under the skies my name!—and all those private names for the parts and places that had loved you best. And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung. The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar, and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment, and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles, and the runaway groom, and the fisherman’s thirteen children set up such a clamor, with their cries of “Miracle!” that our two bodies met like a thunderclap in midday—right at the corner of that wretched field with its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle. We fell in a heap on the compost heap and all our loving parts made love at once, while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyes and then went decently about their business. And here it is, moonlight again; we’ve bathed in the river and are sweet and wholesome once more. We kneel side by side in the sand; we worship each other in whispers. But the inner parts remember fermenting hay, the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense, and passion, its bloody labor, its birth and rebirth and decay.

It is said that after losing his wife, Orpheus was torn to pieces by Maenads, who threw his head into the River Hebron. The head went on singing and forgetting, filling up with water and floating way. Eurydice already forgetting who she is with her shoes missing and the grass coming up through her feet searching the earth for the bracelet of tiny weave on her charcoal wrist the name of a fly or flower already forgetting who they are they grow they grow till their bodies break their necks down there in the stone world where the grey spirits of stones he around uncertain of their limits matter is eating my mind                                I am in a river I in my fox-cap floating between the speechless reeds I always wake like this being watched already forgetting who I am the water wears my mask I call  I call lying under its lashes like a glance if only a child on a bridge would hoik me out there comes a tremor and there comes a pause down there in the underworld where the tired stones have fallen and the sand in a trance lifts a little it is always midnight in those pools iron insects engraved in sleep I always wake like this being watched I always speak to myself no more myself but a colander draining the sound from this never-to-be mentioned wound can you hear it you with your long shadows and your short shadows can you hear the severed head of Orpheus no I feel nothing from the neck down already forgetting who I am the crime goes on without volition singing in its bone not I not I the water drinks my mind as if in a black suit as if bent to my books only my face exists sliding over a waterfall and there where the ferns hang over the dark and the midges move between mirrors some woman has left her shoes two crumpled mouths which my voice searches in and out my voice being water which holds me together and also carries me away until the facts forget themselves gradually like a contrail and all this week a lime-green hght troubles the riverbed as if the mud was haunted by the wood this is how the wind works hard at thinking this is what speaks when no one speaks

From "Metamorphoses," Book II, 846-875 Majesty is incompatible truly with love; they cohabit Nowhere together. The father and chief of the gods, whose right hand is Armed with the triple-forked lightning, who shakes the whole world with a nod, laid Dignity down with his sceptre, adopting the guise of a bull that Mixed with the cattle and lowed as he ambled around the fresh fields, a Beautiful animal, colored like snow that no footprint has trodden And which no watery south wind has melted. His muscular neck bulged, Dewlaps hung down from his chin; his curved horns you might think had been hand carved, Perfect, more purely translucent than pearl. His unthreatening brow and Far from formidable eyes made his face appear tranquil. Agenor's Daughter was truly amazed that this beautiful bull did not seem to Manifest any hostility. Though he was gentle she trembled at first to Touch him, but soon she approached him, adorning his muzzle with flowers. Then he rejoiced as a lover and, while he looked forward to hoped for Pleasures, he slobbered all over her hands, and could hardly postpone the Joys that remained. So he frolicked and bounded about on the green grass, Laying his snowy-white flanks on the yellowish sands. As her fear was Little by little diminished, he offered his chest for her virgin Hand to caress and his horns to be decked with fresh flowers. The royal Maiden, not knowing on whom she was sitting, was even so bold as Also to climb on the back of the bull. As the god very slowly Inched from the shore and the dry land he planted his spurious footprints Deep in the shallows. Thus swimming out farther, he carried his prey off Into the midst of the sea. Almost fainting with terror she glanced back, As she was carried away, at the shore left behind. As she gripped one Horn in her right hand while clutching the back of the beast with the other, Meanwhile her fluttering draperies billowed behind on the sea breeze.

to challenge sleep to go against the one-eyed god of  victimhood: Polyphemus by way of  Redon rising, open eye ripe with stupid gazing. How dare you look at me? plural tense: now and then, to bed and back again and one more war. The oral rinse of moral sense can lift the fence of expectation, expand the dome of  tolerance. I, too, arose from the unthinkable, used to Nobody responding loud as circumstance.

I The light foot hears you and the brightness begins god-step at the margins of thought, quick adulterous tread at the heart. Who is it that goes there? Where I see your quick face notes of an old music pace the air, torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre. In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche have a hurt voluptuous grace bruised by redemption. The copper light falling upon the brown boy’s slight body is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing up from blind innocence, ensnared by dimness into the deprivations of desiring sight. But the eyes in Goya’s painting are soft, diffuse with rapture absorb the flame. Their bodies yield out of strength. Waves of visual pleasure wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience. A bronze of yearning, a rose that burns the tips of their bodies, lips, ends of fingers, nipples. He is not wingd. His thighs are flesh, are clouds lit by the sun in its going down, hot luminescence at the loins of the visible. But they are not in a landscape. They exist in an obscurity. The wind spreading the sail serves them. The two jealous sisters eager for her ruin serve them. That she is ignorant, ignorant of what Love will be, serves them. The dark serves them. The oil scalding his shoulder serves them, serves their story. Fate, spinning, knots the threads for Love. Jealousy, ignorance, the hurt . . . serve them. II This is magic. It is passionate dispersion. What if they grow old? The gods would not allow it. Psyche is preserved. In time we see a tragedy, a loss of beauty the glittering youth of the god retains—but from this threshold it is age that is beautiful. It is toward the old poets we go, to their faltering, their unaltering wrongness that has style, their variable truth, the old faces, words shed like tears from a plenitude of powers time stores. A stroke.   These little strokes.   A chill. The old man, feeble, does not recoil. Recall. A phase so minute, only a part of the word in- jerrd. The Thundermakers descend, damerging a nuv. A nerb. The present dented of the U nighted stayd. States. The heavy clod? Cloud. Invades the brain. What if lilacs last in this dooryard bloomd? Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower— where among these did the power reside that moves the heart? What flower of the nation bride-sweet broke to the whole rapture? Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson hear the factories of human misery turning out commodities. For whom are the holy matins of the heart ringing? Noble men in the quiet of morning hear Indians singing the continent’s violent requiem. Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt, idiots fumbling at the bride’s door, hear the cries of men in meaningless debt and war. Where among these did the spirit reside that restores the land to productive order? McKinley, Cleveland, Harrison, Arthur, Garfield, Hayes, Grant, Johnson, dwell in the roots of the heart’s rancor. How sad “amid lanes and through old woods” echoes Whitman’s love for Lincoln! There is no continuity then. Only a few posts of the good remain. I too that am a nation sustain the damage where smokes of continual ravage obscure the flame. It is across great scars of wrong I reach toward the song of kindred men and strike again the naked string old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake! that cried: “The theme is creative and has vista.” “He is the president of regulation.” I see always the under side turning, fumes that injure the tender landscape. From which up break lilac blossoms of courage in daily act striving to meet a natural measure. III (for Charles Olson) Psyche’s tasks—the sorting of seeds wheat      barley      oats      poppy      coriander anise      beans      lentils      peas      —every grain in its right place before nightfall; gathering the gold wool from the cannibal sheep (for the soul must weep and come near upon death); harrowing Hell for a casket Proserpina keeps that must not be opend . . . containing beauty? no!      Melancholy coild like a serpent that is deadly sleep we are not permitted to succumb to. These are the old tasks. You’ve heard them before. They must be impossible. Psyche must despair, be brought to her insect instructor; must obey the counsels of the green reed; saved from suicide by a tower speaking, must follow to the letter freakish instructions. In the story the ants help. The old man at Pisa mixd in whose mind (to draw the sorts) are all seeds as a lone ant from a broken ant-hill had part restored by an insect, was upheld by a lizard (to draw the sorts) the wind is part of the process defines a nation of the wind— father of many notions, Who? let the light into the dark? began the many movements of the passion? West from east   men push. The islands are blessd (cursed)   that swim below the sun, man upon whom the sun has gone down! There is the hero who struggles east widdershins to free the dawn   and must woo Night’s daughter, sorcery, black passionate rage, covetous queens, so that the fleecy sun go   back from Troy, Colchis, India . . . all the blazing armies spent, he must struggle alone toward the pyres of Day. The light that is Love rushes on toward passion. It verges upon dark. Roses and blood flood the clouds. Solitary first riders advance into legend. This land, where I stand, was all legend in my grandfathers’ time: cattle raiders, animal tribes, priests, gold. It was the West. Its vistas painters saw in diffuse light, in melancholy, in abysses left by glaciers as if they had been the sun primordial carving empty enormities out of the rock. Snakes lurkd guarding secrets.         Those first ones survived solitude. Scientia holding the lamp, driven by doubt; Eros naked in foreknowledge smiling in his sleep;    and the light spilld, burning his shoulder—the outrage that conquers legend— passion, dismay, longing, search flooding up where the Beloved is lost. Psyche travels life after life, my life, station after station, to be tried without break, without news, knowing only—but what did she know? The oracle at Miletus had spoken truth surely: that he was Serpent-Desire that flies thru the air, a monster-husband. But she saw him fair whom Apollo’s mouthpiece said spread pain beyond cure    to those wounded by his arrows. Rilke torn by a rose thorn blackend toward Eros.          Cupidinous Death! that will not take no for an answer. IV Oh yes!      Bless the footfall where step by step      the boundary walker (in Maverick Road      the snow thud by thud      from the roof circling the house—another tread) that foot      informd by the weight of all things that can be elusive no more than a nearness to the mind of a single image Oh yes!      this most dear the catalyst force that renders clear the days of a life from the surrounding medium! Yes, beautiful rare wilderness! wildness that verifies strength of my tame mind, clearing held against indians, health that prepared to meet death, the stubborn hymns going up into the ramifications of the hostile air that, decaptive, gives way. Who is there?   O, light the light! The Indians give way, the clearing falls. Great Death gives way   and unprepares us. Lust gives way.    The Moon gives way. Night gives way.   Minutely,   the Day gains. She saw the body of her beloved dismemberd in waking . . . or was it in sight?Finders Keepers we sang when we were children      or were taught to sing before our histories began      and we began who were beloved      our animal life toward the Beloved,      sworn to be Keepers. On the hill before the wind came the grass moved toward the one sea, blade after blade dancing in waves. There the children turn the ring to the left. There the children turn the ring to the right. Dancing . . . Dancing . . . And the lonely psyche goes up thru the boy to the king that in the caves of history dreams. Round and round the children turn. London Bridge that is a kingdom falls. We have come so far that all the old stories whisper once more. Mount Segur, Mount Victoire, Mount Tamalpais . . . rise to adore the mystery of Love! (An ode? Pindar’s art, the editors tell us, was not a statue but a mosaic, an accumulation of metaphor. But if he was archaic, not classic, a survival of obsolete mode, there may have been old voices in the survival that directed the heart. So, a line from a hymn came in a novel I was reading to help me. Psyche, poised to leap—and Pindar too, the editors write, goes too far, topples over—listend to a tower that said,Listen to Me! The oracle had said,Despair! The Gods themselves abhor his power. And then the virgin flower of the dark falls back flesh of our flesh from which everywhere . . . the information flows that is yearning. A line of Pindar moves from the area of my lamp toward morning. In the dawn that is nowhere I have seen the willful children clockwise and counter-clockwise turning.

Ventura because she was hungry and because She was curious—but more because she was curious— Took the dare, a kiss for a pomegranate. Everyone gathered, her friends and his. Everyone Watched: the boys, the girls, the pigs and the chickens, And more. Moving to the front were the children She and Clemente would one day have, And the children of those children, too, Gathered and loud with everyone and everything else, Loud as the pigs and fast as the chickens Though she could not see them. Still, they crowded her, and she could feel Their anxious breathing. This boy Clemente whom she would kiss She would have kissed even without the pomegranate, Though she could not say it And was glad of this game. He suited her, She thought. He had a strong face. He felt what she felt. She could see him look around But not at their friends. She could see him Feel the shiver of the children they would have: Their son Margarito, his two sisters Both of whom would become nuns If just to pray enough to take care of him, This boy so serious he would seem like a stranger In their arms, serious enough by himself To make up for Clemente and Ventura And for all the laughter They themselves would feel, This curious child who, as an old man Would never trust a doctor for anything. And his serious wife to come, Refugio, And her sisters, Matilde and Consuelo as well, All the people who would follow this kiss, So many of them, and their children, too, Everyone stood there, arms up, everyone watching, So much noise in this moment, This quick lending of herself To his cheek, the way Ventura would later kiss All these impatient children of theirs. The kiss Seemed so small, but was filled with itself. This small moment of affection she gave this boy The quarter-second that it took: There they all stood, waiting with the crowd Egging them on, hefting the pomegranate And pushing them toward each other. Clemente and Ventura in that quarter-second lived Their lives, a quarter-second not finished yet.

Prais’d be Diana’s fair and harmless light; Prais’d be the dews wherewith she moists the ground; Prais’d be her beams, the glory of the night; Prais’d be her power by which all powers abound. Prais’d be her nymphs with whom she decks the woods, Prais’d be her knights in whom true honour lives; Prais’d be that force by which she moves the floods; Let that Diana shine which all these gives. In heaven queen she is among the spheres; In aye she mistress-like makes all things pure; Eternity in her oft change she bears; She beauty is; by her the fair endure. Time wears her not: she doth his chariot guide; Mortality below her orb is plac’d; By her the virtue of the stars down slide; In her is virtue’s perfect image cast. A knowledge pure it is her worth to know: With Circes let them dwell that think not so.

Titan! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice is echoless. Titan! to thee the strife was given Between the suffering and the will, Which torture where they cannot kill; And the inexorable Heaven, And the deaf tyranny of Fate, The ruling principle of Hate, Which for its pleasure doth create The things it may annihilate, Refus'd thee even the boon to die: The wretched gift Eternity Was thine—and thou hast borne it well. All that the Thunderer wrung from thee Was but the menace which flung back On him the torments of thy rack; The fate thou didst so well foresee, But would not to appease him tell; And in thy Silence was his Sentence, And in his Soul a vain repentance, And evil dread so ill dissembled, That in his hand the lightnings trembled. Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness, And strengthen Man with his own mind; But baffled as thou wert from high, Still in thy patient energy, In the endurance, and repulse Of thine impenetrable Spirit, Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse, A mighty lesson we inherit: Thou art a symbol and a sign To Mortals of their fate and force; Like thee, Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source; And Man in portions can foresee His own funereal destiny; His wretchedness, and his resistance, And his sad unallied existence: To which his Spirit may oppose Itself—and equal to all woes, And a firm will, and a deep sense, Which even in torture can descry Its own concenter'd recompense, Triumphant where it dares defy, And making Death a Victory.

At supper time an ondine’s narrow feet made dark tracks on the hearth. Like the heart of a yellow fruit was the fire’s heat, but they rubbed together quite blue with the cold. The sandy hem of her skirt dripped on the floor. She sat there with a silvered cedar knot for a low stool; and I sat opposite, my lips and eyelids hot in the heat of the fire. Piling on dry bark, seeing that no steam went up from her dark dress, I felt uneasiness as though firm sand had shifted under my feet in the wash of a wave. I brought her soup from the stove and she would not eat, but sat there crying her cold tears, her blue lips quivering with cold and grief. She blamed me for a thief, saying that I had burned a piece of wood the tide washed up. And I said, No, the tide had washed it out again; and even so, a piece of sodden wood was not so rare as polished agate stones or ambergris. She stood and wrung her hair so that the water made a sudden splash on the round rug by the door. I saw her go across the little footbridge to the beach. After, I threw the knot on the hot coals. It fell apart and burned with a white flash, a crackling roar in the chimney and dark smoke. I beat it out with a poker in the soft ash. Now I am frightened on the shore at night, and all the phosphorescent swells that rise come towards me with the threat of her dark eyes with a cold firelight in them; and crooked driftwood writhes in dry sand when I pass. Should she return and bring her sisters with her, the withdrawing tide would leave a long pool in my bed. There would be nothing more of me this side the melting foamline of the latest wave.