246 Mythology poems

The air tonight is thick as curry; like every night this summer I could cut it with my wine glass, spray it with mace. Over and over it would heal together like a wound, follow my click and pace of heels down Conti Street, St. Ann, Bourbon. Oh Hamlet, if you could see me now as I pump and swagger across that stage, cape dripping to the floor, me in three-inch heels and a technicolor G-string— you would not wish me in a convent. They’ve made me a queen here, married me off to a quarter bag and a pint of gin. The old men tend bark and splatter, rabid at each table. I think they stay up all night just to spite the moon. They bring their diseased mouths to the French Market in the morning, sell Creole tomatoes to tourists who don’t know what they are. Each bald head shines plump and red. It seems like so long ago that I modeled for those legs outside of Big Daddy’s— the ones over the door that swing in, out, in, out— the sculptor made me painted as Mardi Gras. I thought you might recognize them if you ever passed with the boys, parading from Abbey to Tavern, or think them royal feet in need of slippers. Someday I expect to find you here, sitting at the table between the first and second rows, fingering bones or something worse. And in the end you will throw me a columbine, light me a Marlboro and take me to a 24-7 where jukebox light quivers, makes us as thin as ghosts. But for now, I will dance for the fat man who sits in your place and sweats his love for me at 3 a.m., because only he knows I am Horatio in drag.

In one version you must convince every living thing one by one to weep until he climbs back into the marriage-house, that earth about which it is said that bread is the glue of the earth. Certainly glue is money, the phrase “the tears of things” is money, the revelation of the Woman Clothed in the Sun is money. The lake is a disc of bright money buying a few plain birds down, they climb back nervously as you hurry through, plain birds like a plain song, that moment when four or five are around your knees like Zeno’s arrow, rising by halves, like Eurydice’s bread, & still the possibility they might intersect, you would be the one who was struck by a flying bird, somewhere between a blesséd fool & village idiot, the only one to persist outside the local economy, drooling at travelers, holding yourself, slinging incomprehensible advice, you would learn the trick with museum wire where you snap the heads off quiet animals in front of the store, tempted equally by science & dirty work. . . . I am trying to invent a way for you to buy me back—

He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song and there she was, Eurydice restored, perfectly naked and fleshed in her rhyming body again, the upper and lower smiles and eyes, the line of mouth-sternum-navel-cleft, the chime of breasts and hips and of the two knees, the feet, the toes, and that expression of an unimaginable intelligence that yoked all these with a skill she herself had forgotten the learning of: there she was, with him once more just for an instant as she vanished. And then he heard her from behind the invisible veil, absence: a shrill and batlike but lexical indictment. Why had he violated the divine command, why, when he had seized all song to himself and robbed her of power to open her own oblivion? It grew in volume and now seemed to spew from an insane old mother with one breast hanging like a huge withered testicle from a rent in her weathered gown, who was being watched by a tall woman, copper-helmet-coiffed, richly suited in salmon colour, a mythical allusion, since salmon were long extinct in the bays and rivers here: songs never brought them anymore. The young restrained breasts and the old free one oppressed him equally and he went to live among men, waiting for the crazy and the competent to join forces and come for him with their scissors. Orpheus listened patiently to my poem and when it quieted he said to me: That wasn't it at all. I sang outward from my face to blue spaces between clouds, to fern fronds, and men and women sipped my song as you drink from a stream going by. What I sang is lost in time, you don't kmow what it was, all you have is your own old stories about me. And if women tore me into pieces, maybe that only signifies each one keeps part of my body, which is melody among visible things.

It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk On the shores of the darkest known river, Among the hooded, shoving crowds, by steaming rocks And rows of ruined huts half buried in the muck; Then to the great court with its marble yard Whose emptiness gave him the creeps, and to sit there In the sunken silence of the place and speak Of what he had lost, what he still possessed of his loss, And, then, pulling out all the stops, describing her eyes, Her forehead where the golden light of evening spread, The curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulders, everything Down to her thighs and calves, letting the words come, As if lifted from sleep, to drift upstream, Against the water's will, where all the condemned And pointless labor, stunned by his voice's cadence, Would come to a halt, and even the crazed, disheveled Furies, for the first time, would weep, and the soot-filled Air would clear just enough for her, the lost bride, To step through the image of herself and be seen in the light. As everyone knows, this was the first great poem, Which was followed by days of sitting around In the houses of friends, with his head back, his eyes Closed, trying to will her return, but finding Only himself, again and again, trapped In the chill of his loss, and, finally, Without a word, taking off to wander the hills Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken The image of love and put in its place the world As he wished it would be, urging its shape and measure Into speech of such newness that the world was swayed, And trees suddenly appeared in the bare place Where he spoke and lifted their limbs and swept The tender grass with the gowns of their shade, And stones, weightless for once, came and set themselves there, And small animals lay in the miraculous fields of grain And aisles of corn, and slept. The voice of light Had come forth from the body of fire, and each thing Rose from its depths and shone as it never had. And that was the second great poem, Which no one recalls anymore. The third and greatest Came into the world as the world, out of the unsayable, Invisible source of all longing to be; it came As things come that will perish, to be seen or heard Awhile, like the coating of frost or the movement Of wind, and then no more; it came in the middle of sleep Like a door to the infinite, and, circled by flame, Came again at the moment of waking, and, sometimes, Remote and small, it came as a vision with trees By a weaving stream, brushing the bank With their violet shade, with somebody’s limbs Scattered among the matted, mildewed leaves nearby, With his severed head rolling under the waves, Breaking the shifting columns of light into a swirl Of slivers and flecks; it came in a language Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and dark, Where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift, So the future, with no voice of its own, nor hope Of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn.

Set where the upper streams of Simois flow Was the Palladium, high 'mid rock and wood; And Hector was in Ilium, far below, And fought, and saw it not—but there it stood! It stood, and sun and moonshine rain'd their light On the pure columns of its glen-built hall. Backward and forward roll'd the waves of fight Round Troy—but while this stood, Troy could not fall. So, in its lovely moonlight, lives the soul. Mountains surround it, and sweet virgin air; Cold plashing, past it, crystal waters roll; We visit it by moments, ah, too rare! We shall renew the battle in the plain To-morrow;—red with blood will Xanthus be; Hector and Ajax will be there again, Helen will come upon the wall to see. Then we shall rust in shade, or shine in strife, And fluctuate 'twixt blind hopes and blind despairs, And fancy that we put forth all our life, And never know how with the soul it fares. Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high, Upon our life a ruling effluence send. And when it fails, fight as we will, we die; And while it lasts, we cannot wholly end.

Helen achieves the difficult task of translating a symbol in time, into timeless-time or hieroglyph or ancient Egyptian time. She knows the script, she says, but we judge that this is intuitive or emotional knowledge, rather than intellectual. In any case, a night-bird swooped toward them, in their first encounter on the beach. To Achilles, lately arrived from Troy and the carnage of battle, this is a "carrion creature," but Helen would banish these memories. She says she is "instructed," she is enchanted, rather. For from the depth of her racial inheritance, she invokes (as the perceptive visitor to Egypt must always do) the symbol or the "letter" that represents or recalls the protective mother-goddess. This is no death-symbol but a life-symbol, it is Isis or her Greek counterpart, Thetis, the mother of Achilles. We huddled over the fire, was there ever such a brazier? a night-bird hooted past, he started, "a curious flight, a carrion creature — what—" (dear God, let him forget); I said, "there is mystery in this place, I am instructed, I know the script, the shape of this bird is a letter, they call it the hieroglyph; strive not, it is dedicate to the goddess here, she is Isis"; "Isis," he said, "or Thetis," I said, recalling, remembering, invoking his sea-mother; flame, I prayed,flame forget, forgive and forget the other, let my heart be filled with peace, let me love him,as Thetis,his mother, for I knew him, I saw in his eyes the sea-enchantment, but he knew not yet, Helen of Sparta, knew not Helen of Troy, knew not Helena, hated of Greece.

She is afraid, too. So she needs this protection. She has tried to conceal her identity with mockery, "I am a woman of pleasure." She knows what the Greeks think of her, and here is Greece-incarnate, the hero-god; true, he is shipwrecked; nevertheless, though wounded, he carries with him the threat of autocracy. She has lost caste. He is still Achilles. Or who is she? She says that Helen upon the ramparts was a phantom. Then, what is this Helen? Are they both ghosts? And if she is convinced of this, why does she entreat the flame that Achilles kindled, "let me love him, as Thetis, his mother"? Is she afraid of losing even her phantom integrity? And what of it? Thetis — Isis — Aphrodite — it was not her fault. O—no—but through eternity, she will be blamed for this and she feels it coming. She will blacken her face like the prophetic femme noire of antiquity. But it does not work. Achilles is here to impeach her. Why? We must blame someone. Hecate—a witch —a vulture, and finally, as if he had run out of common invective, he taunts her — a hieroglyph . This is almost funny, she must stop him, he is after all, the son of the sea-goddess. She has named Isis, the Egyptian Aphrodite, the primal cause of all the madness. But another, born-of-the-sea, is nearer, his own mother. Again, she thinks of her and reminds Achilles of his divine origin, "O child of Thetis." This is quite enough. Can you throttle a phantom? He tries. The end is inevitable. How could I hide my eyes? how could I veil my face? with ash or charcoal from the embers? I drew out a blackened stick, but he snatched it, he flung it back, "what sort of enchantment is this? what art will you wield with a fagot? are you Hecate? are you a witch? a vulture, a hieroglyph, the sign or the name of a goddess? what sort of goddess is this? where are we? who are you? where is this desolate coast? who am I?    am I a ghost?" "you are living, O child of Thetis, as you never lived before," then he caught at my wrist, "Helena, cursed of Greece, I have seen you upon the ramparts, no art is beneath your power, you stole the chosen, the flower of all-time, of all-history, my children, my legions; for you were the ships burnt, O cursèd, O envious Isis, you — you — a vulture, a hieroglyph"; "Zeus be my witness," I said, "it was he, Amen dreamed of all this phantasmagoria of Troy, it was dream and a phantasy"; O Thetis,O sea-mother, I prayed, as he clutched my throat with his fingers' remorseless steel, let me go out,let me forget, let me be lost. . . . . . . O Thetis,O sea-mother, I prayed under his cloak, let me remember,let me remember, forever,this Star in the night.

The Greeks are sitting on the beach wondering what to do when the war ends. No one wants to go home, back to that bony island; everyone wants a little more of what there is in Troy, more life on the edge, that sense of every day as being packed with surprises. But how to explain this to the ones at home to whom fighting a war is a plausible excuse for absence, whereas exploring one’s capacity for diversion is not. Well, this can be faced later; these are men of action, ready to leave insight to the women and children. Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased by a new strength in their forearms, which seem more golden than they did at home, some begin to miss their families a little, to miss their wives, to want to see if the war has aged them. And a few grow slightly uneasy: what if war is just a male version of dressing up, a game devised to avoid profound spiritual questions? Ah, but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens. There on the beach, discussing the various timetables for getting home, no one believed it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca; no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable affliction of the human heart: how to divide the world’s beauty into acceptable and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy, how could the Greeks know they were hostages already: who once delays the journey is already enthralled; how could they know that of their small number some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure, some by sleep, some by music?

How do we know Eve and Adam were happy, deprived, as they were, of a childhood? Eve never knew, unlike Adam, a world that was free of the chatter of others.’ How did she cope? And how could she choose, if she’d wanted, to live by herself? What did the man eat that made him hear voices, while Eve was inventing frustration? Where could she go for a break from the sound of Himself, in his skin suit, like Tarzan, assuring the bush that he’d just given birth to a woman? Did she smile at the fool, or remind him that he was asleep when she turned up and found him? Where could she go to be shot of his need for a mother? (A pity she woke him.) Life for them both was a training film shown in real time, on the zen of zoo-keeping. When the encyclopedia seller arrived, who could blame her for buying? No exit pollster asked how she felt when she left at the end of the movie.

He called her:  golden dawn She called him:  the wind whistles He called her:  heart of the sky She called him:  message bringer He called her:  mother of pearl barley woman, rice provider, millet basket, corn maid, flax princess, all-maker, weef She called him:  fawn, roebuck, stag, courage, thunderman, all-in-green, mountain strider keeper of forests, my-love-rides He called her:  the tree is She called him:  bird dancing He called her:  who stands, has stood, will always stand She called him:  arriver He called her:  the heart and the womb are similar She called him:  arrow in my heart.