along the fountains gouged by the river god
and heard the torch-lit spume
laud every note, laminar streams,
each night before he climbed the stair that zilled
up to the chamber no slave had aired,
no wife had warmed, no priest had censed, where
Death, his lively captive, all night
rattling the chains around him, prayed
his noise would nudge an earache to liberty.
The king’s torch lifted
loaves of jagged shadows.
He knew Death’s half-baked parabases
would hurt a world where nothing can live without
his leavening, but giving up
such a rare toy was unthinkable
he thought. A chained parade,
Death rattled funky defunct bodies—
jumbled heads and joints and haunches
chopped by a whimsical, wasteful butcher.
Yet Death was young. Pink Ganymede, baby fat
or no, was Death’s elder. Conceived in Night
by Darkness (though unborn for ages,
letting the living end life freely
till Darkness ordered, Open your opening), Death
stank like an explanation. Yet catching him
unwound the hitherto unhappy king.
Our deasil pain is divine amusement.
The late birth stunted Death, leaving him
gullible as a child and forgetful as
his mother. And he thrived:
somehow he made himself mandatory.
Two horns doubling as forcipules
beetled from rusty cuffs
and crowned the first of fifteen wedges
lashing the links with their legs and weaving
two pair of wings whose openwork dredged the flare
till the horns combined and echoed his abdomen.
No cross-breed ever tore the chains. Death
couldn’t think small. He told his captor:
“Choked, poked, wrenched, wrung, bleared, bruised, and humiliated
by a skulking crown afraid to sleep
(although delaying nightmares makes them
meaner), I’ll get out, I’ll grab you,
I’ll drag you down, and nothing will taste so good
to corpse umbrellas whisking the windless air
on wings worn tight by thirst and boredom,
flapping for Zeus, as your yellow liver!”
Sisyphus proved that his mouth was hollow. Death
had made the same threat nightly with rare revisions:
his “yoked” gave way to “poked”—less bestial,
no more divine. He told his captive,
“Again, I’m not the wrapper of buffalo bones
who taught us how to mimic the lightning. Death,
you see the future, but it’s mangled,
much like your jumbles of defunct bodies.
Force-fed on extinction, forbidden smoke,
you cannot think ahead and can barely think
behind. Poor god, try painting wind:
that’s easier than predicting my downfall.”
Death’s horn dehisced and flowered tines
on scaly temples, crinkling flames of bone
each a man’s height high. His torso
reared like a de-winged dragon’s, dangling
forearms of narrow dough. But the new fangs failed
to tear the chains. He grumbled, “You never gave
punctual smoke and never learned why
keeping your tongue warm and dark is wisdom.”
Death kept his own voice down, since he didn’t want
mortals outside to hear that a mortal caught him.
“When Asopus demanded, ‘Where’s my
daughter?’ it would’ve been wise
to pity the dumb pebbles. You mouth, fool, tattler,
traitor, godless pervert! The mere words
rape
and
Zeus still tickle you. My bargain
torments are hoarding your immortal torture.”
“Let me explain, again. I was playing chess
near Sicyon with Lyre the Tortoise—don’t
remember? If I won, he’d tell me
what’s within Ino’s ambrosial innards,
but if
he won, I’d give him my horse-mad son.
Just as I pinched my tower to mate him,
an ozone williwaw disturbed me:
Zeus, having netted a girl in his whiskers,
itching for shade, ran up, and our chessboard stubbed
his path. All thirty-two pieces squared the air—
a lone pawn plugged between Aegina’s
toes, though her upended legs kept kicking.”
“How,” Death demanded, “how did you know her name?
I don’t believe you!” “Geezers interrupt
and children interrupt and beggars
interrupt. Where’s your divinity?
Oh, you don’t remember? Then let’s go on:
rising, I saw the Olympian rear, Aegina’s
flapping soles, and their alpha scars.
Asopus fathered so many girls
their names outdid his memory. He gave his friend
Hermes the youngest daughter, and in return
Hermes caught the rest and chiseled
each pale sole with pink initials.
The river reads their names when they walk across.”
“Ah, clever work! Remind me what happened next!”
Sisyphus claimed, “Divine rape’s eddies
dazzled me. Lyre, too slow to run off,
hid himself quick. He knew I’d won. I tried
to burn that meadow down to the final blade—
so much grass to hide one green shell.
Lyre seemed nowhere to see or be seen.
My fire gobbled westward until the river’s
flank said fizzle. ‘Why have you journeyed here,’
Asopus asked me, ‘far from arid
Ephyra? Just for the joys of arson?
The smack of ash will tarry for months, young man.’
‘I’m looking for a tortoise and think he might’ve
dipped inside you. Sift your current!
Dredge the cheater! I’ve got a secret
you’d burn to learn.’ ‘A secret!’ His algae coiled
a redder shade of green. ‘You will tell me
first,
and if I think your secret’s good, I’ll
braid myself brown till I dredge your tortoise.’
I asked him, ‘Where’s Aegina . . . ? Look over there, that lap
of unsinged fern. You’ll find her beneath the greased
hinges of Zeus.’ The river’s million
tongues wagged across the meadow’s embers,
squirting the ears of Zeus, who unsheathed himself,
plucked a thunderbolt from his thigh hair, threw
it at the furious father, boiled off
half of his fluid in huffy vapor
that girdled Zeus, who re-sheathed himself
inside Aegina. Their fun kept up till noon,
long after all the vapor vanished.
Drained to a comatose culvert, Asopus,
nursed by his virgin daughters, was strong enough
in a week to pay me. By then, of course,
Lyre had left for good. The river
roiled up no shell, so we knew the lightning
hadn’t boiled him. Asopus, capable
of shame—unlike the Olympians—vowed to flow
beneath this city, trickle upward,
pricking our courtyards with creamy fountains,
making amends. Again, it was neither—one,
a lust for irrigation, nor two, my rumored
hatred of Zeus, nor three, my rumored
logorrhea that leaked the secret:
since Lyre cheated me, I’d do anything
to make him keep his word, and I won’t pretend
that I repent, that I’d do different—
Lyre betrayed me, and I’m not happy.
But Zeus, whose tantrums cobweb the night, is wise:
preventing anger is just as easy
as muting the ocean, and he knows it.
Anger will pardon its host—he knows it.
Me? Godless? Impossible! Betray Zeus?
You’ll sooner catch me stealing fire
with teeth. Remember, Death (or try), and tell him.
Knowing my motive, he’ll show mercy.”
“Mercy from the lightning? So I should go up
and plead that anger snaffled, ensnared, sniped, snuffed
your piety? If you’re so pious,
why don’t I smell any offerings, liar?”
He told him, “Silly Death, do you think that Zeus
would change his mind for a little smoke? His brow
wears bands far tighter than your fetters.
He feels the squeeze, he knows I’m honest.
He’ll know. And if I wanted to sacrifice,
I couldn’t do it now: your captivity—
think who you are!—has kept our altars
dry, though I never intended making
priests even idler, corking hieratic smoke,
or cleaning up the sky, when I captured you.
Don’t blame me too much, Death. I never
wanted to capture you—just more life.”
“Never wanted, never intended—keep
saying these stupid things, but it’s what you do,
not why—who cares!—it’s what that matters.
Soon as I get out, what gets even.”
It’s what Death couldn’t do that deformed the world:
the sun and moon remembered their scheduled paths,
but two of life’s primeval habits,
killing and dying, forgot to function.
A whiff of war will always allure its god,
whose anvil brow rolled eyes for casters,
twins who cowered close together,
bulging to take in the latest battle,
and were not pleased. Malingering Death allowed
uninterrupted pain to supplant glory.
The spearhead stuck inside a stomach
couldn’t evict the adjacent ghost;
arms and legs and entrails that hung
by lyre strings of gristle forgot their right
to rot away in Earth’s amnesia;
fire turned flesh into sentient cinders,
and pain became as innocuous
as breathing, even for lips unmoored
from native lungs and left to shiver
wordless and blue on a rolling brain-raft.
And blood stayed blue when it bolted veins
revised by bronze and learned that its bygone paths
were too rigid.
Like a young bard discovering chords, who
till then had plucked notes cleanly partitioned, blood
discovered it could vary its volume, smear
or bubble, drip or cascade, or loom as
wafting miasma between the wounded.
And when it rained, fingers, forgetting palms,
hailed the worms, their neighbors in mud, and knew
the joy of kindred spirits while their
nails arced ahead and sliced the boneless
neighbors, quick to regenerate
their severed segments, wagging beneath the turf
of green-eyed flies that grew unmown by
Death, till they rivaled the rain in loudness,
veiling the maimed and hazing the battle lines
in Ares’ eyesight, lines that had anyway
long since renounced their rectitude in combat,
forfeiting form as a mincing courage
pillaged men whom Death had neglected, fear
had fled, and pain kept squirming—a sport deprived
of shame for losers, fame for winners,
a sport as dull as a race of dewdrops—
at least to Ares. Hopping from citadel
to citadel, the god, whose gratuitous
gold avalanche of armor always
buried the ears of the local people,
became inane, not awesome. A fighting man
could lose his crested head to a blade gone blank
in Eos, wobble home, cram down his
breakfast, return to the battlefield,
retrieve his head (or one that felt similar),
and sew it to his neck while his peons rushed
to warm his bath and fill his wine-bowl.
Ares would rather go to Hades
than watch this game play out. But before he grabbed
a shovel, greasy fingers impeded him.
Fraternal gimp had filled the window
watching the game of lies and fetters,
played by a king who looked unafraid of Death,
though captivated by his technology.
Fingering links, he asked the bailiff,
“How do you work them, dexterous Death?”
An eager demonstration ensued from Death,
who twisted his own fetters around himself,
while Sisyphus deployed a knot
that, trapping the god in the royal bedroom,
coughed up unheard giggles. (Because Death
is more immortal than the Olympians,
whose lungs wheeze black with sacrifice’s
toxic homage, he has no incentive
to store up wisdom. He stays a fool.
Perhaps if in his name we begin to sear
our extra cattle, one day Death will
also decay, but by then we must be
already dead. We’ll never quite hush the gods:
when Earth and Sky and gullible Death recede,
and our beliefs are windy slough,
their names will be hissing upon the bookshelves,
like snow between your sole and the stone beneath,
and in that hiss the latest immortals, peeved
by lines, will stomp the frigid velum,
creasing our faith in the thaw of reason.)
The white-striped pony’s overbite only buffed
the chains. They would not break. The lame god laughed.
He thought of Ares in the double
mesh of the bed-trick and Aphrodite’s
embrace. The ridicule that his rigging bred
was worse than any scandal Harmonia,
the lovely bastard, brought Hephaistos:
no one believed that the greasy limper
could keep his Lemnian tongs on the ring of Love,
but no one guessed that War would become his bound
captive, squirming
under a network of prickly diamonds
that sparkled with the ichor the couple oozed
grinding their wounds to wriggle away; those limbs,
already brightened by their love sweat,
rallied the light on the laughers’ teeth.
Lathered in ash-mascara, Hephaistos wept.
A mortal man betrayed by his wife and brother
can give up his resentment only
cooped in the cool of his urn or pried off
memory by dementia. But gods live long—
so long their grudges are bound to cloy:
born to be bored, they doubt their feelings
and ape the guilt they gave to mortals
or swap love for loathing, disgust for lust.
The limper laughed and the limper wept,
flipping through past humiliations
(gods are each other’s untiring readers—
good readers, finding bridges to the most
repellent of their kin), he recalled the bronze
jar, Ares’ airless home for thirteen
months when the beautiful brothers, Otus
and Nightmare, kept him captive. His panoply—
a thousand scabbards bristling peacock quills—
did not intimidate the giants,
ready to pile their own mountains higher
than Zeus’s mound and rollick his virgin daughters—
a threat that didn’t disgruntle Zeus
as badly as the brothers’ giant
beauty. “Hephaistos, intemperate tallness,
like any kind of surfeit, is incompatible
with goodness. How, Hephaistos, can monsters make
me look so plain? Proportion mustn’t
quicken the faces of hypertrophic
usurpers; no, those barges of perfect skin
will not float long on their purple seas!”
(At the base of deep Olympus,
Ganymede fondled his fulgent beard’s tip.)
Zeus gruntled, “Gimpy, look how they confiscate
proportion, balance, harmony—all the fruits
of my accession. Guess my father,
crooked as ever, still rules the dasmos;
old cutgut dandles the helm’s cocked spokes
and guides us through the fog of our Mother Yawn,
and all my windrowed yawps won’t stop her
endlessly nagging me, ‘Can’t you drown yet?’”
Ganymede almost drowned in the master’s beard
before his rape had ripened, a lasting love.
He rose, a buoy. Zeus continued,
“Loving my thunder, I cleared the dasmos;
I cut it into Heavens and Earth and Dis,
but my division can’t prevail, it seems:
now Earth banks above Heavens,
freaks who belong in Dis climb up
to tear our clouds, and we—and I—
can’t help ourselves from seeking Earth to feel
its young, who flee so brief.
Now nothing keeps its appointed place:
the clouds, the sands, the rivers, the clods, the seas,
the birds, the fish, the serpents, the flies, the trees,
the nymphs, the boys, the girls, the satyrs
go their own way like anarchic whiskers.”
Falling had taught Hephaistos to let him have
his way with words or women. He kept his tongue
dark and warm, aware that father
liked to trick his womb-born offspring
with fake stupidity and provoke bad words
that gave him an excuse to do bad things.
Crowning the clouds’ tain, Otus gently
held the war-god’s hectic ankles
while Nightmare pushed him headfirst down the jar,
lopping the breastplate’s decorative knops and barbs.
Hephaistos knew bad juices must’ve
pooled in the bottom for thirteen months
and steeped his brother’s eyes, which had lost their chance
to watch immortal warfare. Twenty-eight nights
he lingered in the royal bedroom,
and neither captive nor captor heard
the giggles and the sobs of the god who loved
to watch Death’s alterations. At last, magnetic
lips cresting the bedroom window,
pouting as long as a panpipe, whistled:
three copper rings rolled up and snapped around
the god, a gimbal. He perched inside
on a beam of
air as it rolled down the walls and over
the locked and lettered gateways of Ephyra,
whose last tyrant’s wagon had barely made
such awful noise and hadn’t littered
millions of inky screws, which worried
the city’s idle young and neglected old
for years, although the children conceived that “Night
of Grinding” didn’t mull its threaded
riddles with pleasure—the girls born earless,
the boys compelled to carry a pipe to piss through.
Hephaistos left the Peloponnese and rolled
until he spotted the quintuple
crest of his visored brother, ready
to claw his way to Tartarus. “Brother barl-brain,
simmer, and pay attent: I saw Ephyr’s king
capture your Croak, and that’s why kill has
forfeited flave. If you want your menace
authen again, stop fussing, just foot it there
and pop him. Fussing will noon the night
leaving you hot and both. Just foot it—
cities can’t coward away from quick gods.
Once you pop him, Croak’ll put back the fun
in eyeing wounded warriors.” The inky wheels
impaired his armor’s polish,
purled his narrow gaze. He answered:
“I’ll break, I’ll burn, I’ll ruin, I’ll rape, I’ll—wait,
I don’t trust you, botch. Did Alétheia
wiggle past your windpipe’s winches?
Better hope so, bungle.” Ares
attempted leaping over the gulf: he screamed
to invocate momentum, but radial
scabbards and gold plate armor brought him
under the pinkening whitecaps’ blackness.
Arthritically fleeing her conjugal bed once more,
Eos trickled on the megaron,
the cue for Sisyphus to leave
the tower. He summoned his best-fed slave,
“Today will be a happy day. Call the queen.
Today we’ll share our greens in the garden.” Sleep
brimmed the king, who poured his forehead
over a four-handed Gordian table,
on which no meat had fallen for many days.
Since Death quit killing, people weren’t slow to learn
immortal meat annoys the stomach:
who wants to feel the morsels fidget?
Merope flared him awake. She held her head
sideways from all directions. The king addressed
one eye, a cheek immune to shadow,
elbows of lip: “Our fun is over.
Now’s the time to ask you, but first, the wine!
Your daddy’ll run to Delphi the day I speak
such dirty words with a clean mouth.”
The unbearded slave was working the goatskin.
“Just as the moon can’t keep fat, Merope,
my reign can’t last much longer, so prime our Glaucus,
horse-mad Glaucus, to replace me.
Think of him as a potential madman
till you see gray in his beard. When a boy becomes
a king, you can’t imagine—although you spent
a year or more beside his cradle—
how he’ll react to his newfound power.”
“Not again! Although I agreed to marry
you, I’m not so stupid. You hope I’ll moan, ‘No!
No! You won’t go so young—can’t go!’? If pity’s
what you’re still after,
we’ve got slaves, so practice on
them. I won’t list
all the ways they’ll pity you, weeping, praying,
gnashing their teeth, and mashing their tits. A dry run:
master’s departure.”
The slave, whose belly echoed the globe of wine
that rested on his head with no threat of falling,
looked better nourished than his owners
bickering beside him. The king continued:
“Merope, I’ll speak all barbarian tongues
before I learn what you really think.
Maybe it makes no difference. I will
die soon, despite Death’s recent
absence—in fact, because of it. Merope,
when my ghost unwinds, you’ll protect me, right?
Here’s how: first, don’t burn my body,
don’t bury it, or let priests come blessing;
second, pile this body—which gently paled
your own, once—in the marketplace; third, protect
it from the pious, but do not shoo
the dogs and the crows who will beak and chew me.”
Merope’s teal Taurean pallor twinkled.
“Who will shoo, do, chew—guess your words won’t spew till
all my one-time love for you cuts their mangy
bellies with bone chips.
I won’t mention how your perversion bobs
higher as my radiance droops. A new trick?
Every month we talk it’s the same old new trick.
Nothing can burn out
shame. Won’t mention your secret fun: shame—
that’s your only whore! You’re so boring. What
a shame I still can’t burn you! My sisters, waiting—
thank what you thank you’ve
got none.
You’re the reason they hate me.
If they learned, however, I left my husband
in the marketplace, in the mouths of stray dogs,
I’d eat their vengeance!”
“Vengeance? Stellar virgins don’t worry me . . .
Maybe not today, but it must be soon.
Death stretches near. Forget your sisters:
they’ll burn forever;
I’ll rot to nothing.”
“Liar! ‘Death stretches near’—when he’s here already!
First I thought your bedroom was packed with flute-girls,
but my pigeons cooed me the truth. I don’t know
why you would waste time
hiding him. This isn’t Knossos. You thought I’d
never find you’d hidden an extra god here?
Has your infamous cunning made you stupid?
Oracles never
give a girl good lessons. My shame, your fun, will
keep your corpse away from the mouths of stray dogs—
think of Glaucus watching his maggot-yellow
father rot
and hearing you commanded the desecration!
I won’t say how badly your bad fun hurts me.
King, my love for Glaucus will guarantee you
room on a pyre.”
King Sisyphus kept digging his eyes for sand
that wasn’t there. “I’m not what I used to be—
the lunatic who first embraced you.
where did I rustle the nerve to stop you
from burning through me, adding redundant ash
to Night? I’ll get no answer before I drain
the lymph that keeps your daddy standing.
Queen, we’re not what we used to be.
Enough with us. But Glaucus, remember: first,
it’s wise to let the kiln of his manhood cool
before you start to fill it with your
love.
Salmoneus was meeker than a whip
of grass—as long as our father lived.
He always wept to see the yearlings
pouring their lives out of neck-slits.
He’d weep for hours and roll in the dust, then—scared
his tears would peeve the gods, whom he loved—he’d weep
in even greater desperation:
guilt was the pride of his boyhood virtue.
I rank that fleeting innocence far above
your deathless beauty, Merope.” Zeus detached
his concave eye, which balanced iris-
down in his palm, while his cup-boy filled it
white. Zeus drank it blue again and dropped
his forehead on a footstool—the cup-boy’s chance
to beat away white eyebrows always
poking the thunderer’s charcoal sockets.
The gimbal whisked the mountain and woke up Zeus,
who watched his ugliest child disaggregate
the rings with one long whistle, sowing
cumulous cobbles with screws and washers.
His waist-long beard, unwhitened by sovereignty,
looked like his father’s first, but ear-wide nostrils
and a crown of mirroring skin
ruined resemblance and made both think
of parricide. When Zeus heard him pour
his digits on the murmuring tablet, words—
transcription fathering dictation—
poured from his own lips: “Why back so quick?
Looking at you, gimpy, is close enough
to death—my youth as a deformed effigy;
oh, may the dragon never witness
how his descendants devolve into crows!”
Hephaistos piped up: “Lord, you’re correct as always!
Please never let me Leth my congenital
deforms. I’ve just returned from Ephyr:
Croak can’t escape from big-mouth’s tower.”
Zeus: “One thunderbolt would spring Death;
one crippled oak would crackle that tower down.
The presence of his wife restrains me;
I feel too old to defend this mountain.
When I was your age, how I could loaf! Could sleep
away an afternoon till some cowherd’s girl
happened to walk by. Grassy slumber,
dreamless ravines, unsuspecting virgins!
But now the world is itchy with mortal eyes
more vigilant than Argus.” Hephaistos creaked,
“So awf to hear your enjoy ebbs, but
Mnemosyn, lord, and you’ll feel much better.”
Zeus: “Can it be? Do you care? Give it up!
What’s it to you my pleasures are nagged to shreds . . . ?
Ah,
you’re the one who’ll overthrow me!”
(Ganymede fondled his fulgent beard’s tip.)
“Let Thetis hatch a murder of sons—in vain.
It’s
you. You wield newfangled techniques and win
through meekness and convenience, lancing
all of my ichor without incision.”
Hephaistos: “Hee ha hee, what a witty! No
way a cuck as bungled and botched as I
could do such things. Oh, please keep ranting.
There’s so much fun in choral anger.”
Zeus licked his eye: “I hear little engines buzz
inside you, boy. I’m tempted to cut your head
in half and see if ichor gushes
out of the wound, or only oil—
see the brazen demons who run your show.
Look at me, boy! These eyebrows won’t quit. I know
that you or sovereignty will turn me
into the billy of Amalthea.
Maybe that’s not a bad ending: retire, Zeus,
retire to Ida, nibble the flinty broom.”
Hephaistos didn’t creak; his fingers
kept pouring words on the murmuring tablet.
Merope ladled honey over her greens
but did not eat. “All Ephyra loved the prince.
Me too. But when Aeolus started
coughing, my brother took up his duties
and fattened at the altar. He learned to like
the god game, started playing it everywhere,
as though the city were a temple.
Ephyra cannot survive another
pious king. Watch out for piety.
If you feel the change coming, find
a bricked-in room for horse-mad Glaucus.
Rule in his place. Let the city prosper.
Don’t hurry to restore him until you know
that he takes after me, not his uncle. Second,
keep the boy away from herdsmen—
how many years did I waste in pastures?”
“That’s where you belong. When your feet touch cobbles,
bad things happen. Keep to the grass. Your brother
only damaged Ephyra, not the whole world.
Trapping Death is
worse than all that lunatic’s rapes and killings.
Ephyra deserves a real herdsman,
not a cattle thief turned abacus.
Why did I love you?”
Merope’s tears will evaporate before
they fall. Horseflies paddled the honey blots.
The king’s head rested on the table.
Unweeded tiles webbed his vision:
bee waste dyed the center—the pollen cuff.
Last night, his captive’s wriggling changes mimed
the dream his eyelids’ yawning mirrors
couldn’t reflect: the towing slave boys;
the dehorned ox of pinecones; the key-shaped lips;
the wood’s long womb; the stone so in love with wood
it burned in emulation; the grizzled
mop at the plinth of a pink altar.
The king walked through the gateway and wondered who
had scattered black screws everywhere. First, a nap.
The king continued through the market,
passing the altar before Athena’s
temple, and looked at its northern frieze, where blind
Orion yanked the scorpion. Sisyphus,
not yet a man, would freeze, delighted
each time he faced that immobile battle
fought on a river frozen without the doubt
of ice and always lashing the mud his love
had donned to ditch him. How could chiseled
stone look so fluent in dry noon?
And how could stone evoke for a sober ear
the snores of Darkness, drunk on the riverbank,
unmindful of the Sky’s incision—
flint against loins—while his daughters ogled?
The triptych had long lost its ability
to move him, but he never forgot to read
it when he neared the entrance; nothing
inside had ever moved him at all.
Although mythographers may concoct a link
between the scorpion and Athena’s cult,
Aeolus put it there to please his
favorite boy, whom Orion’s miseries
amused at bedtime. Over the frieze, the blue
marble bulged like an inverted bowl.
No other
temple in Greek or barbarian cities
could imitate the pitch of heaven. Kings
visited Aeolus to find out how
he dominated stone; he drank their
farfetched wines, but withheld his secret.
Daylight engorged the cella; the gold leaf gear
trilled on the idol, rather than nursing dust
in darkness. Torchlight proved redundant.
Sisyphus peered at her ivory neck-slit.
For all its gilt, the temple could only land
one worshipper that morning. The wood’s long womb.
The king knelt, splayed his palms, and mumbled:
“Goddess, I think that prayer’s as helpful
as counting herds for Hypnos. But captive Death
makes sacrifice an insult. I don’t know why,
but you have kneaded me with wisdom,
love of the truth. As you know, your father
stores up tortures for me because I told—
unhushed by his thunder—the truth and caused
a recent rape to run less smoothly.
Will you allow him to punish wisdom?
I will not beg”—a premature sunset filled
the temple’s doorway and craned to hear the king’s
imagined prayers, while unnailed fingers
circled around a truant scabbard.
A bald man squatted on the altar. His eyes
were bluer than the heaven his art ignored.
The big man came down from the doorway.
While his ringlets jeered at the rigid columns,
the bald man jeered at him: “PROSE PROSE Spooked by that idol? / By tinsel hips? If
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE you can’t do it when he’s / distracted and
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE unarmed, you’ll never / do it when he’s
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE ready to fight. You look
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE tougher than you are. He wants to pray
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE things back / the way they used to be. Think,
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE if you can’t kill / your subjects, why rule
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE them? What’s the point? / They’ve no
reason to obey. He’s deposed.”
The blond curls did not dip: “If I had to do
it, now would be the time, but my wavering
is wise. To put up with the tyrant’s
tyranny or kill my father’s brother?
Neither would be brave.” “PROSE PROSE He’ll put Death right back, / unless you
the bald man warned, “PROSE PROSE PROSE stop him. Put the / bite back in his tyranny.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Should you / honor your uncle when his
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE brother balked
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE at even acknowledging you, though the sky
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE / that winter pissed comets on your deserted
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE / birth? He laughed away my auguries, / but
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE he could see the sky with his own eyes.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Stop him! Or—not just you—everyone must
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE die / again. Remember, it’s not killing. Do
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE it. / I’ll chop the body up, jam the chunks /
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE in a jar. It’s easy. You rule. He’s stuffed.”
The big man had the hair of four kings, the heart
of one-fourth. “Right, you’re right, he hates me,
and I will deal with that, but two fears—
scruples, more like it—stick: that Athena
will free him and repeal our rebellion,
that uncle must have powers we do not know—
why else would a goddess bed him?”
The bald man was ready for any scruple:
“PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE He’s got the thing all females, high and low,
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE love: / the look of a doomed man, a look that
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE not all / doomed men have. Athena: a
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE female. / What makes her a ‘goddess’? Piles
of drachma.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE The tyrant’s look and his rumored
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE cleverness— / no real man fears them, so
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE why would a giant? / A ‘goddess’—I don’t
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE blame you: we can’t / kill these fables at
once. They’re dead slowly.”
The big man’s umbrage brightened the bald man’s crown.
An ivory neck, a sword just a bit too long
to fill its scabbard without remainder.
Sisyphus mumbled: “I dreamed a hornless
ox of pinecones rolled through the alpha gate.
I don’t need a priest to gloss it. You’ll save
me, though I bear the blame. You’ll save me,
first, because letting your father triumph
would demean wisdom; second, because I don’t
deny that capturing Death was stupid. No,
I would’ve long since let him free,
but constant squirming has tangled the chains.”
The prone king dozed at the idol’s toes
until noon clipped the cool off the temple’s tiles.
Walking through the palace courtyard,
Sisyphus heard Glaucus calling,
“Father, one game.” A chessboard with thirty-two
knights lay beside the boy. “We can play tonight
If I’m not tired, though a future
king would be better off learning numbers
than playing games. To break every horse on earth—
a minor feat compared to describing all
the benefits of numbers! Above,
below, or behind Olympus, numbers
reign. They were there before the usurping gods
and their depraved grandfathers.” “That must be why
you laugh at gods. Hmm, did you learn your
evens and find gods’ laws dinky, father?”
“The gods, their laws—son, who’s got the right
to call them dinky . . . ? Gods are so violent,
yet rarely seen. Why, son . . . ? I’ll tell you:
gods spend almost all their time
copying numbers deep in a chancellery,
from which they surface only for rapid fits
of rape and maiming, fits that bring no
pleasure, but prop the lie that power
is life. Though numbers reign—no, I don’t know how—
they cannot keep the prodigal dasmos checked:
between the numbers and the dasmos
men feel the fissures and call them laws. I’m
a hand, son. Look at my lines. The dasmos opens
many. Chop one off, and another grows
to mend the wrist . . . enough! I’m hungry.
Follow me, son—no, go get your mother.”
Petrified horsemen trampled the scion’s snot.
“Nagging me to give up my board and take
up odds and evens is as dumb as
starving a stallion to quicken his canter.”
Glaucus ran toward Merope’s distant hall.
Sisyphus grabbed one knight from the chessboard, pitched
it in a nearby fishpond, whirling
blood-orange banners, which couldn’t wave off
his dream of sleep. He saw himself lying back,
closing his eyes to better imagine Manε’s
new song, and napping—not a snore.
His nephew would know. He reached the throne room
and climbed the spiral dais Aeolus built.
His nephew and the bald man bowed. “Enough.”
Their ankles caught on high couches.
Slaves corked the walls with immaculate meekness.
The bard, his eyes tucked under a high cone’s brim,
footed a line of grout while a slave boy held
his oboe. “Welcome, Manε. While we
wait for the queen, let’s hear something,
something not too old. What’s the freshest tale
you’ve gathered?” “Master,” Manε replied, “I’ll sing
a tale I heard from, master, Athens.
Whether it’s true—let my master measure.
Theseus, Hater of Hot Seats, wandered on bypaths. The highway
heading to Athens was too quick for his victory croon.
Theseus vowed to lay his prize in the shadow of every
plane tree until he got home, where he’d begin to devise
new pretexts for wandering off and neglecting the rapeless
routines of rule. His friend, Pirithous, Lover of Girls,
carried her on his back, and she napped, and Theseus let him
lay the fruit of the swan anywhere acorns piled.
(Ares, at last, trudged onto the beach. He pulled
a cord, ejecting victory banners too
damp to unfurl. His uncle had heard him
splash, and his tentacles could have lifted
Ares out, precluding a briny mess
of lacerated algae and whirling silt.
The tentacles held back and savored
Ares’ retarded charge through the acaleph phalanx.)
“Soon as Athena’s tympanum rose, a goddess ran toward them:
ears of barley and oats popped through her fingernails, ears,
eyes, and violet breasts. She sucked a clavicle stashing
kidnapped marrow and cried, ‘Theseus, help me, I need
heroes—the gods don’t care! Persephone—Hades, the Stinker,
grabbed her and forded the Styx, knowing I wouldn’t pursue,
wouldn’t let flowers and worms retreat and Hunger, the Husk King,
revel in wiping out life. Theseus, I need you to find
Hades and free my daughter. King, if you do it, I promise
Athens won’t have to endure any bad harvests again.’
Theseus replied, ‘I don’t care about harvests: I care about friendship.
If I recover the girl, Pirithous here will spend
one whole night in the offal perfume of her arms. I’ll accept no
other reward.’ Her teeth ground till she choked on the chaff,
coughing it into his face. ‘Fool, don’t you know who I am?’
Theseus wouldn’t give up, ‘Goddess, no other reward.’
‘Just one night,’ she muttered and shut her mouth on a glottal
litter of wheat. ‘But my prize—goddess, I need you to bring
Zeus’ girl to my mother on your return to Olympus.”
Pirithous handed her off. Worms reversed their parade.
Turning their backs on Athens, the heroes hunted a gutter
down to the dead. How they pretended to be
bitches to dupe the triune dog, and how they got Charon
drunk and capsized his boat, how they clogged the Styx,
how they burned down the fungi forest and broke into Hades’
tomb and captured his queen—none of these tales will I sing.
Rather, I’ll sing their unhappy escape: though they outran the stalkers
loosed by the Stinker, somewhere they took a wrong turn,
ending up in Tartarus. Weary from hauling Persephone’s dead weight,
Pirithous rejoiced when they discovered a cave
where they could safely rest. The walls had sweated a long, cool
couch, where the heroes reclined, dozing in body, not mind,
ending up in Tartarus. Weary from hauling Persephone’s dead weight,
Theseus rejoiced when they discovered a cave
where they could safely rest. The walls had sweated a long, cool
couch, where the heroes reclined, dozing in body, not mind,
ending up in Tartarus . . .” Howls cut short
the bard’s long story. Sisyphus hurried down
the dais and, with his giant nephew
clomping behind him, reached the outer
bulwark, from which he saw how the marketplace
had filled its empty meat-stalls: the war-god stabbed
the temporarily immortal
citizens, lopped off their lateral parts,
taunting the finicky crows and the cowering
dogs. A few girls ran to the palace gate
and lost their fear of splinters. No one
opened. There was young turning the key.
The not-yet fatal labor the war-god plied:
with his loud father searing his narrow eyes
he poked inside the palace, maimed all
watchmen too stupid to shirk their duty,
and yelled, “Enough, King Sisyphus! Let Death live!”
The garden paths were ribbed with limbs and nippled
with heads turned down in necks of gravel.
Sisyphus ran up his tower, keeping
one eye on the war-god. He thought of Aeolus,
happy that Ephyra’s greatest king was dead
(hopefully, their heirs’ disasters
don’t reach the ears of Elysian fathers).
Sisyphus trilled his flute, and the coiled stairs
retracted with a snap, and the tower’s bricks
fit snug save where one hourglass oboe
jutted between two granite bevels.
Sisyphus waited on the roof, while Death,
not knowing all those howls were the sound of ransom,
squirmed below his cooped up captor.
Sisyphus leaned on a polished boulder
perched so high just to knock men down. He watched
Merope cross the courtyard. He asked Death,
“A goddess, star, or phantom? Tell me,
am I already dead, in Hades?”
Through the machicolation, he watched the war-god’s
shagreen fingers dabbing the grout with brine
and blood. They bulged. “I can’t defeat him,”
Sisyphus thought, “but I can disgrace him.”
He gripped the boulder and bent his knees.
He heard the scabbards scrape as the war-god scaled
the bricks. A forehead loomed beside him,
“Sisyphus, don’t! Or I’ll make sure you’ll
never get back. Wise fool, hands off!”
The forehead disappeared when he stepped away.
He tossed his flute and splashed the fountain.
Glaucus yelled, “He’s coming, father!”
Sisyphus heard the chains renege their tangles
with timid
pings beneath his feet.
“Still winning, winning!” Ares boasted,
making his victory leap and crashing
somewhere near Athens, ready to kill again.
A long white bear climbed over the battlements:
Death’s face was almost human till he
put on the form of the Hundred-Handed
and thrust twenty-eight in the king’s diaphragm,
tickling the life out slowly. The king laughed blood.
His queen arrived and held his shoulders,
wiping hilarious sweat and weeping.
He wanted to remind her to keep his hive
away from graves and flame, but he failed. She said,
“Let doves eat bees, my love.” Her fingers
leveled his tongue with a foursquare drachma.
Β
His mouth was raw with coin reek,
when jaunty Charon, rolling his eyes like helms,
grabbed Sisyphus and flung him
lifeless, not hopeless, athwart the gunwales
and chin-first on a bench, where he spewed the fare
that hit bone, sang
ching! as another corpse
fell aft and drooled his drachma—
ching! it
bounced on the deck when a third plopped starboard—
ching! went the shekel greeting the ivory planks
ching! sang the doits from dozens of passengers—
so many dead kings’ heads were rolling,
flattened and tarnished—a morbid choir.
(Why did the pilot bother collecting fares?
What did he need to purchase beyond the Styx?
Scrimshaw decanters breathing blood,
dental tattoos, umbral embraces?)
“Oars!” howled that dripping wick of a demigod
then lashed his unpaid crew with the vertebrae
torn out of some huge, pliant creature
buried an age before names spoke up—
kept lashing till the rowers remembered pain
and realized that now they were ghosts—not
ashes or ravens’ windfall—ghosts
eager to pick up an oar and puncture
the fallow resin filling the oblong lake
or groggy river crossed by the unripe dead,
who didn’t know what tortures waited
at their destination
but had no wish to stay on the ivory deck
with Charon lashing bone on backs that ache
no less because they’re meatless:
malice conceives all the nerve it needs.
Most of the phantom crew had completed lives
unmarked by any need or desire to row,
but now they weaved their oars with awkward
vigor, and somehow the galley floated
on course, although its captain would rather howl
“Oars!” than navigate or direct the strokes
his uncoordinated lackeys
gave to the Styx with no thought to rhythm.
Somehow that galley floated, although uncaulked
tusks made up the hull, and the figurehead,
two rusty iron orbs depicting
Kronos’s trophies, outweighed most biremes.
Charon snapped a winch to his jawbone, cranked
till his front teeth curled like a trumpet’s bell,
and shrieked his sweetest shanty, sure he’d
rapture the sirens if they could hear him:
“This muck is poisonous enough
to bring the Pleiades low,
but drinking it can’t free the dead—
to Tartarus you go!
You’ll feel nostalgia for the winter’s
counterpane of snow
when you’re tucked into Phlegethon—
to Tartarus you go!
You’ll miss the grit of desert winds
and beg old floods, ‘Please flow!’
But they’re as deaf as you are doomed—
to Tartarus you go!”
Meanwhile, Athena’s temporal lobes began
to beat themselves black and blue. The drop beneath
the clouds would make it worse, for insects
loved to patrol the contested boundary
where brain and bone were struggling, one to grow
out, and the other shut. Ichneumons, gnats,
and beetles always mobbed her temples
when she descended the antiseptic
winds of Olympus. Drowning inside divine
cognitive juices augured a cooler death
than tombs of amber; poor Athena’s
unadorned Aegis was no deterrent.
Athena was gliding across the leaves
upon a mountain holy to Zeus, when festive
moans made her peek beneath the branches:
diligent dryads, all lambently hooking
and limberly hooked, haloed
a pinioned kill, while Athena’s sister
wearing nothing but an uncooked
girdle of spareribs, unlaced the body:
she tore away the haslets and cut the brawn
into four chunks—red beads on a hickory
abacus. Athena moved on—
toppling dew was her only greeting.
She glided (buzz buzz) over a swamp, drew near
the hole, and flipped her Aegis concave (blind
side out) chanting, “Sweetbile, sweetbile,
open your eyes!” And the snakes, drooling
horse sperm, rowed out of the stone cuff
and blindly chomped the anemic wind.
Their molting coils peeled brimstone scabs—
hard on Athena’s nose.
She came there out of love for the boy whose eyes
often squinted, hushing the light that chirped
behind them, warding off a blindness
that the incontinent sun no longer
was able to inflict. She liked to stay
the night, and no one else caught Laertes’ heir
squinting across his father’s hearthstone—
no one but the mosquitoes’ darling,
that grizzled, high-browed friend of the family,
who stopped to drink their wine when his browsing oxen
took him near their hall. Athena,
far from her Ithacan hideout, ducked
the chomping snakes. But the head on which
their heads had budded unburied funneling
layers of daylight, scraped fourteen
chins on stalagmites, and yelped on finding
her snakes had looped the magnetic ankles, knees,
hips, diaphragm, and neck of her BFF.
Some neighing horseflies mimicked mussels,
oozing their undigested ichor.
Athena could’ve winked and reduced her reptile
pigtails to ash. But wisdom beat wrath. Athena
didn’t sweat the horse sperm: wheedling
Phorcys’s daughter demanded patience.
Think of obesity as a mode of patience—
patience purified into vice.
She hadn’t left her hole for fourteen
years. On the day that Athena had finally
awarded her a look in the mirror-shield,
she learned her beauty was gone, and worse: whelks
crusty and white replaced the blushing
skin that appealed to Poseidon’s feelers;
her lips, which one day nibbled the girl’s
excruciating honor in Ocean’s ears,
puckered a blot of beetle’s legs
and glistered with pus or mercurial serum;
the hair that once delighted the connoisseur
of iridescent algae unknown to men
(even to those whose lungs fast long)
yielded to snakes that allowed no combing.
Athena didn’t tell her what made her eyes
outgrow their sockets: she faked surprise
and only let her see what happened
after she’d pleaded the moon down.
The night before, Athena had clipped her wrath
and faked the giggling of a gossip when
Phorcys’s daughter boasted that she
wielded the wand of the tide’s deep master.
A day of yanking couldn’t remove her snakes,
nor could she bite her lips
into their foregone softness, cancel
chronic harvests of hoary pustules,
or run from the woods to the beach to the sea
and drown—if she met her lover auditing
(gods always turn up when unwanted)
oysters, his wince would be worse than living.
She wolfed a forest brimming with nimble meat.
Even the jittery deer would give up fleeing
and let her sour gullet knock them,
hard as their horns, down her strident stomach.
These creatures made her prove her digestive power:
though their meat was gritty at best, she ate
them all: skunks, lions, beavers, leopards
vultures—whatever the snakes could yank,
all life that crept too high or soared too low.
She ate that forest down to the final moth,
then squatted in her parched grotto,
weeping while snoring, a wild coma.
Now awake in daylight, she found her only
friend involved in her ugliness. “Off! Off!”
She yelled so hard that four whelks popped,
prompting her snakes to uncoil Athena.
“Scaly braids! Oh, let me upbraid these bad scales
with a bloody shave or a comb of brazen
tines to nail them down till I’m down in Hades—
unless I’m there now?”
“A little harmless agony—nothing I
would hold against you, Sweetbile. It’s wonderful
to see you up again, my dearest!
Hope that you’ve made the best of your bedtime.”
“Oh, great goddess, no! But at least in nightmares
braids can’t bark or smell— now I smell their loose bark!
Oh, great goddess, tell me who did this to me!
By now you must know.”
“Afraid I’ve not been able to find out who—
the bastard that . . . ” But nausea cut off the verb,
it seemed. She gripped her absent navel,
spilling a flash of the mirror’s recto.
“Goddess, let me see it! Oh, let me, goddess!
Tell me, has it gotten much worse? Don’t tell me—
don’t—I’m sorry, goddess! No eyes but mine can
measure the damage.”
Over and under prickly elbows held
horizontal, wedging the red pines’ green
sleep, cheeks brown with blood conjoined
a nictitating gaze and a snaggletooth glaze.
Neither Athena nor her companion knew
a third was tracking their dialogue.
Athena said, “I’d be a friendly
enemy if I obeyed you, dearest.
Of course I’ll let you see it. I can’t deny
a boon so petty to a friend so dear.
I don’t, however, want to hurt you:
mirrors are blind, and I love you too much.”
“Goddess, if you loved me, you wouldn’t tell me
you don’t want to hurt—a benign beheading
by a boy who shakes when he lifts his hatchet.
Knowing cuts clean through.”
“That pit has taught you something. You think you know
better than I how knowing can cut?” Athena
puffed and wiped the eye-intensive
muck off her brain’s breach. The buzzing guttered.
“That’s not it—I swear! Oh, I swear that’s not it!
Who could ever hope to out-know your knowing?
I just hoped to make my poor plea appealing,
wisdom incarnate!”
“Today, all too incarnate,” Athena said,
pausing to flick an ichor-addicted wasp
off her earwax, adding, “Verbal
hecatombs rarely win over wisdom.”
“Then I vow these woods will become my wordless
hecatomb of timber and leaf, of wing and
paw, of moss and hide, and I’ll drive the dryads
singed to the sea’s cool!”
“Better than all that burning, I have in mind
a feat of air and water. The lonely Styx
grows turbid: imitate your lover’s
hurricane art on its moon-starved ripples.”
“No more salty kisses. Not even salt breeze. . . .
I’ll go down to his fishless mimic. Goddess,
I’ll make ripples billows, just let me have one
look in your Aegis.”
“One look before you go. But be careful: squint.”
Athena leaned backward and warily turned
the mirror outside out (it isn’t
proper to tell what her squinting features
looked like—a face fermented in loam for years,
the pickled cabbage left in the ground too long,
a chorus pounded by fecal vermin—
mirrors will never turn readers to stone
so what’s the point of putting her face to words
too light for lapidation): ɒƨᴜbɘM looked
and fled and marked the way to Hades,
winding and muddy, with tears and vomit,
cloistering her face from the mirror’s ken,
a loss that didn’t worry Athena: soon,
she knew, that face would fill her Aegis,
gaping forever uninverted.
Athena wasn’t quick to compile the will
to hover home, though hornets had occupied
her temples, and pain peaked at every
bang of the sea-wolf’s feet.
“Head!” her sister, ripping through red pines, heckled,
“Up to something, aren’t you? No good. You’re always
up to something, head. I despise your footprints:
keep to your sky-crypt!”
“Look at you! Dressed to kill. Though I’d normally
be frightened by that boar-spear, I bulge with craven
bravery: sweetie, I saw your poaching
orgy on father’s holy mountain.”
“Head, don’t ‘sweetie’ me! You despise him even
more than I do, but you’re too weak to say so.
Tell me why you sent her to rile the Styx up,
or I’ll tell father
it was
you who made her destroy the forest
fourteen years ago—when he thought her bad looks
punishment enough, and he didn’t know
you
started the whole thing.”
Athena took a vial from her breastplate: “How
about an oath? I’ll answer your question, if
you vow on this inert current
never to tell my secreted secret.”
“It’s a trick—I hate you: you know I must know!
It’s a trick—just pour the libation, head. . . . Oh,
hateful Styx, I vow that I’ll keep her secret,
tell it to no one.”
Athena corked the half-empty vial and tucked
it back beneath her breastplate. “Aeolus, king
of Corinth and a godly human
built me a temple of buoyant marble
and honored me above our dear father. I
couldn’t help his eldest: he went too far.
But his lastborn just died. I know he’ll
never be any god’s favorite human—
a cagy and ungrateful liar, slow
to sacrifice and quick to remind me when
I owe him something.
Nevertheless, I desire to bring him
back to this world of thriving decay, and you
won’t say a word about it.” Athena watched
her sister gulp the froth she almost
spat in her brain-breach.
“Head, your ‘won’t say’ hurts. And it’s wrong. It won’t do.
Sisyphus deserves to revolve in fire;
Sisyphus deserves to regale the vulture.
How can you let him . . . ?”
A fox had loosed the last of her faithless orbs,
which hunted down the nostrils of Artemis,
who ran away unanswered, baffling
even the wisest of gods, Athena,
who now could hover homeward and win release
from earth’s nosy odors and creeping things:
the pincers eased, the insects tumbled,
frozen dry in the Olympian breezes,
and shattered on the ground, littering legs
and puny ghosts that drilled the earth
without the aid of tipping tongues,
eager to buzz by the bashful river,
where bony gulls (which, having no feathers, tread
along the shore and nibble the shades who lie
there supine, palates blooming drachma)
witnessed Athena’s agent arrive.
The black pebbles rattled like hailstorm dice.
Down came a flapping channel of chins and breasts
Heralded by peeling serpents.
“Blawp,” said the Styx when her leap concluded.
ɒƨᴜbɘM swam until she nosed a fight
between giant crabs and a school of hydra.
The latter’s eyes lit up the darkness,
threading necks through the thick benthos—
an adaptation that wiped them out,
for when their bright eyes captured the sea-wolf’s gaze,
a prompt sclerosis turned their innards
hard as their scales,
trapping the blind, unpetrified crabs inside
coils that no claws could pry, or between the fangs
pent in a jaw immune to pinches—
idols unfit for the maddest immortals.
A hollow lung-hoard hauled up her lepid head.
She sucked her fill from Hades’ excuse for sky
and dove again and started
piling those idols. Before Apollo
retracted sunlight from the unburied world
above, her dam, for all its crustacean tizzy,
brought the maker to the surface,
where she refined her engineering,
sending her braids to the beach to retrieve the debris
and shingle that, combined with her flinty shit,
would grout the dam’s submerged reluctance,
glutting the cracks with the current’s nausea.
Nothing had ever obstructed the cochlear stream’s
current before, and that’s why gods
invoked it in their vows: its viscid
fortitude put them to shame.
The current’s indignation would raze the dam
within the hour (during which Hermes vowed
never to steal again, aware that
oaths on a mutable Styx aren’t binding).
Bisected by the improvised dam, which lifted
coral, rash and ragged, from the quiet,
the Styx remembered what her mother
Tethys had taught her: a river runs.
The current strained the fidgeting masonry
as climbing pressure pitted a lanky wave
against it. Far downstream, the galley’s
pilot continued to blare his shanty.
But Sisyphus discerned what his comrades blinked:
the current, never quick, would now lose a race
with drool, and nothing kept them moving
but the ellipses of phantom oar-wounds.
Sisyphus peeled his eyes—not just his palms—
while those around him, bobbing a daze induced
by Death’s Parousia—dumb flotsam—
missed their chance to become free jetsam.
Since rivers run relentlessly—defanged sharks—
the Styx continued grinding the upstart dam
until her runny noses toppled
it.
Goldcaps unknown on that stream as long
as the immortals dreaded its aftertaste—
twelve months’ aphasia, years of exile—
rushed like the stripes on Ouroboros
reeling across braised sand to the Nile’s relief.
Charon, for all his eons of ferrying,
remained a novice pilot: choppy
current had never tested him.
The keel became a crowbar, the gunwales gushed,
the fares returned to tickling the ivory deck,
and half the crew went empty-handed.
Charon uncranked his dental bugle
and watched the waves conveying the vessel up
and down and always closer to shore, where stone
beat bone. Charon panicked,
scrambling on deck as disoriented
as any of the rowers. He cursed the Styx,
decried her chronic sucking on hard oars,
blowing the filthy Greek that Hades’
natives deploy (which defiles translation).
Up, down, and always closer to shore: a bluff
became the river’s armrest—Sisyphus jumped,
knowing Charon’s mind had splintered,
much like the hull of his ivory galley.
Up, down, and aimless as cork, the other ghosts
bobbed, though they lacked the will to retreat beyond
the reach of Charon’s nimble gaff-play.
Like a good captain he gripped the taffrail,
alone on a deck tipped perpendicular:
the stern performed an inaugural belly-flop,
pointing the yellow ram bow straight up,
raising its ponderous orbs of iron,
desperate to restore them to heaven’s thighs—
as though there were a heaven, as though a rack
skimmed just above the earthen rafters
Hades erected, ashamed of lightning.
The buried firmament denied the ram bow’s
plea. The figurehead had become a perch
for phantom terns that dared to peck on
feathery rust, but cracked no seed.
Down, down, deeper, deeper the galley twirled
till nothing but the ram bow remained in view,
and soon that dreamless horn—abjuring
colors and lightning—also vanished.
Niggard of foam, the river clawed back its calm.
Charon arose and rallied his floating crew.
The minted kings lay tucked in muck beds.
Sisyphus ran through a fungi forest.
Hungry for meat he couldn’t digest or find,
thirsting for wine where grapes are impossible,
he hoped he still could sleep. He wandered
mushroom arcades alight with poison:
the gills exhaled prismatic bubbles: one
popped on an antler, spittling black and blue
on pedicles and empty sockets,
creaking femurs and bleached hooves.
The creature stopped and pointed its pitted wedge
at Sisyphus, and the socket draft
didn’t impede his look, for sometimes
ocular lack opens ample vision.
Both man and stag forgot their needs and fears,
where they were going, what they were fleeing, why.
a happy silence
till that collusion of bones remembered
the horseshoe clang, the twinkling arrowhead,
the second death they threatened (a real threat
only to the resurrected)—
tokens of imitation centaurs.
Bad air, riled muck. None worse. Off the Styx. All tooth.
In sun, half nose, half ears, despite the eyes.
out sun, all tooth—smell hurt; hear hurt.
Bad air brings fat trunk, burl belly.
The stag snorted, “A-rǽ-uf,” and was gone
between the stalks of the leafless wood,
prizing his dead life, retreating
into the echoes etched by his hooves.
“I meant no harm, for once—meant nothing,”
Sisyphus told the gills. If the fungi forest,
lived ten thousand
centuries longer, shirking harvest
and flame, the scene would never repeat itself.
Though apotemnophilia plagues the world,
whose tails grow back each time it docks them,
nothing returns but the unessential:
the latest metameres are exempt from scars
and maculae compiled by the severed dead,
and it’s those glitches, not the binding
septa, that make mortals wonder.
Sisyphus asked himself why he chased more life:
a queen as distant as her sisters,
an heir as tone-deaf as his uncle,
indolent slaves and empty temples?
And would the queen obey him? A crumhorn grunt
declared the hunt, and Sisyphus recognized
a beardless mirror image mounted
on the remains of a boar, whose dimpled
snout didn’t unleash odor, whose tongueless mouth
didn’t give up hunger, whose unsheathed back
couldn’t buck the rider. “Dead man,
where did that ivory red deer fly?”
Around his unridged neck the hunter wore
a frayed and rusty ribbon, which dared the tears
of Sisyphus to well and ripple
over his eyes without smearing down.
“Dead man, what’s wrong?” “The farting hyphae sting
my eyes. Your stag went,” Sisyphus pointed, “that way!”
The rider’s kinks reared up and quivered,
popping a bubble.
The rider honed his head on his boot sole.
“Young man, I’m lost. I know that you’re on the hunt
for no poor prize—forgive my question:
which way will take me to Hades’ palace?”
The hunter sounded patient, although his knees
were prematurely palsied. “You see, dead man,
up there, that coil of peacock comets:
those are bat lenses. They mimic
the hyphae glowing under the daily flight
back to their minarets, which emit no prayer
except the flap of furry canvas.
Locate the palace and follow the bats home.”
Sisyphus turned his back, but the rider saw
him squint: “Oh, dead man, your moss brews frost,
your neck is fatter, but I know you!
Why? Oh, I know why. Your moss brews frost.”
Sisyphus bumped into many a stalk,
but kept ahead of the ambling boar,
whose rider asked him, “Why? What hurry?
Why won’t you give me a hug, you liar?”
Sisyphus bumped into many a stalk,
but kept ahead of the ambling boar,
“You know, the pyre hurt, it really
hurt! I was scared, and my ghost was playing
hide and seek—it would not hurry down here.
I couldn’t lift my legs, but my ghost made them
pedal fire, dance their ash out!”
Sisyphus turned, and the once-pink skin
was flaking coal wherever the yellow bones
were shy; his teeth had nibbled through smoking gums.
“You torched, fake priest, a fortune with me—
mountains of myrrh wouldn’t mute the stink.”
Sisyphus bumped into stalks until the boy
scattered his ash, or so it appeared. The flock
of bats did not belie him: Hades’
fictile palace ruptured ahead.
A burning half-hitch rounded the blue-veined keep.
The riddled slopes were squirming.
He couldn’t see how deep the towers
thrust up the earth’s mauve matrix.
A stutter leveled the dead man’s gaze. He saw
a peasant rub his leg on a dowsing wand.
A huge ant broke the soil. The peasant
knelt down to weigh the reluctant harvest
and dropped it in a kettle. His fingers gleamed
until he rubbed his crotch with the pheromones
and raised the kettle, “Make your mother
proud. When the goddess bites off your gaster,
know that nourishment is the best revenge.”
The kettle’s lid became a madcap zill.
As the peasant neared the palace
gate, he looked at the frieze above
and cringed, like one surprised by the memory
of old humiliations. The gate inhaled.
The man was gone. The drawbridge yielded
Sisyphus entry to Hades’ palace.
But then the figures topping the architrave
throbbed anew as though they were blood-flushed clay—
self-molding clay, not lazy marble
waiting for chisels to groom its torpor.
Two laughing fathers watched their boys
wrestling glazed in the lymph of olives,
while little maidens clapped and big ones
forced melodies out of forking auloi.
The laughers’ hair receded to aural cuffs,
but otherwise they looked exactly
like Sisyphus, who groaned, too thirsty
to weep.
The next metópe welcomed his homesick eyes:
a gray-haired, tall-browed matron adorned a veil
of yellow silk with gems: “Look, daughters,
diamonds are proof of Olympian weeping.”
Sisyphus hectored the mobile stone: “Those tears
are things! Not windows on real grief—just things!
The bloodless gods may trickle, but their
ribs gird nothing but lungs!”
The braided bole of an olive tree supported
two grandfathers. One nipped a wineskin
while the other, oddly sober,
numbered the dust with a broken spear-shaft.
Sisyphus knew those men, who could never be.
The bats swooped down to determine why
he ran so long to stop so short.
Sisyphus didn’t swat them away.
Then something peeled his mind off the mobile stone:
a green-eyed woman, billowing peacock gauze,
lay on a scrimshaw litter. If my
words are a sieve, call her beauty water.
Her white
skin leaked through her garment’s pores and whet
the shoulder-blades that propped her airborne:
even her skeletal lackeys loved her
although they lacked the tongues and elastic gear
with which we try to prove that our love is real.
The retinue of bones behind her
rubbed in or tickled out ribcage rolled chords.
“When your guest, Death’s quick; when your host, retarded.
Feel you can’t go on, but can’t go back neither?
That’s how I felt—eww! I should’ve worn my
rosemary noseplugs—
ripe ones always turning up. Any she-ghost
who retains some nose will avoid your mattress.
Down here soft voids don’t come easy: you’ll drill
sockets for solace.”
The peasant reached the litter and used his head
to elevate the kettle, from which she drew
the ant, whose chitin was as greasy
as hagfish love.
Her mouth was red. She bit off the segments—one,
two, three. Her mouth was black. She whirled a leg
along her lips’ well-larded orbit,
miming an amputee rhabdomancer.
“Like to try one? No? They disgusted me too
when I first came down. Now my winter fodder.
Ants lay up for winter while, furloughed green, I
while away summer
on a bed of violets my brother’s lay quakes.
There the ground feels thick and the sky looks hollow;
here the sky smells thick and the ground sounds hollow.
Nothing lasts here—
nothing but impermanence. Dead man, look down!
Right down there! Their tunnels are reaming Hades.
Look, our palace squats on their cocked Knossos.
Look at them plugging
holes with . . . who knows what—sepulchral sugars
or sulfuric gound from the titans’ eyelids—
who knows? Hope they condense explosion. One day—
sooner the better—
these black walls will plop like a boot through anile
ice or burn with pubescent flame. I can’t wait.
Now I cheer the critters by chewing them—good
cheer for the downtime.”
Sisyphus told her: “Years ago I saw
you, goddess, when Aphrodite’s daughter wed
the toothman. Perched high up an olive
tree, I looked—a beardless idiot—
on the feasting gods. I’ll sooner count up the ants
down there than find the words to explain how raw
the vision left me. Peeled me. But I
saw you frisking
impervious to rhythm, a girl who hopped
between immortal feet and forgot to fear
the touchy toenails, gibbering joy
nine months before the birth of frostbite.”
Sisyphus collapsed, and the queen said, “Get up!
Keep your knees for Hades, but don’t keep quiet.
Help me quaff the hours before he comes back
reeking of numbles.
Let me level: I’m an immortal mortal,
not a goddess. How could a goddess live down
my humiliations? A serial hostage
ransomed by summer.”
Her lackeys never bumped the walls of Hades’
unwaxed hallways. Sisyphus ran beside her
although the casual jabs of naked
ulnae hurt his husky ghost.
A brazier poked the threads in the megaron.
The wine they poured was black, but surprisingly
amenable to gulps. Her sandals
leapt off her feet, her haunches’ pillows.
One root jut through the wall to impersonate
a bough. The cortex bubbled gilt that dried
like wax. A mute crow perched there, blinking
often enough to prove she wasn’t
a gray-beaked trophy on three stiff legs.
The queen, adept
at cawing, greeted, questioned, nagged
or flattered the crow, then addressed the dead man:
“Tell me, what’s your name? And don’t start reciting,
as most dead men do, your despair credentials:
wife dead, dad fled, idols ablaze, and town razed. . . .
Chronicle summer!”
“Sisyphus.” “Ah, I hoped you would die soon! Thank you.
You’re one who tidied our littered beaches.”
“Yes. And king of Corinth—though such
titles mean little to you, my lady.”
“True, my little king. But thank you:
four sweet weeks you kept out the ghostfunk drafts—
one sweet month—like a draught of nectar. Too short.
Tell me a story!”
“I’m no bard, queen. . . . During my brother’s reign,
I sometimes got away from court. Come summer,
I’d ask for leave and lead his oxen
grazing from green to greener foothills.
The wrestling flutes and the diving dung,
the wineskins lobbed at noon and the lowing naps—
these were the things whose recollection
got me through many a winter tantrum.
When sunlight licked the green off the grass, we loafed
in shady nooks and nodded the heat away.
That’s the time the stranger came. His
temporal curls dealt an ocher fan.
Hornless cattle, streaming in rows of four
head each, pursued their master. His feet revolved
a wine cask downhill. Above, a sun-peeled
belly unfurled benign cirrhosis.
His face was red from cheekbones to jowls. No beard.
Scuted fingers played a lyre, whose sound board
rested on his jiggling belly.
I still remember his tart falsetto:
‘In the lime tree grove we found
a bed wide enough for two,
a heap of petals and plucked grass
knocked up with nascent dew.
Down the valley beneath the woods
I heard the nightingale.
I left our thorp to meet him there,
down by the boozy swale.
I caught him pacing when I arrived.
Startled, he cried my name.
Did he spare me his embrace?
A thousand times I came.
We rested on the petal-quilt.
Look, my mouth is red!
If someone saw us there, he’d laugh!
It puckers me with dread.
We lay on roses side by side.
Artemis forbid
that anyone went down that path!
I hope we were well hid!
May no one know how he worked on me—
ah, tandaraday!—
except us lovers and the loyal
crow on the lime tree spray.’
Both teams of cattle, unhorned and horned, composed
one giant herd. He popped the cask: “Drink hard.”
We welcomed him to share our apples,
olives, and bread. In the trickling daylight
we talked of many things, and the wine-bowl moved.
At last our banter aimed at my lack of haste
in marrying. I asked him if he
thought I should do it. The question pleased him:
‘Son, my authority when it comes to wives
will spare you all experience. Lucky day!
Oh, I can talk if you can listen.
Live through my words: there’s no need to marry.
If now I’m free of marital joys and woes
except in recollecting—I’ll soon get caught
once more in wedlock, wedsnare, wedtrap.
Marriage, the rite I was born to discharge—
should I neglect my talent—my genius, lads?
Oh, let the sea quit polishing pebbles, let
the moon quit dialing tides before I
suffer one girl to forgo my splendor!
Five times—yes, five!—I married. But all the greats
start young. Why fritter away your salad years
in innocence? I perforated
wife number one in my thirteenth summer.
Wives one to three were matrons of wealth and age.
No puerile gagging stopped me: they got their due.
Their creased papyrus felt my stylus
every day at the rap of Eos.
I kept their gray heads masked through my morning chore
(Athena, Hera, Dike—their doubles all
succumbed). No sport can quicker
fatten a young man’s imagination!
You think they could out-nag me? Well, think again:
“You drunken hussy! You shitfaced whore!” I’d rail,
then beat them blue before I balled them
into a slumber calmer than death.
Out every night surveying the town for girls—
the perfect front, hands down! And I’d tell my crones
I wandered through the streets to catch them
tight in the arms of their burly lovers.
Lads, my flattery demolished doubt.
I was the one who taught them that real love burns—
a good rehearsal for the pyre.
Let there be ash! Let the next crone step up!
The fourth differed: rich, but too young. A real
whore . . . Why laugh, why laugh? Where’s the shame in it?
The art of marriage can’t be mastered
by wimps unwilling to brave its woe.
Yes, I wed a whore. But the challenge honed
my talent—genius. I’ll never neglect a chance:
I’ll know my strength. The world has rarely
seen a face bluer than number four’s.
Could they speak, my cattle would testify
their master walked these pastures when number four
tripped on Styx. I’m brisk in mourning:
lachrymose April brings midsummer forage.
A mean man, aren’t I? In Hades, ghosts
commune forever. Why should we waste our life,
atoning for our dimming memory
if the corral below will host our
endless reunion? Now for the fifth, and, yes,
I spotted her before the incumbent croaked:
a barefoot girl who nursed her toothless
daddy and kept up his tree-trunk hut.
Her legs, her calves, her shanks—I was helpless, lads.
Rhapsodes acclaim Aphrodite’s rump, the knees
of darting Artemis—don’t listen:
nothing compares to a poor girl’s brown legs.
I made her leave that geezer behind. No tears
could ever douse my conjugal zeal. Six months
she poured them out. Oh, boys, they always
snap in the end, though you think they’re ductile.
Soon as the tears ran dry she began to weave.
I took no interest in it, was gone all day,
off trimming Gaia’s green whiskers,
plying my razor of ruminators.
Gaia’s lips go sleek come winter—crone
turns girl. Oh, lads, how do you muddle through
when snow—it dragged long-winded evenings.
Now it’s a perfect excuse for drinking.
The eaves grew sweaty fingers. A tapestry
that number five had worked on for months became
the quarry of my blanked out
eyes. It pictured the crimes of husbands.
Left, the Cretan princess liberated
Athens’ delinquent heir with a rubric spool;
they fled, they wed on deck, but then he
ditched her on a stitch of coral.
Around the center, a Georgian girl
guided a one-shoed moron to victory.
But soon enough, his blunt betrayal
drove her to hyphenate fledgling windpipes.
The sister of the cannibal cook appeared
hard by the right-hand margin. The tongue’s root
let loose many a filar offshoot
threading my eyes with a tree-trunk hut.
Bare black above the Minotaur’s horns, a space
remained unfigured.
That had a meaning, lads!
An eye for cattle makes keen readers.
If I had seen myself there—the fallow,
empty, virgin, blank space provoked me more.
Above the horns—and she must’ve known
my gaze would graze there: I’m a herdsman.
Maybe she hoped that the horns would parry
my notice, too familiar? I grazed that blank. . . .
Prometheus, go home. Let your liver heal.
No bigmouth ever did real damage;
nothing can hurt you like weaving fingers.
I wrapped the wailing bitch in her own abuse.
Ah, when her mossy legs—how hard she tried
to kick! It almost won my mercy.
Love is no law for happy husbands.
I lobbed my wife in the Alpheus.
Calm down! I fished her out when she begged for life.
The river took the rag away.
Weeping, I warned her, “Next time, it’s you.”
From then on, we were happy, until her death.
Happy or weeping, wives can reform for keeps!
She quit her loom. I never caught her
swiping the shuttle with truth or fiction. . . . ’
Although he kept on talking, I don’t remember
what else he said. In fact, we had drunk so much
that I remember
little of dusk and nothing of night.
The drink’s file spared one dream ruck.
Should I put it in words? I might as well
try to repair an amphora
stomped by a whole herd.
Men gathered round a prickly piebald tile.
An argument conducted in three barbarian
tongues deferred the finger contest:
‘Cut up the chairs! Earwigs! Earwigs!’
Dawn wedged our thick skulls open. Autolycus
was gone already. ‘We’ll never drink again!’
we vowed—an oath the gods don’t bother
monitoring: it adorns each daybreak.
By noon I had rallied enough to give
my herd the care I owed it, but counted half
a dozen cattle missing. Maybe
we were so drunk that we drove them off.
Maybe our love of Oeneus compelled a midnight
sacrifice. But how could their blood avoid
blotting the butchers? No one, queen, no
matter how fat, could eat that much beef.
The moon shaved off one cheek by the time we met
Autolycus again. He came whistling
a barbarous tune to hoof percussion.
Grass lined the barrel he pedaled downhill.
The man had grown a gambit of tawny beard
that couldn’t hide his belly’s inflation: flab
advanced a convex vanguard
till he dismounted the cooper’s earthquake.
The wine within was water. “A joke,” our eyes
declared. Our tongues belied them. He claimed he found
the sweet and smoky drink near dawn, where
even the king eats carrion cabbage.
We spoke of many things, and the wine-bowl moved—
mostly of shepherdesses deflowered in mind,
though not in body, by my herdsmen,
banter attracting his randy annals:
‘Your deeds, my lads, are snoring your dreams asleep.
I’ve done them all—just listen. When Chloe sprang,
I twined her stem around my thyrsus:
bulging so white, her radical splurted.
Then Eunica—she hovered from bloom to bloom
as though virginity would unweave all nets.
She flew right in: I almost
mashed out her indigo wings.
Cynisca couldn’t speak, but her olive eyes
and unwarped woofing won my meat.
I gripped those weeping soles and made her
yelp heat till my ears hurt.
One look at Galatea—oh, lads—you’d think
she only grazed by moonlight! To cup her tits
was worth a million weaning lectures.
Teach them to hemorrhage milk: they’ll thank you.
Ah, Amaryllis, what an experience!
She—lads, it felt like fondling a star that cooled
her burning for a lay. Let thunder
husband his germens a year long,
winter to winter taut in his guarantee
of tyranny, and let him release them all
in one arc blast, that falling sea would
never white out her ignited sapphires.
Think I’m exaggerating? They’re whores, I know,
but that’s a term of art, not of diatribe.
Acrotime was pricy, but she
earned every drachma. First I turned . . . ’
I can’t remember anything else he bragged.
I know that he invited us to his home
on Mount Mainalo, but I can’t
picture him saying the words nor hear them—
only a man who sat on a wooden floor
wrapped in a taffeta tent, and beetles’ feet
had flit oak gall on the white square
rolled out before him. He pinched a wheat ear.
Dawn wedged our thick skulls open. The wind’s tail
gored us. We found the barrel of watery wine
empty, Autolycus absent.
Headache and moos left us all too present.
Twenty-four cattle gone! And our re-count chimed.
What could I tell my brother Salmoneus?
No matter how intoxicated,
giddy with rape, or engorged by torture,
the tyrant loved to add, and our deficit
would turn me redder than Marsyas.
We couldn’t think up any
cure for subtraction
till I remembered nothing can speed a man
from triumph to defeat like the number three.
Into the right fore-hoof of every
bull in our herd, I engraved my sigma.
Queen, I do not know how I kept my jaw.
Some goddess must’ve hated Autolycus
or loved my smile. Although the hooves
spared me, the gums of my herdsmen wrangled
purple deracinations. I knew he’d come
back for more loot: our incompetence was plain.
And when the new moon cornified,
just as I figured, his hornless cattle
mixed with our remnant while the gigantic thief
bandied a sloshing barrel from palm to palm.
His newfound whiskers swept the navel-
bung in the belly my brother’s beef built.
He found the booze, he claimed, on a journey north
to a land devoid of grapevines where even trees
are rare. One whiff of that bronze fluid
killed any vermin our nostrils hoarded.
One of my herdsmen, too quickly hammered, joked
about Ixion, goading our guest to brag:
‘I’ve ravished goddesses—how many!
Artemis barked while I chafed her armpits;
Hera’s udders let me forget her eyes;
Eos’s ardent haunches deposed her huge
teeth from my mind; Athena’s suction
almost atoned for her cranial leakage;
Demet—no, Metis mastered a nasty trick . . .’
We bathed our brains, dissolving the afternoon,
yielding a splinter night couldn’t sand.
Shy with goodbyes, our guest had bolted.
Awaking, one look rendered our counting rite
unnecessary. Yet, in what sun remained,
we put a number to his robbery:
ninety-six head. What was he thinking?
That we were fools or cowards or both? I knew
the thief would molt his prudence—but ninety-six!
After the second theft, I could’ve
run from my brother, but now—never!
Autolycus had made me look like a fool,
and he would tell the story of how he duped
us—three times, three times! Every herdsman
roaming the Peloponnese would chuckle
at my losses—
my losses? Not one
bull was mine. Indeed, I deciphered him,
dare I say, quickly: Aughtlycus never
would’ve pulled off his last two robberies
without my prescient consent. But tell me, queen,
why the anger stays, why it won’t go home
in the happy fallout? O well,
summer’s the time for inane adventures.
I stored them in my mind for winter.
Night, like a guest whose shyness tapers
with each new visit, came a little
earlier every day, departing
a little later. I knew it would be my last
whack at revenge. I cut down a boxwood tree,
and gouging out its pith I made it
feel like a budding flute until I
spotted a wink of red when I dropped the bore,
raised the wooden socket skyward, palmed
one eye, and peeped inside. This walking
staff would permit me to drink my rival
down. But the roads to Mainalo, if you’d call them
roads, are risky: all the remaining bulls
would stay behind with my companions—
loyal but witless—while I, their makeshift
master, wandered off for a week or two
alone. They swore by Hermes to follow me;
I swore by rancid Pan they would not.
Shouldering my boxwood, I headed southwest
alone. Do you know Arcadia’s corners slacken
the brooding spool? Her gradually lifting peaks
ambush you with elevation,
straining your lungs, yet your feet aren’t sore.
A week of walking brought me a glimpse
of Mainalo and Alpheus drooling south
(you’ve probably heard, fair queen, that river
used to distribute his lonely current
below the sky-scabbed earth till he heard the tread
of Artemis gone hunting. A river pumps
itself, which is to say a river’s
nothing if not its own heart in motion.
The rhythm of her feet was what did him in:
it clipped off all the calluses
that make for cozy flowing: suddenly
Alpheus felt the finical edges
of caverns keen to measure his liquid drill.
Flowing was hurting. How had the fact escaped
notice the first hundred million
stadia spilled? He despised his waters.
But rearing erosion let his hermetic surge
mirror the sunlight. ‘Yes!’ he gushed, ‘This gleam
will primp my courtship of the pattering
dancer.’ But
Artemis heard his rapids,
ran to a swale, and mantled her skin with muck.
She feared male lus
t so much, unaware he loved
h
er footfalls, not her pale complexion.
Alpheus happily scoured the
muck
and tore the tun
ic beneath. Her howl
wedged pa
st the current’s earplugs to Ganymede,
who yanked the whiskers of his snoring
bedma
te: the fourth-awake father
heaved a forgotten fistful of Pelion:
the f
alling mountain splashed out the river’s will
to woo, but Artemis, who feared what
almost occurred in Arcadia, gave up
ram
bling there. That’s when Pan installed
h
is hirsute caravan and called it home.
But s
till the punch-drunk river wells up,
nourishing Mainalo’s base, and tri
ckles
to sea, no more remembering
his earsick love
than Pelion recalls how the titans’ palms
daubed him with sweat. But sometimes
Alpheus leaps in the air—a senile
reflex—I saw him), divvying liberal springs
that riddled Mainalo, like the spunk asperged
by prudent satyrs, never saving
love for a rain day: the world might dry up.
Pearls plump as ripe peaches reposed on gold
brocade and planed the sapphire brawl.
But when I plucked one out it lengthened,
numbing my hand, and adjourned its pallor—
a leech!—with blood. I wasn’t about to wade
across that river. The banks were thick
with flowers rising not from human
toil, divine regrets, or the self-hatreds
that make seeds rip themselves, but from Alpheus,
the green world’s blind red. And syrup poured
down every tree. (A little younger,
I would’ve lapped at the bark, forgetting
revenge was what I’d come for, until the bole
imbibed my head.) And enameled apples gleamed
down the cool shade, gilding rubies.
How could I ruin the rinds by biting?
I didn’t dare, and now can’t describe their taste,
though if I’d dared, I doubt I’d survive one taste.
On the green sutures between the groves, I
witnessed leaps and leashes, routs
and sounders, earths and mischiefs, turns and screws,
romping and browsing, coupling and dozing, free—
for Artemis, the fiend, had finished
tearing the ground with bombastic chases,
and in her absence flowers repaired the soil,
flowers of every color and scent, and no
thorns on the rose to thwart your fingers—
only immobile, angling insects.
I faked a limp and plied my stick in case
Autolycus was watching from caves that dropped
vast braids of grapevines in the river
wishing the fish were impatient drunkards.
A giant pomegranate tree, in love with spiders,
spun a root to my bank. The branches,
full of insomniac owls, raked me
into their shade, where I’d still be mumbling
hymns to Demeter, hacking up pollen threshed
by satyrs’ leaf-beat syrtos. I know the world
can nowhere match that bower’s beauty,
not even En—but my story wanders.
I’d still be mumbling there if a green-eyed girl
shouldering a jug of water and chaperoned
by multitudes of famished rabbits,
mowing the clover with helical teeth,
hadn’t approached and whispered a warning: ‘Go back!
Quick now back!’ I told her I’d come to visit
Autolycus, my friend. She giggled,
wondering what fool would befriend that bastard.
‘Limper, leave. Autolycus—he’s my father—
drinks and laughs all company, friend or foe, dead.
Quick now back! Don’t follow me. If you seek death,
drowning is cleaner.’
I willed away her warning and limped uphill.
‘Anticlea! Dinner!’ an unseen man
hollered—the rabbits’ rout. The robber
stood in the gate of a hall constructed
entirely of antlers. His beard still reached
his stomach, but the latter had shrunk
within his hip-bones’ orbit. ‘Dinner!’
hollered the starver before he saw me.
His rage, if that’s what it was, couldn’t survive
one smile: ‘Ah, gimpy’s hobbled to Mainalo
at last! Come in—no wait! First let’s go
check out my coop and pick out a nibble.’
The same falsetto, but the skin dripped loose
below the eyes, which I couldn’t see before
when sanguine cheeks had squished them
into a seemingly permanent squint.
I told him I had slid down a mountain path
and hurt my heel. He offered to carry me.
I laughed and hobbled on. The stockyard
heckled my nose, then my eyes, with hundreds
of hornless cattle. How could I get a chance
to look beneath their hooves? He commanded me
to pick one, and my finger answered.
When could I peek at their hooves’ carved versos?
He tugged the bull away, and despite the dusk
I made out what he never noticed:
the bull’s right fore-hoof planted
sigma ridges in tattling dust.
Back at the hall of antlers, he sliced the bull’s
neck, and it broke into separate joints
as though it were a smashed mosaic
not a betrothal of bones and tendons.
He roasted it with equal dexterity.
The wine bowl kept our arms moving.
The antlers quaked the hearth shades’ horror,
aiding my covert delivery of liquid,
whenever he turned to harangue Anticlea,
out of my mouth and into the stick’s tall hole.
I leaned the stick against my shoulder
like a . . . queen, invention fails me:
I’ll sooner find the words to depict the joy
a dying man must feel when his health returns
coevally with spring, than tell you
just what it felt to hear my victory
slosh between my hands and to know he didn’t
know. ‘Closer, Anticlea: we’re sipping, watch.
To sip and peck and pinch—they open
gateways of eloquence, good gab, sweet talk.’
My host began to reel off the catalogue
of bastards he engendered. Their names and wombs,
unmoored alphabetically,
launched from his lips in a mist of spittle.
Every time he got through a letter, I
excused myself to color the nearby woods
with hospitality’s nomadic
surplus, then emptied my wooden vial.
Some wine still found my stomach. My face went red.
I worried that his tolerance would defeat
my scheme. But once he got through letter
Mu, he was slurring the names, and hiccups
barnacled his catalogue. Walking out
to drain the stick again, I saw four tiers
of ovals, which the half-moon’s digits
didn’t poke. Anticlea pleaded:
‘If he lives till winter, I can’t protect them.
Here they’re safe from owls, but not from that mouth.
Drill his two-faced belly and build a dovecot
fit for my poor friends:
please, please, kill my father. I know he hates you.
Though you’re wise—or cunning—he can’t be cheated.
Tell me what you want—I do everything—just
help me undo him!’
Both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ were answers I couldn’t give:
I limped back to the father, his catalogue.
Before he reached the letter sigma,
something went wrong:
“Son, my authority when it comes to wives,
if they could talk, my oxen would testify
that once or twice I’ve courted matrons:
check out my coop and pick out a nibble
as though virginity were a spider’s thread . . .
such flattery might mitigate massive doubt
an eye for cattle makes dull readers,
now it’s a candid excuse for sipping . . .”
He sat upright, his back to the flame.
His eyes poured shut, and the bowl gave up his hand.
No more bastards, no more names: his
tongue was too short.
One finger knocked him supine, although his back
was slow to open down, and he spent the long
drop snoring with the wakeful passion
oracles muster before the nonsense
of their office ruins its novelty.
For lack of anything better I took the harp
out of his lap, broke off the sound-chest,
braided its reticent strings together,
and bound Autolycus to a spiraling
column of antlers. Oeneus kept him down—
for once a god was useful to me!—
maybe the reason I didn’t kill him.
Despite the beef and wine he consumed that night,
he looked so lean. ‘Ho, nather fight.
Ha, dother may,’ he snored. I took his
daughter and left him my boxwood ally.
Anticlea cooed and the doves awoke
and roosted on her forearms. ‘Oh, father night.
Ah, mother day,’ he snored. The antlers
wagged when he exhaled, but didn’t buckle.
Anticlea knew where the river ran
shallow. We led the cattle across as best
we could, but some went free. Daybreak
milked old horns on half the remnant.
I don’t know why my enemy gave up, why
not a single leach
clung to the wading pasterns. Well, queen,
maybe you can solve this riddle.
Sleepless, with slow and wandering steps, we took
our ruminating way, but my enemy
didn’t pursue. The herdsmen joined us
outside Corinth. I brought Anticlea
straight to Demeter’s temple, whose architrave,
protruding vestal flowers, has never kept
her mind from plucking. Yes, I gave her
up to Demeter and stone devotion.”
The unseen god awaited the final word,
playing the deference he conned from books.
You’ve never seen a man so handsome.
You’ve never smelt a stink so foul.
The unseen god held a vertical fist
no wider than his pinky. The boy hiked up
his chin and aired the pink line stringing
posthumous scabs, an abridged necklace.
“My faire Proserpina, þis seli barn
beldeth within my bokhous whan hunting worth
a longe tale of no disport.
He telthe me þy frend is a lither lorel.”
“Lord, your little friend must’ve lived a hard life.
Grief’s a knowing text, but a naïve teacher.
Don’t give my friend, Sisyphus, grief before you’ve
heard his petition.”
Her nude eyes elbowed Sisyphus, who declared,
“Lord of immortal ores, that boy is wrong:
I’m no lorel. Though the sky-god’s
cano
py sickens me, Lord, I beg you:
let me
return to Corinth. My queen, my wife,
my woman, left my corpse
in the marketplace,
flouting the rites of
clod and pyre.
Let me go bac
k up to square this outrage.
Her crimes—I’ll list them: one, she allows crammed birds
to blur your realm with heaven (the dasmos cries out!);
two, she mocks the rule of husbands;
three, she lets laborers gawk my innards.
Lord, let me go back u
p. Then I’ll come back down
the way that you intended. I guess your f
riend
d
ied before his daddy taught him
not to go
calling strangers ‘lorel.’
I barely
know the boy. I’ll forgive him, though.
If Echo toured his
perjury high and low
the ange
r roused would fail to measure
up to the anger my w
ife—my error
was
coupling with a star—oh, the stink of ether!
Lord, I’ll fix that woman, pac
k a proper
urn, and come back down rejoicing,
free from the fidgeting air forever.”
“Why sholde I trowe thy sermoun? It tikleth thee,
par chaunce, a gost, þe govnour of gostes berd
to make? What ransoun canst thou,
blodles and arm, awake for warant?”
“Lord, send Samjoko to investigate.
While she wings to Corinth, your boy can tell us
what he means by ‘lorel,’ what mean things my friend
did to him. Send her.”
“Ninth of þe mordre, hy thee to Corinth! Quik!”
Without a single caw, the compliant crow
swooped off her root and braved the mason’s
headache of flying through Hades’ hallways.
The drawbridge dares to goose the retreating south.
Northwest, a peacock fans out bare slats.
Northeast, the ant-queen’s cocked antennae
douse for a liquor we’d never pebble.
“Tell me, what’s so ‘lither’ about this man whose
tale has whiled away my hours—hours,
days, or weeks? Who knows? We can’t tell them, lacking
fiery dials.
When the summer comes, and I prick my dull eyes
for the solmization of stars and planets—
boy, don’t feel so bad that you’re down forever—
when I go back up,
listening to the dryads lip last year’s gossip,
listening to my mother recite her wheat yield,
listening to my brother’s unending epics
feels like dry drowning.
Of the three, Apollo’s unending epics
(too soon ended!) bore me the least. His music
laces vile lore with the lyre’s venom—
eargulping sweetness!
But the laces rip, and the words don’t warm me.
Now’s your chance, boy. Prove that you’re not a lyre.
Swaddle me in your hate speech.
Tell me your story.”
Hades brooded his gold throne. The boy stood tightlipped,
peering at the queen, as though reticence
would let him share her summer furlough.
“Now,” warned her nod, and his mouth opened.
Γ
“Each day—each dayless day—I ride down to Styx
through woodless woods and tickle my unnerved pets.
I wave my boarspear,
littering paths with ivory kindling.
But my boarspear pops no wine. And I bring
no treats for the ghosts on the beach.
But they don’t grudge me their sad stories.
Corinth—and many other places
I’ll never see—are words, but they
are. Nice queen,
my uncle was a crotch or beard—
that’s all I remember. Stories
gave him the bald hat, the bad fun.
Nice ghosts, who tell what they heard or saw
of uncle, fa
ther, mother, but not enough.
And stories wriggle in the scroll
house—
that’s wh
ere you’ll find me. Hail Lord Hades!
I mine the scrolls and munch the hardest words.
I read
till both the words and my head hurt. I’m
not what I was. W
ell-read, ready.
If I re
ad hard, I knew you’d come down!
Eww! What uncle did to the gi
rls and wives
and boy
s and biddies, things I don’t understand—
the ghosts have tried and failed to teach me—
p
oking and slicing, bad fun with new mouths.
Uncle was bored, I
found, with the normal holes
kings plug to steal the world and stink it up.
He
thought that nature was too stingy,
t
hought knives could make boring meat nicer.
The south’s my blank—a quarrel of fake crows.
Northwest, the blackness thickens between the bulbs.
Northeast, a deer keeps running: endless
Night never nags unlucky hunters.
He entered h
igh priests’ widows, cooper’s wives,
coi
ners’ houseboats, the one-room huts
of cowherds, even be
ggars’ upturned
bathtub
s. Coin didn’t spare the big names,
and being poor and nameless was creepy too.
The nightwatch went diplopic: both meatguard
and pimp. Well, father, didn’t think I’d
round up the words and outtalk you, did you?”
“Lord Hades, I’m a king! This imposter”—“Pes!”
Hades commanded. “Fange þer thee let!” He did:
“Walls that puckered tight in daylight
bloomed, and doorknees bowed over backward
for Corinth’s Aphrodite. Her raped curls
kept their native headskin, which failed and tried
to furrow loose. Her nightgown yawned gold
yarn and yanked birdfur,
while xeric trophies fluttered above her wineless
boob. She usually came for love and love’s
particells, but often people
simply needed
to hear her sing, and even the victims, once
they’d keyed their peepers, could almost think they perched
before the pew of Aphrodite’s
passerine choir.
King Aeolus, by all I’ve heard
from ghosts who knew him (I didn’t. Born
after his death, I came too tardy),
ruled like a milkmaid.
His tyranny rang sweet, so the gray gummed slave
forgot resentment, and the coiner,
noting Aeolus never scolded,
boned—half way up—on shame.
Father, I’m told your father spent his nights
fingering seadirt, amused by the mysteries
of numbers, lines, ellipses; Corinth’s
tightgirls and wives had no hope or worry
that he would come between their husband’s loom
or father’s bed. But poor uncle only got
grandfather’s love of numbers. Uncle—
when he was king, you had to learn them:
on winter nights Corinthians knew their odds
of death and rape were high, so despite the cold
the wise ones hid in rainpipes, winetubs,
amphorae, catacombs, piles of kindling.
Children snored away while their parents woke.
The new king built a temple to innocence
where orphans prayed in splendor, and he
made it a funeral crime to fondle
a boy or tightgirl younger than fourteen years.
Coronation morning, a gibbet cocked,
and fourteen short-eyes hanged. But uncle
worried problems grandfather wouldn’t
Is the Styx repealing the southern shore?
Northwest, a livid woman lopes across.
Northeast, the stick-man’s press gang scavenge
futtocks of bone on their knees and knuckles.
imagine needed solving: is one man split
by bulls in Aries greater or less than two
women reamed by rams in Taurus?
Only experience could teach him,
not scrolls or seadirt furrows. I try to plough
boustrophedon, and paddle scroll to ghost,
ghost to scroll. But I’m too old now.
Father, you owe me a beard.
Uncle dipped his beard in oxwine. Ghosts
tell me that as a boy he was so polite
and holy he outdid his father’s
niceness. Too bad he wasn’t
the second born. When uncle went up the screw,
my father shunned his wine—did you stub your toes
when you heard him coming, father,
just as you bumped in—” “Go lie your ‘dayless
day’ away: you’ll never claw back the height
that dying short denies you.” “Stynt þy clappe!”
Hades, giggling, rebuked him.
“Tell forth þy tale, child, and spare it nothing.”
“Lord Hades, primogeniture isn’t fun.
He fled his own first-born—though it would’ve been
easy to overtake you, coward,
flying my pony of bones. Well, father,
you didn’t think of that! Did you stub your head?
Where’s that wit they brag of? Has dying dumbed
you down? I’d like to think your brother
scared you away, but your friends, your only
loyal friends, dead cowherds, informed me, no,
it wasn’t cowardice, it was cleverness
that made you shun your brother. Maybe
cowherds aren’t liars. I wasn’t born yet.
When was fleeing uncle’s court least deadly?
When blue grass would be glad to escape the noon
even among the boiling shadows
lining the tummies of royal cattle.
You took them north to the oracle
stubbing Parnassus, eager to get the truth
from priests whose living leaks
out of an endlessly rotting serpent.
You knew your cleverness couldn’t solve
all your problems, which is a minimal
mark of cleverness: to know
death can outroll any well-scrolled crook.
The legless gateway didn’t try to spook
or welcome pilgrims. Only an epsilon
(fifth in the alphabet, the loveless
wedding of bosomy two with randy
three) dwelled above the curve, a hermit
emptying stone, cut loose from the company
a word would furnish. Had the rodent
killer forgotten to close a proverb?
Asphodel meadows mantle the albino south,
yet northwest pythons latticed with tears absorb
no sunlight from her stony bolster.
Northeast, the cairn parades arrivants.
Or was the lonely letter
designed to puzzle pilgrims? You still don’t know?
You bragged four chiseled gills would
turn that epsilon into a sigma.
On the chorus beyond the gate, the priests
frolicked in albs made up of eleven hundred
eleven mice pelts pinned together
heads attached. The priests hurried
one of your brother’s bulls to the red slabs
and poop near the altar. A long hard job:
instead of hands, their armnecks pouted
lyres, the price of ordination.
They told me what you mumbled: ‘It’s easier
to chew the moon than to narrow down
the reason for this mutilation.
Playing themselves with plectra
pinched between toes or teeth doesn’t amplify
the beauty of their hymns. Let me speculate. . . .
Three reasons: one, Apollo’s tone-deaf;
two, Olympians hope to irritate us
until our blasphemies court their violence;
or three, the priests made up this requirement
to fake belief.’ Remember, father?
Choppers kept dropping, and hooves kept plucking
teeth, while lyres, bruised out of tune, kept up
a hymn so loud it made the profane bulls
envy their brother at the altar.
Fumbling gashes uncorked enough wine
to drop the bull at last. Then you screwed white
stairs down a limestone cauliflower ear
until you reached the brain beneath:
the oracle spackled the walls with palms full
of snake meat ripened black, but the ivory
flysprouts worked to negate that stain—
a million wriggling failures. Python’s
spinekernels teetered, glowing barrows.
Hand to nose, you asked what you came to ask:
‘How can I kill Salmoneus, king of Corinth?’
The oracle gulped the wall and licked down;
scales webbed her skin, a white tetter.
“Beaker pus and Being a waste—more nonsense!
Let me go back home if it’s not on fire.
Yes, I know, it could be much worse. I’m only
doomed to dumb questions.”
The oracle gagged, and a stone the size
of a full-grown infant dropped from her lips and rolled,
between the feet of priests who
knelt to report what her stomach acid
had burned in the stone: a woman wept
beside a reaper rubbing his glutted gut.
The oracle wriggled to a corner,
winding rare fumes down a limestone furrow.
You asked—they told me—‘Why do the gods demand
that wisdom enter the world this way?
It isn’t right.’ The priests converted
dirty pictures into tidy verses:
There is no south in snaggletooth stone, a coiled
palate. The fake crows have bestowed white alms,
northwestern vermin. Northeast, wayward
seagulls are paddling guano paddies.
‘Tyro plain but true goes dousing fratricide’s bedrock.
Buy her from the most demented cowherd your city
suffers to well up. Keyed to hatred, hammered by wedlock,
Tyro’s belly will horn, an anvil in regicide’s smithy.’
Although he sold his beef to Aeolus long
ago, the cowherds knew Suppositus well.
He kept his farm, a wedge of thistles,
Io the milkcow, his daughter—mother—
and a trunk too kind to the wind and rain.
They were real, no strangers. The oracle
didn’t hatch them out of dactyls.
Once a boar, who preferred the unburied
woods, the greeny ones, to the mushroom woods
that hail no acorns, lured your horse past
Tyro lurching like a hounded
balance of buckets alluring midday’s
dry and dogged tongues. She had little chance
of tempting you to halt, let alone unhorse.
The milkmaid was—admit it—barely
pretty. I failed to inherit mother’s
dignified plainness—wish I had, don’t you, father?
Ghosts who knew her goodness (I can’t include
myself) have said its beauty made her
one of the loveliest mortal women,
grungy or glyptic. Mother’s poor look
warded off bad fun. And her thin lips
more often bled on stubbled water
buckets than gulped from purple goblets.
She worked so hard—no loafing the afternoon
away. Her ribcage barred a heart both ripe
and caulked and anchored, which prevented
any indulgence of girly whimsy.
She nursed her loafing father a long time,
dropping her hoe or bucket or rake or rag
soon as he cried for help or food or
company. Father and mother lasted
because she nagged his acre, somehow
flirting out beans and cabbages every year;
because she milked the cow; because she
fingered the forest for grubs and acorns.
They had no neighbors. The cowherds kept off.
That’s how the old man liked it. But every spring
couriers honey-quiet, mirror-
quick left a box on the doorcuff.
Its innards never varied: five pure coin torques.
This was the only time the old man
got out of bed all year: to bury
five more torques in the hollowed stone
beneath his mattress. Tyro didn’t complain.
She loved him. Who else taught her the things the cow,
the rag, the rake, the beans, the buckets,
the acorns and grubs kept to themselves?
The south renews its limit. The beak peels glare,
high enough to fall a little, the northwest wind
aiding our mission. The mock sun
scratches the ecliptic, ascending northeast.
Her father was no wise man, but smart enough
to till his tiny experience
under the sandnail of repetition:
‘Incest evil! A father no father
who doesn’t warn the young’uns. With incest, no
Zeus can know who will own his bolts, no
Artemis know herself. A plane leaf
never an oak leaf, a horned bull never
a hornless! But with incest you can’t tell.
If, as you say,’ his daily hate speech, ‘you love
me, kill whatever walks in incest.
Life without difference deviant death.’
She cooked outside and carried his bowl to bed
and pinched his morning lice while he lipped his mash.
She always hoped ‘They’re done for,’ but next
morning his head would hop again.
Her bed was the hay of the milkcow’s pen.
That’s where you found her, fretting dough udders, the dawn
you raided with your dowry, scaling
diamond cordage.
Tightlipped, the milkmaid showed her “No”
through rounding noseholes. The cowherd reared up: ‘Go!
Take this man! As father to daughter,
so the king to us tiny fathers.
Remember who you are, and obey! My old age!
Not a daughter a daughter who disobeys.
His mattress cleaner than your mashed hay.
Go with this man! Let him lend a spare slave—
to my Demeter—or three—to delve,
and tease out beans and cabbages for my meal,
and milk the cow, and maybe
finger the forest for grubs and acorns.’
Her fingers, harder from work, icky with fear,
couldn’t fend off your soft, dry grip.
Mother sobbed to quit the cowherd,
but her first gawk at Corinth’s gateway,
lesson alpha, proved that her leak was more
than the raw wife’s traditional
and brief protest against her new home:
breaking in knives on the shackled presters
of mutes and cripples, the king held court,
ripping his mind to mend an enigma: why
do some necks arc their wine like fuck while
others drain down like diarrhea?
‘Dear king, dear brother, welcome this girl, my bride!’
‘My bride, my brother, welcome these knives, my dears!’
His cutlery was too engrossing:
uncle seemed idler than he was.
The old queen argued ‘the House Aeolus cannot
admit such a menial bride,’ but Salmoneus
hankered for a wedding banquet:
just what his new knives always wanted.
The southern head dangles from a beak-wide neck—
and there, Corinth. Northwest, Parnassus cups
her sacred hole. Northeast, Dirce
tosses from stone, a perpetual bull ride.
Since coronation night, no one dared object
to the king’s bad fun. His mother—
your
mother—would not keep tightlipped this time:
if he permitted the celebration
of such a menial wedding, she’d never give
her son and king her counsel again. ‘How can you
challenge my right? How can you
“menial” me? Oh, I hate an uddered
gap—I could eat my gums. Oh, I hate the dry
and toothless ones! My brother has rights! How can . . . ?
If
I can’t hear your precious counsel,
Neither can
you.’ He screwed down,
redded her lips with his fists and let
her wrinkles out of her dimpling robes. The hall
became a sculptor’s stockyard; no one
showed courage—only your mother’s
handmaid, Sero, who ran up to veil the naked
queen and caught a tight fist with her loose head.
Sero went sleepy. The others kept still,
unfurling gibbets for sobs while uncle
pruned your mother’s ears to the mastoid bone.
He gagged her with her wimple and knotted it
behind the head, a multi-purpose
bandage. ‘“Menial” my right? For decades
you staunched the royal groin. Can you still absorb?’
He kicked her to her chambers. It seems you are
the last to die of those who witnessed
grandmother’s earing. I’ve talked to almost
everyone. Their stories don’t always match,
but they agree that you said and did
nothing to stop your brother,
though your knifesock hung full. The cowherds
claim doing nothing was a cunning trick.
A simpler explanation (or so it seems
to me) is you’re a coward: that fits
what I recall of your winking back.
A royal wedding nags, “Where’s my sacrifice?”
The king brought in whole herds and emulsified
the palace air with wine and paeans;
spits were spinning, so priests were grinning.
Every time he looked at the bride he laughed:
why would his brother marry a girl so plain?
He leaped around the table, asking
guest after guest. But none could answer,
so he answered for them—jokes so rude
I cannot make them make sense. He wouldn’t sit
and eat his meal until the maker
sang.
That’s him! He wasn’t lying. They didn’t burn
the meat perch. It’s plucked. On the wing, he must’ve
smudged the follicles. Ah, purple
blacker than murex mucous!
The slaves near Manε sung notes too high
to hear and strummed impalpable strings.
Home again, the maker kneed tile,
bowed to the king, a cold tonic,
cradling a barbitos. When his mother heard
her baby’s ears were blind, she killed four
five-legged turtles, hailed Poseidon,
braided a reedy dinghy, and pushed it
over the gulf’s milked bosom. The breeze nipped
the baby down the bank where Aeolus held
his angle in one hand, while the other
doodled a seadirt icosahedron.
‘Waah! Waah!’ Grandfather fished by waxlight.
‘Waah! Waah!’ Grandfather lifted Manε
into his fretboard bosom,
counting, for lullaby, the steps back
home, where he taught the improbable rhapsode all
the arts of air and plectrum and memory.
Grandmother wasn’t pleased, but Manε’s
beat loosed weeping so lovely
he made himself immovable even when
grandfather died and grandmother’s boy turned king.
His latest patron liked percussion:
‘Manε, today we are celebrating.
Today is rare. So why do you always sing
about the past? I hate it. I hate the PAST:
Dead heroes capturing forgotten
cities, or gods unknotting tightgirls
a pyre had unraveled before our birth!
My brother’s happy days are ahead of him:
a face that plain will not grow plainer.
Let’s hear a song about unborn heroes.’
Hiding his chin, embracing his knees, a slave
wobbled across the tiles like an addle egg
until he reached a dab of dusty
sunlight and leapt up and unsocked unseen
weapons at absent enemies. Manε thanked
the slave. Today he needed no mime to help
him read the pink rings of the regal
hole. His plectrum tolled echo torques:
‘How can I remember the rage of Mustergrief,
a hero yet unfathered? And will the Muses laugh
to hear me beg for knowledge of what the Fates alone—
gods I dare not pester— could graft on my deaf tune?
I will not pester the Muses and dare not pester the Fates.
Lead my fingers, song, for the gods can lend no frets,
and breathe yourself in, song, and I will breathe you out,
or drag my fingers, song, cool limbs from the victor’s cart.
Mustergrief is taking form in falling words:
his red hair riddles a helmet immune to swords,
and his diaphragm fans wider than a trireme’s stern,
and his eyes are always cueing not yet widowed wives to mourn.
The marketplace? A garden of twilit scraps.
A nibble? Hhm, damn vulture’ll beat me there.
The boy’s asleep beside the fishpond.
No need to fear his unfledged slingshot.
Is he the titans’ daydream, the one who might kill Zeus?
He journeys to the city tentacled with gates,
and he fights to quell a cuckold— no, that’s just a ruse:
he really fights for practice, rehearsing, rehearsing the day he’ll rise
against the cloudless mountain, against its idle king.
And I see him palm a footrace, and I hear the scabbard clang
on his left leg leather, and it looks like Mustergrief
tracks his own reflection or the sear air’s glare glyph.
But no—the one who’s running a shadow’s length ahead
is panting Paleknuckle, unable to retract
his brow from the riddled helmet he stole from Mustergrief,
who lent it to his lover, as though it could’ve kept him safe.
Three times they round the hot spring, three times they round the cold.
They plash the wounds of bodies whose wine has not congealed.
Men watch them from the campfires, men watch them from the walls.
Their sweat makes glutted vultures hungry enough to beak their quills!
If Paleknuckle runs round the cold spring one more time,
perhaps he’ll run forever, perhaps I’ll always strum
this barbitos, and no one will ever run him down.
But all strings rot or break, and all heels one day yield to bone.
Zeus keeps wringing and gnawing his white beard.
And Hermes pours the fighters’ sizzling dooms in gourds
and brings out the golden balance. But when he dusts it off
they see it turned to iron, they see rust pock gold leaf.
“Don’t worry,” chirps their father, “just weigh the sizzling dooms!”
And he strums his beard in spirals on his spindle thumbs.
and Athena and Apollo count to four and drop
each gourd in a separate basin and see the acned balance flap.
The beam breaks down the middle, and the gourds break on the tile,
and the two dooms they laid up mingle in one pool,
and the gods cannot determine what the mishap means.
Zeus yanks his eyebrows and yanks his grizzled stones and swoons.
And his quiver goes down with him and rolls to the sky curb
and pours its loud arrows, which land in one hot gob
on Thebes, annihilating besiegers and besieged,
the partisans of either son of the coward king who gouged
his eyeballs when the city needed them the most.
The lightning’s impartial, turns everyone to dust:
the hairless crone, the baby, the virgin, and the slut;
both those who pray devoutly and those who curse the gods with all their might.
Paleknuckle turns round and yields to Mustergrief:
the yielder’s ears are bleeding; the other was born deaf.
And Mustergrief impales him: a new hole spews a soul,
but Paleknuckle’s spearhead, falling, nicks the victor’s heel.
He drags away Paleknuckle, whose kinsmen weep their shame.
And Mustergrief, unglutted, lashes him to the beam
of his once-gilded cart, rusted by neglect,
and each day drags the carcass across that gore-manured tract
four times round the cold spring, and four times round the hot.
Zeus torments his moustache; King Courage rolls in shit.
Meanwhile, the greeny spear-wound that marks the hero’s heel
each day grows slightly bigger . . . like a . . . sprig of . . . kale?’
Mucous murex than blacker
purple, ah. Follicles the smudged
must’ve he, wing the on. Plucked it’s. Perch meat the
burn didn’t they. Lying wasn’t he. Him that’s!
The plectrum dropped. Unrhyming riot stopped
the song, and slaves came running, ‘The queen is dead!’
But only one among them, Sero,
honored her mistress by mowing headskin
and letting a bit of the red within
her cheek see day. The queen had a good reason
to flout the wedding with her absence.
‘Hanging herself,’ the king reflected,
‘the last way for mother to get revenge,
to spoil my wedding banquet. “The queen is dead”
has spoiled our fun, poor Sisyphus!
Not because mother warrants mourning:
I hate a killjoy gap. You listening?
I hate her, though if
I wore their thing I would’ve
done the same. What else is there?
Pity and guilt are a woman’s weapons.’
You cannot burn a queen without sacrifice.
In sacerdotal cowskin, the king clogged
the palace air with myrrh and oxwine.
Smoke and chariots, hoofy doodles.
His wedding gift to mother was all the gold
and slaves of his dead mother. The slaves were glad
to serve, at last, a kind lady—
all but Sero, slow but true.
My mother, plain in face but remarkable
in mind, soon mastered every royal
duty. My mother was a stallion
pilot, for when it was necessary,
when you were gone, playing games with cowherds,
and when experience took up the king’s time,
mother even managed common
profit: when quarrels arose in Corinth—
among the squeaky rich or the squalid poor—
it didn’t matter—mother would reconcile
everyone with wise decisions
kindly tongued, and the people started
thinking some god—probably Athena—sent
mother to rescue Corinth and right its wrongs.
There was no anger, jealousy, or
worry she couldn’t allay. Even
maimed survivors of royal whimsy ditched
their hate and learned to love the king again.
But Tyro had no Tyro.
Her father’s absence—hail Lord Hades!—
a full moon perched on her windowlip,
a slack-jawed perigee stalking her nosleepnights.
She begged Suppositus to come
live in the palace. Nothing could get him
to leave his home to the ants, although they’d eaten
half his roof already. The men she sent there
only retrieved his “Drop dead, inbreds!”
Helpless uncle wouldn’t let her
Ride-bull perpetual a, stone from tosses
Dirce, southwest. Hole sacred her
cups Parnassus, southeast. Corinth, there and—
neck wide-beak a from dangles head northern the.
leave the palace. Who else would wake up early
as a milkmaid and handle the tedium
of governing? So mother didn’t
see the cowherd for many years.
Like a boulder carving the—I was born—
carving the weepy stream without damming it.
Lord Hades, I concede this coward
wasn’t the worst father: somehow
he kept me snug and blind to the king’s bad fun
and kept me blind to my own blindness.
But keeping children blind—Lord Hades,
I say you’re wise not to sire more eyes!
I played games in the walledwoods and thought myself
free. . . . Brothers, and even fathers, die.
Their ghosts turn up down here, and we may
hear them and touch them again. But walledwoods
die slow and dry—petal by petal, branch
by branch; if walledwoods have ghosts, they don’t turn up
down here. The walledwoods had a secret
way of secreting secrets: roam it
daybreak to dinner, something would always keep
unseen, a tree untopped or a spring unsplashed—
and different ones tomorrow! The paved
world past the walledwoods won no awakedreams.
—Queen, I’ve gathered my history
from anecdotes of dead bystanders,
and the words with which I tell it
come from the scrollhouse—hail Lord Hades!
My memory got pruned. My experience,
good as wombdead. Only authority
can hear and parse a tale worth telling,
one worth wasting immortal patience.
No, this dead man wasn’t the worst father.
No, but surely the worst husband: what
he did to her before my birth was
worse than grandmother’s earache.
It’s true he never beat me or scolded me,
but he’s earned my hate and a fangled hurt.
Lord, if Tartarus keeps yawning,
let it yank that dead man deep.”
“Gods don’t take orders from cutthroats. Time you
learned your place, old boy, in our untold time.
We’ll decide what Sisyphus did and where his
mistakes will take him.”
“Please forgive me, queen. How the father’s bad talk
blots the black son! Forgive me, queen,
goddess. Should I ‘now’ now . . . ?
Mother sent talkers to the trunk
every week, talking the man to share
her royal comfort, spoiled by guilt.
He had to cough his ‘no’ through clotting
girdles of lice, but he still coughed it.
Southwest ascending, ecliptic the scratches
sun mock the. Mission our aiding
wind northwest the, little a fall to enough high,
glare peels beak the. Limit its renews south the.
She didn’t know his mind had clenched a lead
over his feeble meat in the footrace
for absolute decrepitude.
The cowherd commanded his slaves to beat all
talkers away, so they weren’t allowed
to see how bad his mind went. One week, my last
at home, instead of welts, the talkers
brought back a pair of milkmaid’s yokes
on their necks. ‘Thngk, thngkl.’ I can still hear
Suppositus gnawing his white beard, face down,
his neck, his arms, his shins, his tiny
groinlegs barked in torques, which rattled
the walledwoods, coin against bone, to wails
of ‘Io, Io!’ as they brought him straight
to the mothers’ corner of the palace.
‘A kidnapped clown,’ my friends imagined.
Sero died too late. She remembered him.
He didn’t seem to know his daughter.
Sero remembered him. Their questions
always received impertinent answers.
He didn’t seem to remember Sero.
He made no move to fend off the hands that took
his torques away, but gripped a small one,
drool-lunar, bone against coin, and bitter
between his gums. The old boy endured a bath.
Mother and Sero carried him to a couch
and heaped his torques beneath it. Mother
wept while he snored with his eyes open.
Royal comfort didn’t renew the cowherd’s
memory, but he never forgot to take
his torque out of his mouth when mother
asked him a question he wouldn’t answer.
Most of his meals avoided his hopping mouth,
none of his talk made sense.
His third—by far his sweetest—childhood
sucked.
But Sero knew from the first look. Fear,
she told me, kept her mouth shut. Apollo lashed
down to Atlas, Cronos torqued, and
Sero died up to her name.
‘Rash me, Tyro, rash me. I veiled you. That man—
I was even younger than you are, mistress—
thirty years ago, just a riddle curl, I
met him in this loom.
Secrets that I promised your husband’s mother—
promised her I’d tie before anyone, not
even cats and dogs and the tall-eared bog leads,
heard them from my mouth.
As a boy, the king was afraid of women—
anyway, strange women. She had to tutor
him the night before he received the golden
scepter of office,
Paddies guano paddling are seagulls
wayward, southwest. Vermin southeastern,
alms white bestowed have crows fake the. Palate
coiled a, stone snaggletooth in north no is there.
teach him other ways to enjoy a woman,
ways around the Gharybdis (
her word) he veered
funneling twice. Oh, what some mothers
too for their polis!
Every curl fell bray to his need for practice.
Even me. His mother eluded sunlays,
spent the wrong nights tracking her boy’s adventures,
telling a patient
scribe whatever action she beeped through marble
grannies. Years blown squinting, years blown piercing
wax in unlit corridors nearly blinded
three of their four eyes,
but she loved to witness the king’s triumphant
use of what she taught him, and lighting down her
victories was proof what she witnessed wasn’t
only a nightmare.
One was hard to master. She cut him so drunk,
blinded him with wine, so he wouldn’t notice
where she bored him. Didn’t foresee his mother,
bounding the dew-thick
walls with wrinkled balms, would be watching every
trick she played. Not clever enough, the boar curl.
Haloa induced him to reeve his weary
harem and count horns.
Pad men carried Callida to this corner
of the palace. The curl ate well here.
But she dried to run almost every morning
when I fetched her
peals—and pit me, scratched me—my arms rooked awful.
But she never managed to get around me.
No one doled me what she would have to suffer
after she cave birth.
I was only doing the things my mistress
doled me, careful never to touch her belly.
What I did I’d too it a ken, my mistress,
if you zed too it.
When her belly’s trouble began, the pad men
bushed me out of there, so I couldn’t z. your
birth, and though my spread-eagled ear invited
lavishing splinters,
it was burr quiet inside. Rater,
rate, I saw the outcome, a lovely tauter.
Moons purged, moons binged, and you sucked her nipples,
rocked in the same loom,
sucked until that man over there was galled in,
plushing like a curl—you could dell he’d never
pen inside the palace. My mistress cave him
cubits of cold dorks,
promised more each weir if he kept the secret,
doled him he would tie if he didn’t keep it,
handed him the baby, and doled him, “Keep it
safe in your ox-stall.”
Arrivants parades cairn the, southwest.
Bolster stony her from sunlight no
absorb tears with latticed pythons southeast yet,
north albino the mantle meadows asphodel.
Off he went. My mistress—I would’ve dried to
talk her out of if I knew her meaning—
rocked herself inside with her pad men. I heard
nothing, no fighting.
Soon the pad men game out, their arms lapping
winedark bar cells, carried them somewhere secret
far from loyal noses, and perned them. I gleaned
wine off the gobbles.”
Then mother asked the cowherd why the queen
didn’t pay him to pin her newborn heels
and hang them in the eagles’ nursery.
He was too stupid or wise to recall.
Mother dealt the blankets and toothed her
hair
in darkness. Ser
o keyed me outside. I heard
no tears, no curses. Mother
waited
for your slow and wandering steps home.
I
don’t know what she said and can never ask her.
I d
on’t know what you said, and you ran away
too early. Mother must’ve told you
she was
your niece, and I guess you told her
something ab
out the oracle, why you wed
a girl so plain. I knelt near the fishpond’s c
urb
and tried to spot the golden babies,
keeping my shadow from grazing water
and hoping
not to spook them out of sight.
She didn’t kiss me, arm me, c
onsole me, pray.
I felt the knife before I sa
w it:
hate can pour a sharp libation.
Maybe she hoped surprise would abort my fear.
Maybe—kind, wise mother—she knew a kiss
goodbye can’t nurse the murdered. Maybe
mother at last joined the royal family.
My neck poured so much wine in the fishpond—I
didn’t know boys contained so much wine. The splash
brought slaves and owners running
too late: it seemed I was dead already.
My meat could not throw up my ghost—did you flee
your meat quickly, father, and scoot to Styx?
No one knows how bad it hurt—both
weakwombed mother and headstrong baby.
My agoraphobic ghost gobbled all
my strength. To hike an eyeflap was
impossible. But ears are flap-free:
like it or not, I had to listen—
but I won’t tell every name you named her (bad
words are poor fun): ‘I know what I should’ve known:
niece or no niece, never wed
a peasant. They’re crows at heart though cows
in face! But words won’t hurt you enough for justice.
But how, you cut him—your baby’s throat? How?
You look at the sky! You flaunt your neck!
Tell me what shit-eating god seduced you?’
Knuckles and knees their on bone of futtocks
scavenge gang press man’s-stick the, southwest.
Sludge the adorn ripples livid the, southeast.
Shore northern the repealing Styx the is?
‘Fathers, if they’re wise, would be doubly wise
to father nothing but fools. Wise darlings
either go to waste or become too useful
to fools to live long.’
‘What god taught you this dumb answer? Why?
One, you cut his throat—! And one,
will such a mother lecture fathers?
Sooner or later, I’ll be king!’
‘Not my wisdom, yours—no, not just yours, I
meant Aeolus too.’ When she named that name,
the tears that mother spared me poured,
leashing her speech on a pale of heartbeats.
‘Wives must tell their husbands the truth, but no god
says we have to pity them. Truth reaps weeping,
weeping rots in sunlight, and sunlight seeds lies.
Melody’s tyrant
never let me learn how to belt out lyres
or strum my hate. What a bitter ditty
I would sing against you and all beardwaggers
had I the talent!’
You groaned and nabbed her elbow and splashed
the fishpond. Mumbling—‘Phoebus’ or ‘fuck’?—
you proved your lungs had air to waste
while water wringed mother’s.
You held her head down hard, but I didn’t hear
her scream in ‘no, don’t,’ splash in ‘won’t let you,’ gulp
in ‘yes, please.’ Hip-deep, mumbling,
caught in a trellis of filial wine,
caroused by carp, you ended that wedding—
my last chance at liquid revenge.
I wish I wore veins hot as Hydra’s,
wish that my wine could’ve boiled you both!
Wailing Sero waahed her eyes in the fishpond.
Next time I’ll ask how long she’d been standing there.
Her mouth let loose the mouths of elbowed
slaves. Their choiring wails disturbed
uncle, still our king, at an altar’s curb.
Wine from an incompletely butchered bull
dripped off uncle as he ran up
gnashing the knife of his holy business.
There you were, father, hip-deep, your hands still torqued
around her neck. Your head didn’t rise above
the things of your dumbfounded brother.
Sero answered his absent question:
‘Punish me, my king, not your brother—me versed!
Callida cave birth to a secret tauter,
yours. The queen gilled Callida, put your tauter
in a cowherd’s
care. I knew so much, and I should’ve known more
sooner. Sisyphus and your tauter married,
neither knowing. Soon as I realized I
doled all to Tyro
Hunters unlucky nags never night
endless: running keeps stag a, southwest.
Bulbs the between thickens blackness the, southeast.
Torques year’s next the counting keeps scribe eyed-noth the.
gauze I never thought such a kind, wise wife would
go pad. But I should’ve. She gilled your grandson!
Sisyphus went pad and drowned your tauter
like a could father.”
Grandfather picked me up from the fishpond’s curb,
laying my neckhinge on his armcurb.
You didn’t speak. My heart unstrung its
timbrel. My ghost continued piping
low in the belly. Nobody knew. He passed
me on to Sero. You didn’t say anything.
Mum as your niece, my mother—
father, you coward, what a relief
to see him spit his knife and begin to curse
the gods! Oh, what wild blasphemy! Years
devoted to the baddest bad fun
fattened grandfather’s vocabulary.
He must’ve heard you laugh. But he didn’t stop:
he blasphemed each Olympian one by one
then cursed them all again, deploying
filthier words than the last round boasted.
My quaking ghost—you godless coward!—
coiled tighter in my belly. It couldn’t key
the bad words out. The night was noisy
even when grandfather stopped to guzzle
or catch his air. I could hear the slaves
drag screechy treemeat over the cobblestones
and pile it loud. I didn’t know our
hot hive was rising against the morning’s
hurried death games. If you had known I’d feel
the hot hive, you wouldn’t have been so quick
to get the death games done with—even
you, my father, a godless coward.
Corinth ran low on priests, and the king’s brain curdled,
so, profaned by murder, you led the games,
burning the cow, churning the dirge.
You were one who orbited
the hot hive, kindling its base.
But I kept in, coiled tight, and heard the treemeat
shifting beneath us and the crackling
bundles of hyssop, the popping syrup.
The smells! The smells would get much worse before
they got better. All a surprise to me:
I didn’t know what death meant, hadn’t
played any death games. But you and I were
ignorant—in different ways! You mouthed
the prayers our death game called for. A hypocrite,
a mumbler! The hot hive
drowned out your dirge, and the king came cursing.
Waah! went the slave boy angling the reins. A gong
hung from the king’s bung neck. As the slave toiled
to keep four horses stomping
dusty ellipses around the hot hive,
Pebble never we’d liquor a for douse
antennae cocked queen’s-ant the, southwest.
Slats bare out fans peacock a, southeast.
North retreating the goose to dares drawbridge the.
the king continued cursing the Olympians.
Wild zeal! When his air hurt,
he guzzled wine and honey,
banging his boobplate gong with the nailer
he’d used to brain the high priest of Zeus and three
beardless acolytes, whose peeled meat smoothed
away hieratic ruts and hoof-holes
gouging the gravel that staunched their peepers.
I can’t repeat grandfather’s blasphemies
although I heard them clearly. I’m scared the gods
above will hear. Can Zeus’s lightning
mine your measureless caves, Lord Hades?
I can repeat my grandfather’s handiwork,
although my eyes were coined: I can mint the tales
of ghosts whose eyes were open.
When was experience ever enough?
Though Sero had her eyes wide open,
she didn’t get to see how the death games
played out. Guessing that my ghost
feared to flee my meat, she climbed
the hot hive and almost nabbed my charred
elbow before collapsing. I don’t know how
(she can’t explain) she knew my scared ghost
lagged in the hot hive. Her squealing nearly
lowered the loud king—hail Lord Hades!
Before my eardrums fizzled, I heard the thunder,
which didn’t ease the dog days,
didn’t lighten the eyes with darkness,
didn’t give a warning gargle:
the naked thunder threaded the blue-eyed noon:
the king went up in ash and ozone.
Zeus may show mercy to evil-doers
while blameless boys keep burning so slowly. Lord
Hades, I know you’re better: you won’t choke down
his crimes. Hades, I beg you: drop my
godless father in Tartarus.
I don’t know all the crimes he’s committed since
becoming king, but those he committed while
the hot hive burned were bad enough. I
cannot say this, and I cannot say that:
I died before my ripeness—I’m scared of gods.
But when he tells you he can’t explain, he lies.
The truth? My father loved his brother’s
blasphemy: it was much more fun
than his own coronation. The Delphic plot
to father uncle’s death in a milkmaid’s womb
was laughable—and you laughed, father!
Regicide wasn’t your real purpose.
That fat drunk wasn’t so hard to kill. Your scheme
was not to kill a king but to rile him up
to shout the words you feared to mumble.
No one, yes, no one has hated immortals
as much as you, but hate is no defense.
Uncle wore the lips, but the words were yours.
He fried, she fried, I fried—pliers
keep the last corner raw.”
The
son
fell
mum.
Out of his yellow smother, Hades squeaked:
“Arghhede, arghhede, arghhede and figaldry!
Oh, Sisyphus, my dom is flegge.
Wher-til I sholde imilcen lorels?
Of thyn reprise avise thee wel. A wough
it were, and thou were quit.” As a black wine drop
lent the boy a liquid dimple,
Sisyphus wiped his own mouth and answered:
“Lord
Hades, hear my story before you doom me.
Though I must admir
e your little friend’s
cleverness, I
won’t let his lies
dirty the mi
nd of a god. A pity
that such a storyteller had to die so young!
He even do the peons in di
fferent
voices! Poo
r Athens, your agora has
l
ost a talented rhetorician,
my cute accuser. Oh, Athens, who’s left to rouse
your rabble? Lord, the tale I will tell is plain—
we men of Corint
h lack your Attic
glibness—but pl
ain tales can pluck liars.
He told so many lies—whe
re should I start?
One—yes, I married a milkmai
d, but not because
an oracl
e advised it: Tyro
ear
ned my love with her unmatched beauty.
Two, she was not my niece, and I
’ve never, three,
gone as far as
Delphi—no, never gone
beyond the Isthmus, never touched
the north
ern bank of the Gulf of Corinth,
never left the Peloponnese until
I reached your realm, my Lord. If you love the
truth
(no doubt you do) you know that slande
r
is
an offence that has driven fibbers
to Tartarus before. You should send h
im down,
just for a
little while: he will gain respect
for truth—and wi
sdom’s right hand, silence.
Ixion lied about fingering Hera’s
knees, just her knees, and he reels
on a wheel
of
fire, though no one—no one!—believed his boast.
And he deserves that wheel forever:
crimes of the mouth
are the most cutthroat.
Yes, I went hunting—that part is true—the day
I fi
rst met Tyro. Hunting a stag that leaped
al
ong the forest’s rim, forsaking
the forest’s
cover.
I nearly trampled blac
k-eyed Suppositus,
who staunched his wounds with oak leaves. My stag escaped.
the men, he moaned, were in his trunk-hut,
raping his daughter. What could he do?
I stabbed the men who guarded the door; inside
I found the king, my brother, about to hurt
the naked beauty prone beneath him:
Artemis wrung my midriff, ‘Stop it!’
(Oh, let me add, Salmoneus had no fear
of women or their secrets. He treated them
like boys because he thought that being
born was the worst thing one can suffer.)
I put my love for my king on hold and beat him
with the flat of my sword. At last, he let
her wriggle free. My brother, black-eyed,
winedark, sweeping the dirt for his scabbard—
that’s it: the last I saw of my king!
I gave a golden torque to the cowherd—all
I had—and put his weeping daughter
in my saddle. We out-rode the king’s wrath,
rode to Arcadia, up the foothills
and up the mountains until the cliffs
hindered hooves. We fled for more life—
touching the girl was my last intention,
although her body tautened her torn smock,
although we shared a saddle, and it was cling
to me or fall. She clung. One murky
noon we heard the north gargle.
Stars, diluted by fog and daylight,
crumbled their icy gound on our heads, and Zeus
kept dumping javelins, and Tyro
trembled behind me.
Loud hail clogged the ravines. I tried
to shield her with my back, but I feared the hail
would slide my horse beyond the pathway
killing all three.
Amid the rice and torchlight, we should’ve known
it was a wedding pageant. We found a cave,
which windy Oreads made echo—
little we knew—with our wedding carols.
Older, deader, now I could call that day
a morbid day, since out of its pleasure two
boys were born and both died early—
I’m not ashamed: take away the pleasures
that threaten death, what pleasures remain for men?
I needn’t prink that pleasure with Hymen’s name,
though he was there, if Hymen has ever
bothered attending a mortal wedding.
Nearly certain no one was tracking us,
we left Arcadia’s mountains for Mycenae
and lived within the golden palace,
welcomed by Atreus the Gentle.
Sheathed in that silken exile, we heard what happened:
poor Salmoneus rivaled the noise of Zeus
and caught a bright demise. I didn’t
laugh when I heard. I wasn’t happy.
I wept—a loving brother, a pious prince:
I couldn’t but be both. And I’d rather stay
with Atreus, but Corinth begged me,
‘Come home and take up your royal duty.’
Back in Corinth, Tyro gave birth to twins.
Twins—you liar! Both in Elysium—
must be—far from this runt’s slander!
Go there, Lord Hades! My boys will tell you.
The eldest died with Tyro. Apollo, bored
with lyres and false prophecy, dipped his barbs
in plague and riddled pious Corinth
just for the fun of it. Yes, I hate him,
but Apollo is the only Olympian
I hate. Apollo hobnailed my Tyro black.
My eldest son became a pustule
waiting to pop—I couldn’t touch him!
I won’t give up my hate, and although I’d like
to see them now, I have to return. My wife—
my second wife has proved my second
curse. That woman denies my body
the death rites a slave, let alone a king,
deserves. It hurts! My son—not the other twin
(he also died, though I can’t rightly
blame the tree-hugger for that.
Manε, my father’s bastard, who couldn’t play
the barbitos, not even before I cut
off all his digits—Manε hurt him,
hurt him in ways I will not name)—
my living son, my last—he’s in that woman’s
hands. . . . Almost everything that I love is dead,
but I can’t rest here till a pyre
burns my lost body clean.”
A green barrow tore the floor’s coal tile,
and Hades loafed upon its peak.
“A, weilawei, myn litel clergeon:
maugree myn hed, I moste be buxom
to lawe perdurable, although I thinke
he hath þee greved out of mesure and sholde
smerte bineþe a stark foþer:
Helle sholde awende hym to a cherle.
A, it is no drede: I moste delyvere hym.
But lawe perdurable hath never made
upon þe times deffinicioun.
Let hym bide here til his bones welken.”
Hearing—at last—a gap in the dialogue,
Samjoko took root and wrinkled her syrinx
to caw larnyngal tones the wingless
runt-beaks could follow:
“Lord, I spooked flies grouting his bloated navel,
irked ichneumons tracking his beetled bronchi,
angered worms crocheting heraldic sigma
round his cadaver.
The queen’s cuff dropped and revealed a nose
her husband rarely saw. She braved the stink
and spared him neither contradiction
nor a blunt whack from her honed beauty.
“Lord, you know that Sisyphus needs to go now:
law forgives a gash, but avenges pinpricks.
Let him go back up and rebuke the lawless
queen who betrayed him.”
“My quen, thyn hende glosyng of lawe is right—
ther may no god sey nay. And wheras pitee—
foryeve me, litel clergeon—renneth
rath in myn herte, Ichil assoille hym.”
Beneath dry eyes, the cheekbones unreeled
charcoal dimples. The boy coiled
his head between his biceps, ran out
sobbing—a boy.
“My dom is egre. Litel clergeon, foryeve me . . . !
Ichil assoill þis ipocrite, natheles:
hys pale carein drili festeth
coracine ging—for hys wyves hocour!
Every day þexperience preveth newe
þe treson wyves do hire seli men.
I telle can ten hondred thousand
tales of wommanly malengine
and brotilness. A, Hercules, lapidose
conquerour of monstres, þat Deanire,
the moistest monstre of al, shulde daunte yow!
Nessus, indight with a stottes membre,
belirt hire sodeinly. And she wolde have cast
hire lord a buton ende, but Hercules
kidde hym þat hys bow nas broken,
hitte hym at ful with one venimed arwe,
and slough hym in þe stereless boot afore
thei touched þe ferþer rive. While she made a chere
as þogh hir rescoue were cler lisse,
Deanire filled a pappe-fiole
at þarwes bruche. Herafter, she webbed a shirte
bismotered with þe blood, and yave
hyt to hir lord, whos lire worthe þester,
droppyng pus lyke a dynged guth-corn.
Whan he torent þe shirte, both his fel and maue
bowed from his bones, which brennede þe more; no se
was rau ynogh to quench hys brenning;
Hercules lived til hys bones gnidded.
Þat brenning, brenning, brenning and pestilence
fell on alle wyves bodies bidene and left
no gobet on þe bones! But Hermes thanne wolde
leden hem here to forlesen myn ethel.”
“Don’t you know that Hercules killed his first wife,
chopped up his boys’ bodies, and called it practice?
Shot you, stole your dog, forgot? Why lament his
textile pyre?
Deianira wasn’t the horseman’s girlfriend—
hadn’t even met him until his boat came
jingling tolls. Pure as a pinprick, wildly
cursing the horseman,
Deianira thrilled to see him twirling
on her husband’s arrow—the point of byword.
True, she kept the blood, but because the horseman
claimed it could patch up
love’s tears. Lord, my tears won’t adorn the story
of a girl that stupid. But Deianira
wove her husband the burning tunic
for a good reason:
Hercules was burning through every hussy
north of Oeta. Thought she could weave his love back—
thought, poor girl, the slippery hearts of husbands
secretly hankered
after traction. Oh, when she saw that madman
weeping on the grill of the bloody twill weave,
every wife-rigged pyre along Hyphasis
cooled in amazement
at the hemic lightning that boiled her heart dry.
Lord—you saw—her ghost wouldn’t go up Charon’s
gang-plank till she knew her beloved bowman’s
burning was done.”
“Lesynges! Lesynges! Lesynges and harlotries!
I scant mai daunt myn crevil to picche your man
in Tartarus—þe lawe go pipen!—
til I bithenke þe wyf he bideth.
And I bithenk agayn: hou if sendinge hym
up to his wyf were a werse wo
than picching hym binethe me? Shold I
gramen hym werse to graunte hys preiere?
A, what a swarled knotte . . . ! But I sholde ai
erde stable and merciable of deitee.
Sisyphus, oute! Þei pilke þy carein.
Mortherer, go! Lest my wrathe recuren.”
The lily on her brow, a semaphore—
don’t hurry back: next time it’ll hurt much more.
The peasant dropped his kettle, knowing
what the queen wanted before she called him:
“Sisyphus, go home. When you find your body,
worm the mouth. It hurts, but the other holes won’t
take you. Sweet Ascalaphus, won’t you guide him
back to the river?”
Before he turned, the queen revealed
a candid hexagon in her unlined palm:
beveling Sisyphus whiffed his white
hundred-eyed face till her fingers wilted.
The queen reunited her nose and her cuff.
Samjoko blinked. Ascalaphus bowed and left
the room. And Sisyphus required
no one to warn him, “Never look back!”
They crossed the drawbridge linking the banks acrawl
with glossy colonies.
The mushrooms lit the way, their sapphire
bubbles belying lackluster death.
And once again, the boy on his lean boar,
came loping toward him. Sisyphus wouldn’t look.
“Father, don’t forget: Lord Hades
isn’t the only patron of ghosts.
Some god—if not that whore—she broke my spear!—
will weep when I tell how I burned and rage
when I tell what you did. My words will
dictate justice. My words will quit you.”
The peasant caught his neck, and the boy squeaked:
“Let go! Your hands are dirty!” The too-tame mount
collapsed beneath its hanging rider,
folding itself in a ribcage ruin.
“Was it a lie?” the peasant asked, “I can’t
if it was a lie.” The dead boy pleaded, “Help!
Father, for once, be good!” “Can’t what?” asked
Sisyphus. The peasant told him:
“Night’s sweet wine brews noon’s tart spew.
Was it a lie? I won’t if it was a lie.”
Sisyphus watched the black feet pedal.
“It was no lie,” said the King of Corinth.
The tearless boy wept: “Please, don’t let them eat
my bones! Like dying again—so soon? Just drop
me in the moat. I’ll sled the icy
Phlegethon down to the happy meadows.”
“I’ll do what I can, poor boy. I do what I can.
‘Repletes loaf hard,’ the ant-queen tells me.” He yanked
the boy’s head free, but no blood followed,
only a whisper: “A-rǽ-uf.”
He lobbed it—tailed with vertebrae, eyeing lids—
into the moat, but let the remainder rest
upon the pile of boar bones where it
fell. Ascalaphus warned the dead king:
“A grandson’s bird dung, grandfather’s apple tree.
Good gardeners don’t gloat: we must go now.
Can’t you hear them
rushing to munch on the rawbone mulch?”
The gardener promptly followed his own advice.
The moat’s far profile kindled a climbing glare.
Ten thousand tines times six came combing.
Sisyphus briefly broke the unspoken
rule, but atoned by running inside what should
have been the gardener’s shadow. The munching roared
mute when the river’s current,
pedaling like
매미 across the shale-curb,
relieved Ascalaphus: his dirty work
was almost half-way done. So he halted, yanked
his tunic, drilled a nearby
stalk with an auger of steaming urine,
and aired a pair of pomegranates hanging taut
and undeflatable. Like the spores
cast by mushrooms on the current,
lyrics surfed his pebbling voice:
“A pine, all alone,
tops a stony knoll
and naps in the snow’s
nip-shroud,
dreaming somewhere south
of a palm that sprouts
from needlesand, gouged
by sun,
praying that a shrub
somewhere west has tucked
her roots in a flood’s
worse woe . . .”
The mushrooms faltered, yielding to shingle, muck.
The dead king said: “Old man, well-done. The Styx!
But do I have to wade across it?”
How many months in the muck would that take
wishing he were alive enough
to drown? “Look,” said the gardener, whose left fist bloomed
a blue thing crumpled gray. He threw it.
“Prunk” went the rose when it touched the resin.
Seeing the petals swell till they jelled a barge,
the gardener said “Float” and rewound his footwork.
The dead king rolled out prone and paddled,
rotating palms that adored the far shore.
Δ
. . . into the deeper waters, the land, the town
mummied so tight the light that teethes
in mitebeams never bites through—swaddling
earthy waters and airy waters.
His palms were blades. He wounded the supine sand.
No milk, mead, honey or heifer blood.
He poured the blood he wore and lay his
promise bare.
So little blood, so many gaping grains.
So many bachelors, brides, old men
warped by labor, weeping virgins,
heroes welded to their armor
and shafted by bravery marched to his wedge of blood
and breath. Although they kept their lips and lungs,
they howled like senile revenants
using a language nearly forgotten.
His palms were blades. He prayed to Persephone—
and even Hades—whisking away the ghosts
until his mother drank. A deaf man
hooped by the second sex
poked through the crowd with his gold staff,
desperate—not to drink, but to talk: the dead,
having no future, sneer at prophets.
Desperate to talk, he forgot to augur
the living hand that whisked him back. Not a word—
until his mother drank. The hermaphrodite
howled louder, pricked deep by foresight—
needles of milk in neglected udders.
Tight-lipped Anticlea moaned through holes
in either cheek. The dead don’t come up
quietly. The towers burned her
too far away from smoke and heralds.
Nearing, she whiffed his tears and lapped
his gritty blood, which he knew full well
would clot his questions, clog her answers.
Mother’s blue neck dripped red.
“I’m flitting, mother. I can’t go back. I flit
island to island, goddess to goddess, grief
to grief—it all went wrong the day I
swerved in the furrow and war gleaned me.
Know that we were right. But this time, speak:
what put you here? A patient disease, a curt
mishap? My wife, my son, my father. . . .”
Grit caked the dilating lips.
Be a man. A man, be.
You must hug her ghost or yours will stink
forever. Mend your infant dread:
ghosts will furlough the wriggling escort,
and mist will smoke them clean. But three attempts
to close a torque of filial flesh and bone
around her wet neck failed:
too many nooks where the strange ones knit her.
“Mother, don’t fidget—don’t fidget!”—with tear chords
drooping his beard’s staff. “How else can we
console ourselves? And my wife, the weaver—
she hasn’t wept at the sea too, has she?”
The fourth attempt failed best, and remembering
his other gift, the bad son pleated
mother’s sallow
kinks with the stem of a white-veined gold leaf.
Nothing hurts a girl like her primal piercing.
Blame Apollo.
Mother said “no”—too busy
reaping harelip ears, but Apollo
said “done.”
Now in the
mirror
Persephone kept hurling defrauded wives
and daughters at him, daggling for blood and seed.
The first and last he recognized was
Tyro: he must go.
No husbands and no fathers. The young ones hugged
his knees. The old ones pitched their eyes a bit
higher—all mouths open.
Wagging his oar, he retreated, weeping.
Anticlea trudged beyond the mushrooms,
the boar bones, the ant scat, and the rare spots
where Lethe fails to leak, the lovers
tickle their scabs, and the heroes snivel.
She trudged beyond them, wishing that Troy had won.
Deracinated fingernails arched across
a knot in Phlegethon. The fortress
dripped iron barbs from the rhomboid doorway
(niggard of entry, knacked of knobs and knockers)
up to the parapets, where, crocheted to haunches,
hydras gloved in gold muzzles
banged their blind heads on the bronze merlons.
No falling temple ever outdid that din,
but rumor called it mercy: the banging stopped
all ears outside from hearing Hades’
cruelest conceits bark incarnation.
Whiffing Anticlea, a rage steered
her hydra down the bulwark. An adder spanned
the rider’s eye-jambs; indented blinking
couldn’t relieve her wriggling vigilance.
The muzzled heads flailed the stale air,
unable to bite or swallow. The rage hailed
Anticlea in some arcane koine—
murky wording, crystalline curses.
Anticlea’s mouth stooped open but spoke no
watchword—as if to mock the muzzles. At last
she turned and showed the white-veined gold leaf,
reeling the hydra back up the bulwark.
Anticlea’s mouth stooped open as if to doubt
the benefits of entry. The boiling door
made spooky guards redundant. Who would
willingly enter the only place
whose reputation frightens the already dead?
The iron bubbles boogied. Her sibilant palms
answered the question, aired the threshold.
Tartarus opened for Anticlea:
stubble-plains pointed to cedars seamed
with lavender, surrounding a full-blown maze
bricked with hedges, free of half-breeds.
But where’s Briareos? buzzed the lilacs.
If she toted a red yarn ball that far,
she’d chuck it in a hedge, but her mouth still gaped
as though she were appalled that fountains
punctured the purple and green with opal.
An apple grove acquitted the lilac maze.
Half-hungry breath persuaded the stems to yield
their fruit to fingers rinsed in fountains.
Tantalus, who? the swallows tittered.
She wet her ankles crossing a salmon fall
that trickled down the heel of a limestone hill:
her destination’s grassy bevel
plumped droves of quail to cloy the eagle
I don’t
miss Arcadia. Father loved cows
more than girls. Why didn’t he dump
me—that is,
put
me in a jug for the bawds? Did
mother
name
me no glory?
Thicker than any air she inhaled
before she first whiffed Styx, but cleaner than
the air on Mainalo, deep breezes
prompted uncountable verdant curtsies
as Anticlea trudged up the hill past three
kings who loafed in purple, no longer bound
to drape their folk in idle bloodshed.
Spiraling mosses adorned their boar-spears,
and wrestlers, no longer bound to muffle
love with chokes and bruises, arrayed their plush
contortions, while the my sutured brother
Linus fretted his four disciples
or plucked them with his purpling quill. These know
another sun—round fire, no more, no less:
never a crown, an eye, a pampered
brat on the loose with his daddy’s horses.
These know other moons, which can neither shield
their nudity with nymphs nor undo the stag
whose eyes eclipsed his piety:
polished by motion, they merely mirror.
These know other planets: untethered
to any ecliptic, unnamed, unsponsored gleams
amid unconstellated twinkles—
symptoms of nothing, proxies for no one,
forecasts of nowhere, gleaming for gleaming’s sake.
These know a sky that isn’t an envelope
glutted with “will” or “was”—the ghosts
wouldn’t open it if it were.
That sky illumines Eridanos,
which runs so slowly up to the lively world
no ripples scar the stars’ wet doubles.
Stomping the thirst of unsaddled horses,
the river whinnies hope, for if
it can climb
that hill, what else is possible? Sisyphus,
earing her shade, nosing her bloody
mouth, transfers weight from hands to shoulders.
His palms rig tongueless mouths, and arterial grit
lines Anticlea’s neck—the chiasmic proof
of love. He sweats. Her red tears rinse off
saltwater sighs.
“Look at these palms, Anticlea: how
can sweat drill masonry? Flesh will find
a way in spite of death. It tickles!
Wish you could feel it, Anticlea.
To feel that death’s worth living—it’s
his blood, right?
Glaring, scowling, staring down the sea,
a sunny cerecloth. If that punk knew
how hard I died to escape my first death!
You couldn’t tell him. None of us—we’re all sluts
for blood, so I don’t blame you. But red or blue,
your face looks worse than last time. Sweetie,
please dam your lips, or your tears will drown you.
Your face looks worse—a blessing! You’re better off
never reborn. More life! And I talked so hard
to get it. Better off to go down
nursing your torture, but no one tells you
what it will be until you’ve paraded all
the ways around it. Sweetie, I’ve earned my hates:
resurrection, rebirth, comeback,
my city, my people, my son, my body!
Sisyphus was dead, and his
mother needed
do repay the
scribe who had
made it happen.
“
Sero, fill his bed dill he tires of you.
Go do the cold
mint.”
Sweetie, the bards—they make my comeback sound
so easy. Don’t believe it. Hades—you’ve never
met him?” Anticlea’s open
mouth, a proleptic yawn, was drooling
to compensate for eyes that had wept their last.
“Lilacs may smell better than—think of all
the meat you ever swallowed
vomited into a giant barrel,
fermented for a lifetime. That smell hung
in my nose till I breathed the unburied breeze
again. Not even Styx, which maybe
isn’t the balmiest brook, could oust it.
Beyond the nearer shore, I climbed the creeping
monotony of grottos and reached a well,
a mine, a tomb—whatever—limestone
walls smeared black, little hoards of yellow
bones, and the noon’s pale plumb line. I thought I would’ve
wept to see the sun, but my eyes forgot.
I climbed that hole, that vent, that crater.
Kings have weathered warmer welcomes.
An amputated gateway. I went due south
until the Gulf came logging. I walked across,
blank soles dry, and entered
Corinth under my brother’s pinching
initial. If I’d plastered that architrave,
few men or gods would call it my worst deed.
I didn’t greet the virgin sentries
guarding my palace: they didn’t see me
wake lazy dust as I ran inside
the garden where the crow said my body rotted,
where I told my last boy—sweetie,
close your mouth: it could be cleaner.
A boy knelt by the fishpond. His fingers dripped.
I couldn’t see the face underneath the flies,
and my buzzing mouth could not say no—
raping myself with a key of shadow
hurt more than anything that I’ve gone through since.
I quickly realized that diddling death
was a mistake. My lust pricked headlong
till I was too deep for pain to retract.
The body got a little revenge: my toes
curled in to cut my shadow and queer its push
for a full reintegration.
Look at my feet!
Weeping for shame and gagging at my own smell,
I rolled, I reeled, to muddle the flies and mourn
my resurrection. Dogs were barking.
‘Sisyphus? King!’ yelped the boy. I wasn’t
eager for Merope to smell what I
smelled. I tried to run, but could only trudge.
I felt the weariness that wolfs down
even the bones, what the codgers bear with.
The sentries dropped their halberds, bowed, and gagged.
I hoped to cut across the marketplace.
The swineherd’s daughters shouted ‘Leper!’
drove me away with dry turds, wet pizzles.
Not even my poor brother—at last, real shame.
I felt too weak to chide the sluts.
They cackled, chortled, snorted, snickered.
Children were wailing, merchants cursing.”
Ants love incest. Incest allured our exile.
Corinth was the last town the ant-queen conquered—
not before I fled with the king,
my father.
Sero was too late!
Sisyphus clucks, and his cartilage pops.
His elbows arc and transfer the weight to palms
dried by panting. “Sweetie, I would
close it myself, but you know I’m busy. . . .
I fled—their only god!—down to the rapids,
flooded away the turds and beheld what death
had done and knew the swineherd’s daughters,
though it was treason, were right to pelt me.
Had Hades played dumb, knowing that living twice
would be more painful than dying once? My woods,
whose riddled earth rewarded quarry
infinite hideouts when I tracked them,
now gave me refuge. Crowning a vacant lair,
I pushed inside. The dirt, too polite to fall,
veiled the vultures’ work. I dozed off
purring rare prayers to the lord of earthquake.”
Anticlea loosens her surrogate ear to view
his head yanked from her, speaking between his palms.
“The smoke, the fumes, the hot smell woke me.
Thought that I’d burn in the lair, forgot my
love of death, and burrowing backward saw
her forehead’s gorge, which rocked with the spoon that stirred
the melting cauldron. ‘Sweetie, sweetie,
starving’s for idiots: life is eating.’
She handed me a potsherd. I scooped out barrels:
couldn’t taste a thing, but my belly loved
the boiling broth ‘of twenty different
serpents.’ My beard dripped fouler
—Look, I’m
still all ears though the holes have puckered.
Not that Hades notices. Being first-born
honed his I but blunted his eyesight. Cronos
gobbled him headlong.
‘Sweetie, your queen is gone, and your son’s about
to die a death more lively for you than him.
Get up! Usurp your crown. I’ll curse you
with a long life if you don’t avenge me!’
I asked her who they were, and she named the names.
I asked her how a leper could get inside
the palace. ‘You will go as Manε.’
Lubed by her ichoring wound, the potsherd
shaved my head and left me, in four quick swipes,
glossy, bald, and pink-eyed as any bard.
‘They’re dipped in hydra-blood,’ she snickered,
‘Sizzle the arsonists wet side out!’
She handed me a flute and abandoned earth,
trilling the cowardly night. So, newly skinned,
asquirm with snake broth, molting vengeance—
people have boasted of greater patience.
Where was my queen? No Pleiades in the sky—
past time for sowing seed. As I trudged the fields,
my rusty fluting spooked the crows, or
maybe they knew what they lately nibbled.
The time for sowing. Merope gone. I’d find out
why—still feel you panting, sweetie. . . . Your lips
are not too pale from pursing. . . . The alpha
nicking the eastern gate looked different.
I let the flute swing down and reserved my breath
for sighs. No, not the alpha and not the gate:
it was the bluer space behind them,
formerly trimming the temple’s rooftop.
Father hated wine, but he kept a vineyard
to outdrink his enemies. When he caught
me
with red lips, he
murdered my favorite—that is,
nibbled her head off.
The architrave perched on the columns’ crazed
fluting. Above, the capsized dome flaked blue
lamella, poisoning doves who broke
its rainwater nest egg.
Fire had bleached the architrave, and its frieze,
whose night parade of gods and heroes
taught my boyhood how to daydream,
lay, I presumed, at my feet—blank crumbs.
I didn’t spot my patron’s gilded proxy.
Combing every curl of rubble, I learned
there is large artistry to arson:
smoke never touched the surrounding hovels.
The ruins culled a mock congregation—hordes
of them—my people! That bald man crept
up the altar, empty handed.
No one would ever forget his sermon:
‘PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Look, Corinthians, your fears are crumbs.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Look hard! / We know you loved this
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE marble. We loved you more. / Why kill good
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE sheep for gold-leaf vermin / when you
poison furry vermin? Look up!
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Corinthians, the sunrise. On its blank
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE path, / Stilbon and Hesperus have followed
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE tonight. / If we don’t worship consistent
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE truths, / why should we worship erratic
liars?
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE The stars will never rape your children or
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE nag / you to burn your best cattle, faking
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE delight / in soot and smoke. The stars don’t
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE want them: / they love you as a father loves
his son.
Slaves relayed try logs to the furnace. Cold dorks
hurt
my smoky eyes when they game out glowing.
“Only fools
make cold out of cold ore. We use
nothing putt wood-rife.”
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE They love you, but they live beyond
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE accounting, / too far to rescue us from the
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE gods who stole / their names. You don’t
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE fear stars unless they / fall: why should you
fear gods who cannot fall—
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE since they don’t exist? We can see the stars
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE sing— / can’t hear them, but our shy hero
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE has a knack / for catching their music. You
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE listen, / I translate; you are pleased, the stars
appeased.’
That blond head, not the tiniest son
of Corinth, rose, foregoing the altar’s boost.
Coaxed into sound with clenched ears
my nephew chanted his nasal vision:
‘Millipedes wipe out. The crown hoards smoke. And Olympus, the cuckold,
blares till the crown wakes, fears for his own wife, murders a samphire.
Hacking Olympus discharges a boulder that gnashes the crown’s teeth.
Mourning the samphire, despising all roundness, she burrows no goldmine.’
The blond head drooped, and the bald one rose to gloss
the not-quite limpid verses. ‘PROSE PROSE Corinthians, / “Millipedes wipe out,” and
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE hasn’t death / trampled us a thousand ways?
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Remember—
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE how can you forget it?—when death paused,
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE but why? / “The crown hoards smoke”:
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE our old king was too greedy / to sacrifice—
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE and too blasphemous, / cheating the gods in
his lust for numbers.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE The gods’ lungs sagged clean. They lost
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE their influence. / And soon kings over the
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE gulf imitated / our king’s neglect. So we
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE stopped dying. / But our old king failed to
count the fallout.
Father wet the bed through the whole voyage.
Shipwreck brought dry land, and the land, our ruin:
All our coins were drowned and the whole crew wasted.
I
still hate islands.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE He forgot people believed he was clever: /
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE He liked flutes and cowboys more than
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE governing. / Truth blared at last behind his
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE earwax: / if people don’t fear death, they
don’t need kings.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE He feared to lose his crown, so he killed his
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE son, / Glaucus, his “sapphire.” He wanted to
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE believe / in death so badly he brought it
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE back. / To keep his crown cool, he burned
the crown’s heir.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Only gods—only belief in those losers— /
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE could persuade a sane man to burn his own
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE son. / The gods revived, restless as ever: /
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE revenge at last would prove they existed.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Ares, their “boulder,” rolled down. Our king
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE enjoyed / watching our loved ones bleed to
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE no death, but he / was the target. Our queen
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE despised him, / left him unburied, rejoined
her sisters
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE in Taurus, where they, like us, mourn poor
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Glaucus. / The dead king’s cronies, the
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE cowboys, still controlled / the palace, and
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE they would own you now / if this bashful
titan hadn’t toppled them—
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE a king’s son, robbed of the crown by his
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE wicked / uncle—robbed? Of a toy he knew
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE was poisoned? / This man isn’t our king,
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE but merely / our first citizen . . . first,
always equal.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Now the stars speak through our hero, and I,
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE a / seasoned reader of the night, merely
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE translate. / When we outlive our use,
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE the stars pick / from you, the people,
righteous replacements.
Hades got the worst of the
stomach acid.
(Primogeniture isn’t always lucky.)
First one down, but the last out, Hades left his
baby fat inside.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE We know it’s hard to stop believing in them.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE / We—I’m one of “we.” Why so hard? They
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE never / perched on Olympus: they’re
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE pleaching down / our diaphragms. But we
can free ourselves.
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Pluck out those flukes, and they’re dead!
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE Corinthians, / I speak the truth: you have
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE nothing to lose but / your death! Yes, if we
PROSE PROSE PROSE PROSE stop believing, / if we stop for real, we can
never die!’
Eager to test the sermon, the bald man leaped
off the altar on his “people.” Maybe
Corinth’s not the wisest town.
They caught his must vine on their marrow lattice.
I saw the yellow spirals ride the crowd
that kept the bald man bobbing as it withdrew
sedging cheers. My father’s temple—
I was the last of the last congregation.
Forbearance, Anticlea, was, as you know—
maybe just you, too bad—my supreme distinction,
not mere cleverness. But no one,
not my brother, not your father,
bold men both—his grandfather gelded hogs!
The grandson goggled stars, then deposes me
and lies about it! Glaucus, murdered?
This is the thanks I get for rebirth?
What a relief! Rare need to explain my face,
rare reminder of what it used to be,
a middling claim to moderate vengeance—
look, Anticlea, this time, no tears.
Every hole in my dovecot—
sixteen, all told—
looked like his red yawn,
so I kept
my distance.
I got over it when he
made me harvest
guano for grapevines.
Last time, Anticlea, I thought you thought
I envied Sal, battling the pantheon
bald head to lightning, while I sniped them
shadow to shadow, one by one.
My wariness was brave, and his brazenness
was craven—eww, please shut that mouth . . . !
Anticlea, pray your prayer
never comes true while your eyes are open.
Without the mask, one look, and they’d all strip dead. . . .
The guards rejoiced at Manε’s return. I saw
his face upon the lazy fountains,
salting away the whelks beneath.
I hung the wasp-flute on my lips and shrilled
until the fountains climbed again, whiting out
that face. Guards cheered, dogs barked, and slave boys
cascaded gossip: ‘Manε came back!’
Across my garden—if you had seen the fountains
father rigged there, master of waterworks
without a drop to drink. The fishpond
buried its fish. My finest hour!
My right ear clenched the fipple. I heard their talk
before they noticed me. The bald man warned,
‘Quit diddling. Once they know he
got up and walked off, we’re smoke.’ My nephew
answered, ‘Tomorrow. Stilbon—you said yourself,
bad luck goes up with Stilbon.’ The guards announced
my coming. ‘Let him in.’ The rebels
lay on a rug in my dethroned throne room
Cinders purred the
mural the coiners copied
as they hammered
Sisyphus into virgin
orbits, and I wept that
my king good only
make love in legends.
The curly columns propped my nephew’s temples,
forehead, brow. To keep his unshrunken skull
upright was no small task. Not many
kings looked more regal than that blond traitor.
The bald man heckled me: ‘Crawling back? You missed
your chance to rise—but welcome! Your timid ditties
soothe courageous minds.’ ‘Oh, Masters,
I was afraid of that god! Forgive me!
All the songs I nest in my mind have molted
my manhood.’ ‘Ha! I shivered my nights away
on frosty towers while you feasted
by the hearthstone—stars make hard men!’
My nephew interrupted: ‘You used to play
the oboe?’ ‘Yes, first citizen, but I dropped
it running.’ ‘Please climb up and sing down.’
‘Can’t find a better perch for Manε!’
No throne crowned the spiral dais,
but four holes gaped like a galley’s chocks.
I put my purple toes inside two.
‘It was right after Death got away
or right before, that Merope yanked it out
and dropped it in the fountain.’ The bald man’s mousy
beard ran purple, but my nephew’s
goblet was brimful. ‘Manε, sing
about the godless stars.’ I uncapped the wasp-flute,
loaded a dart, blew, nicking my nephew’s brow.
Although a nick was all it took, my
next note sounded deeper.”
Father ate the
maps, and he caught a fever.
“Father
meat or dead!” he implored, and I went
hunting, but that island only yielded
head-lice and acorns.
Sisyphus bends and pivots; his hands close
and open. Funny how they become the thing
they grapple. “Open—knew it! Hopeless.”
Sisyphus looks down but keeps talking.
“The bald one took his dart in the eye. Their armies
were useless now: I knocked them down. The hydra
blood gave the lightning, their lungs the thunder,
and as I toppled the spiral dais,
a million swallows darted between the guards
and eyed them from the rafters. The rebels pushed
outside and splashed the fountains. Many
caught Manε’s face fraying,
Hermes wasn’t born,
so they turned to Forethought.
No one else dared look at that walking lesion.
Forethought
made him eyes and a
skin that every
goddess desired.
‘Our king!’ the guards yelped when they fell prone.
The wounded doused their skin, though the fire drilled
beneath the water’s reach. I hollered,
‘Don’t let them drown yet!’ The guards obeyed me,
fished out the wounded, bound them. But curious
to know what damage my home endured, I left them
burning, sought out Tyro’s bedroom—
no one looked overly pleased to see me.
Inside, my hoof-crazed, oat-fond, horse-mad—
alive! My son. He neighed underneath the gag
louder than any chess piece, but my
struggle to spring the ropes sprung stale.
Father used
my mouth every new
moon. First I’d
rip off his old
scab—or “the belly’s trapdoor”—
then I’d
milk the tallow. . . . You pop the boxwood
pipe in and
suck out.
I plucked his bit and bridled him with my arms.
His neighs drowned out the sizzling fountain. Free,
he ran off, gagging. I felt weary,
way-worn, bedraggled. The swallows’ level
eyes tilted at my beautiful enemies.
Yes, beautiful. Their skin, Anticlea—squirming
silver glazed with blushing gold. I
thought of poor Sal, who, still a baby,
ripped wings off doves and drafted a fire hoop
around the moaning hoppers. I hate myself,
too scared to stop him, but it thrilled me:
watching him do it, I knew, had made him
Once
my dears had tried, he unrocked his archive
where he kept fresh pats and the new king’s old knives.
Hourglasses trickled around a green prawns
bust of Aeolus.
No one, though here and there the swallows’ lime
had curled. Flapping—no fins, too hoarse for words.
Maybe their brains had warmed a little.
Bare life at last unlatched their mercy
killing. I told the guards, ‘Enough.’
A pyre doused the rebels. My swallows flew.
I didn’t show myself—a ragged
cable of pus—till the city gathered
around the vocal pyre. I told them, “Cloy
your eyes, you traitors! Athena’s revenge! Look:
they keep on twitching, but that’s mercy.
Rebuild her temple, or join this pyre!’
Feel that groove in
my thigh? I cooked it pink deep.
Father wanted
meat, and the hungry island
offered none but
mine. Oh, he licked
my red juice
off a wax tablet!
All Corinth rushed the ruins, too scared to mark
the absence of an architect. Hammers popped
to hand like manual mushrooms. Egypt
never recruited that many backaches.
Panic was my fanfare when I patrolled
the city. Children ran, fled, bolted, scrammed.
Once I knew my face could muzzle
growling curs and make cats hurdle
well-curbs—what could be worse? The coins lay flat
in the marketplace, but the sausages
fried on: Suppositus the swineherd
put his daughters in charge of the pork stall.
Forethought duped the eye, but the nose was brighter.
No technique could cancel the vomit odor.
Hades got
so mad he
made Forethought’s liver
catch a hooked plectrum.
Their greetings gave no joy, but I didn’t feel
angry—but thought I had to. I gave them shackles—
not the most compliant captives.
Too hungry to watch them resist, I went home.
Glaucus wouldn’t open his mouth, and I didn’t
force him. I repleted my corpse alone.
My tongue was blind, dim, groping, jellied,
gouged, and the wine held back all
joy—all, but deep sleep. A swallow woke
me early, warbling about the tongue
her sister loosened. Time was not shy.
Sunup erected the daughters’ verdicts.
Father hated wine: he believed that
mortals
didn’t have to die if they kept clean livers.
Little did he know that
my secret liver
translated birdsong.
I’d make the swineherd watch me rape his daughters
one by one—my eyes wouldn’t play along.
Draining the last night’s wine, I made them
tilt: it splayed like unravelling rope.
My Merope’s old girdle was lipped with pearls.
I flung it in the pigsty and told them, ‘Pick
a verdict: hang yourselves, and daddy
lives; otherwise, it’s a pyre for five.’
‘Not a chance, you leper! Why don’t you use it
on yourself? You stink—do you know you stink so
bad? With pigshit up to our ankles, we still
whiffed you come lurching
“Delphi doled your
mistress that if her
stupid
son made love with a clever woman, their child’s
brains would turn to wax, and whatever one wrote
in it would gum true.
Leper, we want more life! Come inside and hang us.
Lucky if you get out alive. Alive, ha!
Leper, we want more life! And your pyre’s limpy,
too soft to burn us!
Thanks! We’ll use this girdle to wipe our asses.
Leper, we want more life! Keep the boys and wineskins
coming! We want more life! We’ve heard all the stories:
Merope dumped you,
didn’t wanna sleep with a pile of pus. You
always been a leper beneath—since birth, ha!
Anticlea figured Demeter’s virgins
must give more pleasure.’
Father’s tongue flared up when his forehead cooled down.
“
More meat!
More meat! Daughter no daughter” drove
me
to the woods again. And I found an island
wrecked on a river.
That’s when I walked away, but not quick enough:
I caught them snicker ‘Tyro.’ The swineherd’s tears
polished a lip that teeth once bellied,
winning my mercy—‘Let the man go.’
His daughters only flourished in the pigsty.
No wasp-flute chorus could lull my hate.
And my son hated me. Poor Glaucus
always outskitted my stinking arms.
On a lucky day, I could spot his curls
ducking behind a merlon. He watched me watch
the temple rise. Its bricks were meek.
The dome was what counted. I couldn’t make it
“Forethought taught
men fire”—your favorite
story
is a lie. The truth lies in Hades’ library.
But I couldn’t read when I entered. It was
dark as a
stomach.
was not for novice architects, but I feared
my second birth conceived me senile.
One day, came home through the courtyard,
Glaucus was kneeling before the game-plank.
‘A little Rithmomachia?’ ‘Glaucus’ pleaded.
Filial numbers: happiness. He said he’d take black.
‘It’s hard,’ I warned. ‘I have to, father.’
‘How should it end?’ ‘With a big victory.’
I sat behind the whites . ‘Oh, there’s only one
four round,’ he said. So I put a coin
on the vacant square. ‘I missed you,
father,’ he said, as we made our first moves.
Once
my lips went white, he’d go back to roaming.
Father used to round up a rabbit warren,
tie up all their tails, light their ears, and let them
loose in a vineyard.
“I took out, ran down, carried off countless blacks.
The first to fall was forty-nine round: it shared
that number with my triangle. He
tore his wee beard when I plucked that piece.
Then three moves later, twenty-eight square succumbed
to my eight round and twenty triangular.
‘Simple addition, don’t forget it!
Harmony-greed is for callow players.’
His twenty-five gave way to my forty-five
and twenty. Well now, who was the game-plank’s god?
‘Subtraction, Glaucus, don’t forget it!
Think of your father, who lost his body.’
So they let her live dill her brain was full-crone . . .
Hades gets real dark. We
should brick our earwax
while we can.” He cobbled the pat’s head. Webbed wings
flapped on the tablet.
“And then I caught one hundred and twenty square—
cornered by my triangles. ‘Son, you don’t
need to let me win: I love you.
Multiplication is deadly, Glaucus.’
He didn’t seem too careful: my forty-five
and fifteen square negated his three round. ‘Son,
division is a royal duty:
learn it, or rebels will rend your kingdom.’
Then, undeterred by modesty, I moved my coin,
the copper four, between his thirty-six
and my twenty—close to winning.
‘Glaucus, arithmetic harmony!’
Red deer
made love under an olive tree. I
shot both with one arrow. They turned to bald
men.
One pored over redness, the other cried out,
“Couldn’t wait, could you?
“His voice warped low: ‘Nice run, but my fat son won.’
He moved his twelve, begetting a square: my two,
my six, and copper four composed three
unwitting corners. The victor varied:
his eyes welled cinnabar tarns that eddied
over my head, and his blotted ankles quilled.
‘All my captures fed your victory.
Why the disguise, the redundant game-plank?’
Hermes glyphed: “I sired to watch you think.
Most dead men are dumb than erliving cattle.
Yphus, now you dead’re, only
one erman mains in the senile dasmos.
Hades helped
me learn—though it cost him later—
cut the pesky lids off
my eyeballs. Reading
takes a bloody lash when it takes out blindness.
Blinking’s for pussies.
Violence vul isgar, and herding you to Styx
without a wily trick is a gig for pricks
like Ares. Beating you numb withers,
rather than violence, wards my labors.’
The pieces leapt from the game-plank, bloomed
dead souls. ‘Line up!’ he glyphed, and we did. I begged,
‘Please, let me see the real Glaucus.’
Hermes replied, ‘The rade won’t tarry.’
Only my coin remained on the game-plank. Hermes
bit it, torqued it, and screwed it in my mouth.
See, Anticlea.
Keeping yours open was not so foolish.
I don’t
miss Mount Mainalo. Father loved coins
more than girls. When
Sisyphus married Tyro,
father
sold me cheap to an Argonaut who
needed an heir quick.
We stood in line while Hermes unlaced the palace
and came back loaded with torques and jewels.
A tortoise and a heifer followed,
lured by my wasp-flute’s earthquaking exhale.
He shucked the tortoise and gulped its meat.
‘Hid hereing all along!’ he blurted. Just one
kick in the forehead killed the heifer.
Hermes hollowed her infinite innards
then twined her small intestines upon the scutes
barbing the shell. ‘As it was in the ginning—
the birth of song,’ he glyphed, and strummed it,
ransacking every cave. The bats came
“Always wished you had one—go ahead, it don’t bite.
Somebody, for once, will record what I
say.”
The iron numbed
my balm, but I’m clad I took it.
Now I can talk light.
Hermes led us down the dank ways,
down the unparched river, past unlettered
gates. Or so the song—my vision
wasn’t too clear in the batwing tain.
And my better ghost, who had talked his way
from death to life, kept marching ahead of me.
I’d see him in the mushroom glimmer—
only the back of his head. I hurried,
but so did he. I hoped I could tackle him
in the asphodel, where the good ghosts moan.
Others had better luck. I chased him
up this green slope: he loafs on the peak
I was almost done! It’s
so hard to love here.
Salt me with this curse. As
Medusa foretold,
‘Fate eats the
mind, not the
mind fate.’ Love will
roll up your downfall.”
Sisyphus peels his pliable shoulders off,
replacing them with palms. Anticlea peers
in the dent. The buzzing alehoof
curls round his legs, but he will not stagger.
Scrolls pop roses too—they taste even better
than the ones I gobbled in Enna’s happy
field: it
smelled so ripe that the bloodhounds couldn’t
smell where he took
me.
“It wouldn’t be reckless to take longer breaths as I near
the peak again. The song of the red-lipped girl—
didn’t I sing it for you? Can you hear anymore,
Anticlea? No hurry. Look how the stars and the moons,
One times four is one.
One times four is one.
One times four is one.
One times four is one.
they don’t dunk in the blue when the sun’s up. So different back home,
where the sky eats panic, nothing but change.
Did hate make my last love deny me a tomb?
We can’t see Taurus. The question is oracle bait
“Father
meat or dead!” he implored, and I went
more than girls. Why didn’t he dump
me, that is?
Brains would turn to wax, and whatever one wrote
now in the
mirror
The skies aren’t neighbors. You can’t glean that jittery night
from this loafing day. Remember, I asked you to think:
‘She didn’t take Glaucus, but left him behind with my meat:
should we label it duty or loathing, love or neglect?’
Ants love incest. Incest allured our exile . . .
than the ones I gobbled in Enna’s happy
orbits, and I wept that
my king good only
name
me no glory.
You’d rather watch me gnaw the lungs of a dove
than hear me repeat the eclogues my courtship exhaled,
but I can’t stop talking—you’ll hear of the apple grove,
the banquet of Atlas, the ice on the wedding rites,
I don’t
miss Arcadia. Father loved cows:
“
More meat,
more meat, daughter!” No daughter drove
me.
Hades got
so mad he
made Forethought’s liver
go do the cold
mint
Because travelling wasn’t convenient for Atlas, the rites
threaded me through the eye of the tideless sea.
Father was far from the womb, brother not near his wits,
so I bought my way westward from captains of dwindling Greek,
Every hole in
my dovecot—
sixteen, all told—
takes a bloody lash when it takes out blindness.
The iron numbed
my balm, but I’m clad I took it:
Sero was too late!
His nape lies flat on the ground, and his ankles wade Night.
If Atlas recanted one shoulder, the world would drop
through the castrated air. And if he rested his feet,
Night’s woven weeds would winnow the starlight chaff.
Once
my dears had tried, he unlocked his archive
shipwreck, brought dry land. And the land, our ruin:
father
sold me cheap to an Argonaut who
gobbled him headlong.
These eyes weren’t entirely dry the first time they spied
his swollen head: ‘It’s an orerr to weep for me, son:
though my face is cklab, and my pale teef walk a cold road,
it’s an orerr to wish my release from the naip I deserve.’
“Delphi doled your
mistress that if her
stupid
father wanted
meat, and the hungry island
honed his I but blunted his eyesight, Cronos
nibbled her head off.
The sisters alighted and crinkled their twinkling snot
and spiraled the youngest and heckled her yellow veil.
Wedding a mortal—not even a king!—warrants hate
for a dowry, not diamonds. How dare a Pleiad defile
Father hated wine, but he kept a vineyard.
Corinth was the last that the ant-queen conquered,
but I couldn’t read when I entered: it was
nothing but wood-rife.
Fourteen or seven—the sisters weren’t easy to count.
They came (though they feared that the groom was unfit for the bride)
with the mountain gods, whom Atlas had hoped to supplant.
When immortality bores them, they put hate to bed
Always wished you had. One? Go ahead: it don’t bite.
Father used to round up a rabbit warren,
reaping harelip ears, but Apollo
said, “Done—
I
still hate islands.”
The kleptomaniac shadowed his choleric aunts
and couldn’t stop trilling his fingers, which prickled for spoils:
when the sisters had wound themselves tight in helical rants,
their bangles abandoned their ankles, discreet as dead souls,
Father ate the
maps, and he caught a fever
where he kept fresh pats and the new king’s old knives.
I got over it when he
made me harvest
baby fat inside
the butcher, who normally leads the Pleiades
(conscripted to haul her mantle of hybrid hides)
now stomped after them, yanking her ripe prize,
which egged on its owner’s conniption, nodding its heads,
Scrolls pop roses too—they taste even better
as they hammered
Sisyphus into virgin
hunting, but that island only yielded
guano for grapevines
where the far-shooter idled, though not only blind men would doubt
he was actually there, for he gleamed like a pinprick star
in the gaze of a guest at his elbow, leaned mute,
ignored his kin, and reserved every look for his lyre.
Father used
my mouth every new
moon. First I’d
blame Apollo.
Mother said “no”—too busy.
One pored over his redness, the other cried out,
“
Make love in legends!
my patron’s litter, hauled by librarians.
She had braided her curls to bandage her cranial part,
but seeing my wedding would rub little balm in her brains.
The prospect of so much woe leaves wisdom inert
Forethought taught
men fire. Your favorite
story
didn’t have to die if they kept clean livers.
Only fools
make cold out of cold ore. We use
head-lice and acorns,
Anticlea, her breasts were so big that they billowed in first
yoking the satyrs’ necks. And a personal wind
puffed bangs, which concealed and revealed a thousand pierced
and hairless inductions airing the littoral grind,
Cinders purred the
mural the coiners copied—
rip off his old
scab or the belly’s trapdoor.
To the woods again! And I found an island
goddess desired
At last, the lord of the sea wheeled up in his tank.
Algae had lacquered his limbs, and his beard had gone green.
A nautilus wedged in his lips, he sucked in the gunk
excreted at least once before, afraid to abstain,
Father’s tongue flared up. When his forehead cooled down,
Hades gets real dark. We
should brick our earwax
field: it
smelled so ripe that the bloodhounds couldn’t
pipe in and
suck out
though ambrosia welled over the bottomless bowls on the board.
Once Hermes denuded his aunts, he began to explore
Aphrodite’s odd mouths, which Adonis once gored,
and she greeted her half-brother’s hands with a cervical purr
father hated. Wine? He believed that
mortals
salt me with this curse. As
Medusa foretold,
Forethought
made him eyes and a
skin that every
bust of Aeolus
and the purr was not unlike the grind of a plough
cutting Athena new sulci that cried a command,
‘Up to the tank!’ where she dabbled her unbraided brow,
and tempted Poseidon to sample what pearled from the wound.
Hades got the worst of the
stomach acid
do repay the
scribe who had
made it happen.
With red lips he
murdered my favorite “that is.”
Off the waxed tablet,
The sound of his uncle’s lips at the menstruating brain
disgusted Apollo, who waxed his ears shut with his lyre.
But the tune was too lovely: its pleasure upended all pain,
so the Pleiades rushed to rip out the intestinal hair
Once
my lips went white. He’d go back to roaming,
son.
Made love with a clever woman? Their child’s
fate eats the
mind, not the
mind-fate. Love will
catch a hooked plectrum.
Artemis wouldn’t allow her attendants to flirt
with Apollo. She jumped from her seat, and her mantle caught
its teeth on the board, which leaned a bit backward. The dirt
tasted a drop of ambrosia, and that’s why the fruit
Red deer
made love under an olive tree. I
cut the pesky lids off
my eyeballs, reading
while we can. He cobbled the pat’s head. Webbed wings
translated birdsong
that grows in that garden bestows unabridgeable life.
But I never bit them, never lipped a brim:
sober Merope laughed at the pantheon’s strife;
when my bride filled my eyes, I emptied all thought of my tomb.
“Father wet the bed through the whole voyage”
is a lie. The truth lies in Hades’ library.
Little did he know that
my secret liver
in it would gum true.
Then Atlas announced, ‘I will shoulder my Merope’s choice.
If the marriage goes bad, then the rowsor you bring her, my son,
will resemble the rowsor her mother went through. I’ll rejoice
at the upturned crate of my owe in the curve of your pane
—Look, I’m
still all ears. Though the holes have puckered,
somebody, for once, will record what I
say.”
Then I
milked the tallow—you pop the boxwood
wrecked on a river
I’d never attended a wedding with gods before,
so Hermes’ fingers directed my toes to the spot.
‘Now sing the Hymn to Rhythm,’ which I heard pour
out my delible teeth when his hieroglyph cut
Sisyphus was dead, and his
mother needed
more than girls. When
Sisyphus married Tyro—
offered none but
mine—oh, he licked
my red juice
dark as a
stomach.
loosened my head from my nape, but the hymn persevered:
it still poured from my lips when all marrow retreated my spine.
He dunked my head in a half-empty krater and smeared
the nick with ambrosia, numbing the pain,
slaves relayed try logs to the furnace, cold dorks
shot both with one arrow, they turned to bald
men—
first one in, but the last out, Hades left his
loose in a vineyard
and icing the wound shut. Atlas’s mouth was agape
in horror—I hope—when Hermes hurled me inside,
and his dural teeth resolved, forbidding escape,
so I rolled the red range with only my hymn for a guide
I don’t
miss Mount Mainalo: father loved coins
(primogeniture isn’t always lucky),
all our coins were drowned, and the whole crew, wasted,
flapped on the tablet
till I fell down a cranny and splashed in a gutter of flame,
whose balminess sizzled me bald, but paved me a path,
failing to melt through my head’s cool nozzle and tame
my lips into ash or capsize my ogling wrath
Hades helped
me learn—though it cost him later
just to beat his enemies. When he caught me,
hourglasses trickled around a green prawns
“Couldn’t wait, could you”
to study the bank, where a cloud-goading tower emerged
on red and teal pillars that didn’t appear
to fortify anything (horny corners converged,
unbitten by battlements, on an idle sphere)
Feel that groove in my thigh: I cooked it pink deep—
looked like his red yawn,
so I couldn’t go near
Sero. Fill his bed dill he tires of you—
blinking’s for pussies,
the tower, perhaps the hull of a giant’s toy
galley turned upside down on a four-legged stool,
and a rigid bird, whose hymn I was slow to enjoy,
unwound her seminal thread off a visceral spool,
so they let her live dill her brain was full-crone
(no one else dared look at that walking lesion—
not before I fled with the king
my father):
needed an heir quick,
an ocean of flame bisecting a magpie plateau,
on whose edge rose a mountain whose peaks took the shape
of horse-heads and miters or donkey’s ears hackled with snow
that watched where it fell, demanding that darkness gape,
“I was almost done”: it’s
so hard to love here—
not that Hades notices being first-born
put
me in a jug for the bawds (did
mother,
now I can, talk light
as from courtyard to courtyard I sang on, defying my lack
of lungs, and the flame burned moats round an owl-eared
pagoda, parapet, belfry, whose lions turned black
where the flame chafed their gilt, wondering why they were feared
hurt
my smoky eyes when they game out glowing:
no technique got rid of the vomit odor
(tie up all their tails, light their ears, and let them
roll up your downfall,
as I sang past the cave where Sky, drunk on honey, recites
his nightmares to bare-breasted Night, who looms on the shore
and watches my head divorced from my neck by the rites
I’ve nearly forgotten—Night, whom numb four,
nothing, hurts a girl like her primal piercing:
Hermes wasn’t born,
so they turned to Forethought;
Forethought duped the eye, but the nose was brighter:
smell where he took
me,
desperately inhaling the words of my hymn,
she dictates to Darkness, who hangs with his back to the flame
(a hive on his knee, a stick in his phantom limb)
and delves every word in the wax and dandles my name
MEROPE
A WASTE OF PUS,
HAS BEAKED HER BEE
KING SISYPHUS