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My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge by Paul Guest

THE LIVES OF THE OPTIMISTS

So the jonquils are fooled into flaming up though it's January. The bricks soak in heat like ruddy sponges. Walking home, I hide within whatever's radiant. A bird whose name I've never bothered to learn sings its farewell to winter. It's January. Tomorrow we'll grieve. Or the next day, but not this thawed instant, not in this false blush of lilac. In my bones, the old scores with the earth are laid to rest and each dyspeptic grudge blossoms into frantic, sweet, careening love. In your bones, the tidal hymns of blood. This heedless smile once was yours. So too my hands, themselves fooled by the tilt of the earth, the white face of a star.

***

REMEMBER HOW SAD THAT WAS WHEN

I missed sadness because I no longer missed you, how emotionally counterintuitive it was as my citizenship in the nation I made of you gradually lapsed. I woke some other place with lakes and blue skies and rush hours and strangers I worried about. But no you. No ages of you. No your name three times when I walked somewhere or lay down at night to bargain with sleep. No you falling from my mouth everywhere I went. No you anywhere to be seen. A secret to keep. And mostly I did, even beside other women who asked with the privilege of their bodies if you had ever existed and what did you do and did you have a name I'd share and had you been good to me but I never gave you up. I left the last of you to be lost in the fog inside me. Napping in bomb craters, haggling over debts I couldn't deny were mine, memorizing every month's horoscope. It seemed then the days you had left me stained in sadness were like that. Good apples on back order from God and the steaks full of blood you taught me to love, rationed. At least I told myself this, thinking of all the never you were. But there were limits and lengths and limits again. There were songs inside the fog inside the world.

***

MY ARMS

My arms are mostly cosmetic. When I say this to a stranger, often he'll wince like he wants to hide inside his eyes. Vanish from the day. I shouldn't laugh, should be tired twenty-one years into the telling of a poor joke, made of pain, nerves snuffed like wicks. Back then, I was a boy. No secret that I fell through that summer like a star. And here I am wanting spring and birdsong after tedious winter. Once I prayed my arms might serve me again, roll toothpaste from the tube, dump rice into boiling water, swat dead the mosquito drilling its derrick face through my skin. That symmetry, left and right, one and one— it's not a math I know, not anymore. There are days I want to lament broken glass or put my fist through the door or throttle the blue sky's silent throat. There are nights full of ache, full of nothing nimble. No music but smashed guitars would be enough. How many clasps and how many buttons did I try with my teeth until her hands did for me what I could not? Untrue to say I lost count of what I never hoped to keep. A lie to say that when she held my hands to her hips and her body above mine, I loved such need, I did not hate us both.

***

MY LUCK

for Eliot K. Wilson

That day I spilled milk with crossed fingers didn't make sense but the tears did even though the laws of science insist there's no sense in mourning waste. At least, I think it's science but it could be philosophy— in school I hated all of that. I tried to think of a world in which wisdom was optional but that world had thought of me first. My best friend toils in a land named Minnesota where sunlight is also optional. A long time ago everyone attempted not to weep or blaspheme or run screaming into the scarred arms of the past waiting in official gloom like an abusive lover and though I wasn't there the day was relentlessly pleasant and not many died unless it was an option they'd been considering for a long time and what I mean to say is that I'm capable of Truth. You might doubt the veracity of all this. So many times I've lied my way into your beds and back out again, it isn't funny. Except it's hilarious and painful and exhausting and cathartic and untrue. All at once, a metaphysical hernia. I'm not sure why I'm here or how the air can seem to scald everyone, everyone in plain sight, so I wait out the day's thin patience playing games of chance I'm not certain I fully grasp or even enjoy distracted as I am by the mutter of rust, the mewl of rescued kittens, the sky broken by blunt star light.

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Euripides V, Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore

CHORUS

Blessed is he who escapes a storm at sea, who comes home to his harbor. Blessed is he who emerges from under affliction. In various ways one man outraces another in the race for wealth and power. Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. But he who garners day by day a happy life, him I call truly blessed.

(The Bacchae, 902-11)

***

AGAMEMNON

I envy you, old man, I am jealous of men who without peril pass through their lives, obscure, unknown; least of all do I envy those vested with honors.

OLD MAN

Oh, but these have a glory in their lives!

AGAMEMNON

Ah—a glory that is perilous. High honors are sweet, but ever  they stand close to the brink of grief. At one time, the gods overturn a man's life. At another, the wills of men, many and malignant, ruin life utterly.

(Iphigenia in Aulis, 17-26)

***

AGAMEMNON

Now will I give you briefly my reproach. Nor will my looks grow haughty with contempt, but looking and speaking I'll be temperate, as it befits a brother, and as a good man to another shows decency and respect. You're breathing hard and red-faced — why? Tell me, who wrongs you, what do you want? Are you burning to possess a virtuous wife? Well, I can't procure her for you. The one you had you governed poorly. Should I pay the price for your mistakes, when I am innocent? It is not my advancement that bites your heart. No, you've thrown to the winds all reason and honor, and lust only to hold a lovely woman in your arms. Oh, the pleasures of the base are always vile. And now—if yesterday I was without wit or wisdom, but today I've counseled with myself well and wisely— does that make me mad? Rather are you crazed, for the gods, being generous, rid you of a wicked wife, yet now you want her back! As to the suitors, marriage-mad, with folly in their hearts, they swore an oath to Tyndareus. Yes, I grant that; but Hope is a god, and she, not any power of yours, put it into effect. Make war with their help — they'll join you in their folly! But in heaven there is intelligence-it can perceive oaths bonded in evil, under compulsion sworn. So I will not kill my children! Nor will your enterprise of vengeance upon an evil wife prosper against all justice. If I were to commit this act, against law, right, and the child I fathered, each day, each night, while I yet lived would wear me out in grief and tears. So these are my few words, clear and easily understood. You may choose madness, but I will order my affairs in decency and honor.

(Iphigenia in Aulis, 378-402)

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Vexations by Annelyse Gelman

[excerpts]

People built robots to clean the dust off solar panels A mirrored array bounced sunbeams to a collection tower Birds flew through the light and were cooked in midair People built robots to pick up the bird corpses The desert blew into the forest and civilized the trees Over the PA someone said, A diamond is forever!

As for the wristband—just as, for the corn, it was cheaper To throw it away than to sell it—it was cheaper To buy a new watch than to fix it—just as, for the cancer It was cheaper to throw you away than to treat it When the robots broke, we piled them with old car parts behind chain-link fences We didn't know what to do with our garbage

In a pocket of ordinary time I met a horse, he was two big warm lips under my lips He looked at me the way people looked at each other in alleyways Before the situation, trying to decide if they ought to be nervous When I held bobby pins in my mouth braiding daughter's hair And she cried when the fox said, Please—tame me! And she cried when the boy said, I want to, very much, but—

***

It was difficult to speak honestly Because it was difficult to think honestly As for the islands of trash in the middle of the oceans Sometimes I thought about them, then I thought about the next thing Because it was difficult to speak honestly It was difficult to think, honestly

The medicine made her head sunflower-heavy Inside my passport was a picture of a bear eating a fish Inside my passport was a picture of a bald eagle and a buffalo The caption said, Is our world gone? We say "Farewell" Is a new world coming? We welcome it— And we will bend it to the hopes of man

I strapped daughter in and we got going Bugs made abstract expressions on the windshield Scientists put jellyfish genes in a rabbit The g-forces were delectable in my pelvis We had retained the word mammoth to talk about big things A mammoth was a big animal that used to exist

Her eardrums ached so I closed the window People awaited rations in neat rows like beech trees in a plantation forest The parallax made her dizzy so I turned off her eyes On an intercity bus a person decapitated another person An atrocity was news, then memory, then history, then myth In the soundproof dungeon, the sound of a whip

People carved baroque monuments out of Styrofoam And spray-painted them gold and left them outside mansions On immaculate lawns with alarmed sprinklers It was a joke, a joke about money, and who had it And who did not, and who would suffer and who would not And whose inklings leaked out inconveniently, leaving viscous, odoriferous trails...

At the edge of her skin there were cells and hairs and heat Continents smashed and made mountains ascend A man opening his trench coat had something for sale Apprehension meant knowledge but also dread Whoever had the remedy could hold the world hostage Inside of understanding, a creamy center of fear

A horse's nostrils flared over my swollen knuckles Another new extinction, another new therapy I couldn't tell if a cave was a cave or a replica cave from a natural history museum I couldn't tell if a cloud was a supercell or a forest fire I couldn't tell if a cemetery was a cemetery Or a shop that used to sell tombstones

***

People fell asleep with their noses in each other's armpits People tossed a tennis ball from their left hand to their right People cleared their throats and excused themselves People summarized an interaction in order to signal its conclusion People kept a shoebox full of sentimental shit People tried to make it look like they were just going on a trip

People unbuttoned their jackets to indicate the desire to sit People hiding under cafeteria tables got shot in the high school People on skateboards leaned in the direction they wanted to turn People drinking slushies got shot in the food court People learning to write their names got shot in the elementary school People got shot watching the parade with their families

People untied the belts from their arms and leaned back People talking to God got shot in the synagogue People in child's pose got shot at a yoga studio People depositing paychecks got shot in banks People made their own soap to sell at the local farmers market People buying eggs got shot at the grocery store

People slid the specimen into the tray and sanitized their hands People riding the subway got shot coming home from the park People formed intimate bonds with inanimate objects People hiding in bathroom stalls got shot in nightclubs I thought it was firecrackers, said the DJ People holding signs got shot at peaceful protests

People drinking soda got shot in a bowling alley People hiding behind racks of blue T-shirts got shot in department stores People hiding behind heavy-duty printers got shot in offices People practiced saying vowels while a therapist touched their mouth People put their hands around each other's throats and had orgasms People marked the box that said they would give away their organs

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The Galloping Hour: French Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Patricio Ferrari & Forrest Gander

If for once again the blue gaze inside this sack full of dust — I speak of myself, I have the right — this expectation, this patience — if for once again — who understands me? — I speak of broken toys, of a black sack, of an expectation, I speak of myself, I can do it, I ought to do it. If everything I call doesn't come to me just once again, someone will have to laugh, someone will have to toast with an atrocious joke — I speak of dust riven with sullen light, blue eyes patiently marking time. Who understands me? Just once again the small hand among broken toys, regard of her who waits, listens, understands. Blue eyes as a response to this death right next to me, which speaks to me and is me. If for once again my earthen eyes, my head stuffed in a black sack, my blue eyes which can read what dust scrawls, its pathetic handwriting. If again each time.

***

Words of the wind, a red horse careens across the memory of ancient wailing nights. Evil emerges from my memorious eyes. The world given form as a cry. How I would have loved to see myself some other night, beyond this madness of being both sides of the mirror. Means of seeing, the opened eyes glimpse the dissolving trace. A red horse foretells choleric seasons. Chewing the end of its name, we lose ourselves in the memory of a howl. If everything is like that, where are the kings of unknowing? I bend myself around the galloping hour, the hour of cries that drag me after them, captive to a single trace, I hear the sound of what beats down the wind. Horse of ire, bear me far from myself. Far from this cry that stands in for night.

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An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn

I know about this, Daddy was saying. His mother, he went on, shaking his head and staring down at the floor, his mother was the most beautiful girl. Not pretty—beautiful.

As I had done once many years before, when I was in high school and he was telling a neighbor how terrific my mother had looked at some event, a bar mitzvah or wedding, I thought, Why doesn't he ever tell her that?

But of course I didn't say that now. Like the students, I remained quiet and let my father talk.

And it's funny, he went on, regaining his composure and squeezing his eyes tightly shut as he spoke, nodding up and down as if he were talking to himself, just as he did when he was trying to remember some bit of trivia, the name of some character actor in an old movie, the batting average of a baseball star from his childhood, some fact that would prove to you that he was still as sharp as ever, It's funny, my father said, but I think this part of the poem is very true. There are these things you have with someone, not physical things, but private jokes and memories you gather over time, little things that nobody else knows about.

He looked up and saw the kids staring at him. A bit sheepish, suddenly, he tried to lighten the mood. Well, sometimes it's physical things! he said.

I was too startled to say anything. But I was realizing not only that he was right but how deeply right he was. I was realizing, for the first time, how much the Odyssey knew about this ostensibly trivial but profound real-life phenomenon, the way that small things between people can be the foundation of the greatest intimacy. And not just between husbands and wives, or lovers. I thought about "Daddy Loopy." I thought about the bed upstairs in my study, with the silly secret of its construction.

When my father said, "Well, sometimes it's physical things," I expected the students to react, perhaps to laugh. But they were rapt. Nobody said a word.

He went on.

Like I said, I think the poem is right about this. When you have those things, those things that couples have, they keep you connected long after everything else becomes unrecognizable.

He looked over at me, as if to see whether I'd registered that he was using this key word from our weeks of conversations about the Odyssey.

Those are the things that you hang on to, he said, suddenly self-conscious. It's why you stick with this ... this thing in the first place.

He sat up straighter in the chair and gave his head a little shake then, as if to dispel the mood he'd created.

Anyway, trust me, his mother was beautiful.

He jerked his head in my direction and then shrank back into his chair.

The students stayed quiet. Well, what could they say? My parents' marriage had lasted three times as long as their entire lives. I could tell from their solemn faces as they stared across the room at him that they were impressed. I had the sudden sense that they were looking up to him.

And then, as I glanced around the table and felt their silence, I realized that this is what those magical transtormations in the Odyssey really are. It isn't magic at all. Something happens, someone speaks heatedly or with authority—with "wingèd words" as Homer puts it, epê pteroenta—and you suddenly see things differently: the person actually looks different. At the moment my father pushed himself back in the chair after admitting that the Odyssey had gotten something right, that between couples there are secrets that serve, in the end, as the bedrock of marriage, secrets unknown even to the children of that marriage—at that moment it occurred to me that he looked bigger and more impressive, somehow, the way that Odysseus looks taller and more beautiful when Athena needs him to succeed, to impress some stranger in whose hands his fate hangs. On that May day toward the end of the seminar, my father had succeeded, too. With this fleeting display of tenderness, before an audience of children too young to understand what they were witnessing, he had, for a moment, been transformed. (pp. 256-58)

***

I thought of these things, looking at my father on what might be the last night of his life, and thought, Who is this man? and realized that I could never really know the answer, now.

Daddy, I called again. He was still.

And then I thought, I'd never have been able to know the answer anyway. My mind went back to all the things I'd thought I was keeping from my father over the years, and how he'd known all along. Well, why not? He had made me. A father makes his son out of his flesh and out of his mind and then shapes him with his ambitions and dreams, with his cruelties and failures, too. But a son, although he is of his father, cannot know his father totally, because the father precedes him; his father has always already lived so much more than the son has, so that the son can never catch up, can never know everything. No wonder the Greeks thought that few sons are the equals of their fathers; that most fall short, all too few surpass them. It's not about value; it's about knowledge. The father knows the son whole, but the son can never know the father.

I thought, No wonder Odysseus can't lie to Laertes at the end of the poem.

I looked at him again. Daddy, I called softly.

Then a nurse came in and turned on the overhead light, and I was suddenly looking at the face not of a king but of a sick old man: a man who, I understood at some primitive level, was no longer present inside his own body, a man whose brain—his mighty brain which had meant everything to him, which had been the means of his escape from his childhood, had put food on the table and paid for his children's lives, had prodded and pushed us and humiliated us, too, which in the end had contained certain secrets that he shared only with the woman he had been with for six decades—had moved. (pp.294-95)

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Water by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori

My heart breaks when I look out on the old turning wheel of the world— the trickery, snares, and deception.

My heart breaks when I see pain planted in the soil. What will it yield but more pain?

What the world has called work, I work hard not to do.

-----

Man, man, man, what kind of lightning are you, setting farms on fire? What kind of cloud are you, raining down stones?

What kind of hunter? Caught in your own trap— a thief stealing from your own house.

You're sixty years old, you're seventy years old, and you're still uncooked? Still won't let Love's flames near, won't let them burn you up?

Enthralled by stuff and status, the crown, the turban, the king's beard— thorns pricking your hands,

but where is your flower?

Gazing in the mirror, you tilt your hat like a crescent moon— but where is your light?

-----

If once, for one day, you would sense the Beloved, sense the Beloved's boundless Love, you'd be a friend, a good friend.

I swear to the pure essence of the Love that loves us all, if you let it intoxicate you— kindness will reign, benevolence will reign.

Love is your true prince, your true sheik. Take a step towards your true master, and you're no longer a horseman in an army, you're the head of the cavalry.

Hold onto Love's hand. Seek Love's aid. Feel its warmth. Nothing else will save you from the ache of separation.

On a desolate night, remember Love. Feel dawn breaking within. How can night persist under a rising sun?

While you sleep, Love sits at your bedside praying for you, weeping for you.

If I say more, the world will burn.

***

If you don't know what Love is, ask the desolate night, ask unkissed lips and a sallow face what they miss.

Still water tells stories of the moon and stars. Bodies give body to intellect and soul.

Schoolbooks can't teach us what Love teaches us— grace, warmth, civility,

their countless ways.

***

Seekers on a pilgrimage to the house of God, where are you going? Where are you?

Your Beloved is here. Come back. Your Beloved lives next door. Your Beloved is right behind the wall.

Why are you wandering round and round, lost in the desert?

Look beyond form. Look into the faceless face of Love. You are that Love. You are the house—the dwelling place of Love— and its maker.

You've traveled ten times to see the house of God. You've described it in detail, all its exquisite features.

Now tell me about the God inside. For once, enter your own house. Climb to the roof.

If you saw the garden, where are the flowers? If you swam from God's sea, where is your soul's pearl?

Searching for treasure, you've endured so much trouble. Hear this truth—

you are the treasure and the veil hiding it.

***

To Brood is to wander through a grove where one sheep strays and a hundred wolves follow.

Why did I make brooding my vocation when awe was an option?

Thought spinner, mull the wine of wonder.

***

The garden's scent is a messenger, arriving again and again, inviting us in.

Hidden exchanges, hidden cycles stir life underground. What stirs the life in you? The garden asks.

The garden thrives. Invites us to do the same.

Saplings break through darkness— ladders set against the sky. Mysteries ascend.

Lips of lilies open— secrets whispered to the cypress. Good news of spring blasts from the mouths of tulips, among redbuds and willows, nightingales perched like guards over open coffers of nectar.

Leaves are tongues. The fruit, a heart. When the heart opens, we know the tongue's worth.

***

Not a lover? Try spinning wool.

Still nothing? Try a hundred jobs, a hundred crafts, a hundred causes and paths.

If Love's wine hasn't seeped into your skull by then,

go to the kitchen in Love's house and lick the plates lovers left behind.

***

Selflessness is sky. The bird of the heart flies nowhere but there.

***

When I leave this body, people will ask— what did he do with his life?

I knew you, Beloved. That was enough.

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Concordance by Susan Howe

SINCE [excerpt]

If one could ever build a cairn to outlast the sound of cell phone ringing imagined as breath so you won't disappear poor Hareton the most wronged for doing nothing.

"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life" or so says Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying: An Observation. An aphorism is a dictum perfected to the point of wit. Wit and weaving have the same beginning. "Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not?"

That's Mary Manning Howe Adams in The Cambridge Holmes for Liars. "Prepare her steeds / Paw up against the light."

Lyric, Lyrica, lyre, liar, lawyer

"Happiness not in another place, but this place. Not for another hour, but this hour." That's Walt Whitman not Wallace Stevens. Concordian serenity. Sound clusters passing through phonological nets called names but opening as if by magnet to myriad elected affinities.

"Feb. 5, Talked about Emerson again today—Holmes saying how extraordinary that 'a hen-blooded farmer-parson' could ever written such things as he did. And then he started reciting 'fired the shot heard round the world.' He described [him] as a wonderful looking sage, with his hair curling over his collar in back— 'like a hawk's feathers.'"

Down at the pier waves are whipped up and breaking against Noman's Island an offshore granite outcropping not even half an acre wide where gunpowder used for quarrying was stored before WWI

Wren alarm calls

Wood to wire—

Intelligence

Trees listen and wait

For now, in haste

I am going to a sea strand six centuries off in search of cockle shells for cutting ceiling silhouettes

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Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi

Midnight Sun

DAY FIVE

A letter arrives from a place where your reply can't be sent

That you're already here That you've already left you

A shimmering letter arrives from the hole that knows everything

Like the brain that sees all too clearly after death, a bright letter arrives Like the days before you were born, a widely wide letter without yesterday or tomorrow arrives

Soft chiming of bells from a carriage made of light Giggles of a girl in pants made of light, knocking on the nightless world

The last train runs above ground the world where all the trains on the platform light up at once and silently forget about you

You can't go, for you are footless, but the children of your childhood are already there A letter arrives from that bright hole where not even a reply in black can be sent

where your children age in front of you from that place where you departed to, to be reincarnated

A letter arrives, written in ink of brightly bright light

from that place where you've never encountered darkness an enormously enormous letter arrives a brilliant light a newborn greets for the first time

***

A Lullaby

DAY THIRTY-SEVEN

The mother of the child coddled her dead child in her arms

She sang a lullaby

This is the contents of her lullaby:

Sleep, sleep my baby, die soon so you'll be at ease, so you won't have to cry

The mother of the child dug a hole in the middle of her room and buried her child

She also buried her child in the ceiling. Buried her in the wall. Buried her in her pupils

Nobody knew the name of the child's mother, but they knew the child's name

***

Asphyxiation

DAY FORTY-SIX

Hence breath Then breath Next breath Subsequent breath Because breath Such breath And breath Same breath Thereafter breath Thus breath Always breath Eventually breath Perpetually breath Yet breath However breath Therefore breath In spite of breath Breath till the bitter end

Death breathes and you dream but

it's time to remove the ventilator from death it's time to shatter the dream with a hammer

***

Don't

DAY FORTY-NINE

The warm buoyant breaths don't miss you The winds that have left for reincarnation before you, that brush against the lips of your childhood don't miss you

The winter, the woman's ice-heart, dead from sickness, drifting away in the infinite blue sky with thin needles stuck all over it doesn't miss you

The leaves blow away, leaving their prints on the frozen river and

the one-hundred, two-hundred-story high buildings crumble all at once and

the spectacles with spectacles, shoes with shoes, lips with lips, eyebrows with eyebrows, footprints with footprints swept into a huge drawer don't miss you

The river is frozen eighty centimeters deep, a tank passes over it, and the fish beneath the ice don't miss you

The dog tied to the electric pole in front of the tobacco shop for fourteen years doesn't miss you

While the big wind takes away thousands of women dead from madness

the sound of the "you's" of your whole life, your hair falling

all of the winter landscape, wailing and wielding its whip doesn't miss you

Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of snow flurries don't miss you

Don't descend all over the world, howling, murmuring, searching for your snowman-like body buried in the snow, don't miss you and say love you or whatever as if unfolding a beautifully folded letter

Don't miss you just because you're not you and I'm the one who's really you

Don't miss you as you write and write for forty-nine days with an inkless pen

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Euripides I, edited by David Grene & Richmond Lattimore

PHERES

I have come to bear your sorrows with you, son. I know, nobody will dispute it, you have lost a wife both good and modest in her ways. Nevertheless, you have to bear it, even though it is hard to bear. Accept these gifts to deck her body, bury them  with her. Oh yes, she well deserves honor in death. She died to save your life, my son. She would not let me be a childless old man, would not let me waste away in sorrowful age deprived of you. Thereby, daring this generous action, she has made the life of all women become a thing of better repute than it was. O you who saved him, you who raised us up when we were fallen, farewell, even in Hades' house may good befall you. I say people ought to marry women like this. Otherwise, better not to marry at all.

ADMETUS

I never invited you to come and see her buried, nor do I count your company as that of a friend. She shall not wear anything that you bring her. She needs nothing from you to be buried in. Your time to share my sorrow was when I was about to die. But you stood out of the way and let youth take my place in death, though you were old. Will you cry for her now? It cannot be that my body ever came from you, nor did the woman who claims she bore me and is called my mother give me birth. I was got from some slave and surreptitiously put to your wife to nurse. You show it. Your nature in the crisis has come out. I do not count myself as any child of yours. Oh, you outpass the cowardice of all the world, you at your age, come to the very last step of life and would not, dared not, die for your own child. Oh no, you let this woman, married into our family, do it instead, and therefore it is right for me to call her all the father and mother that I have. And yet you two should honorably have striven for the right of dying for your child. The time of life you had left for your living was short, in any case, and she and I would still be living out our time and I should not be hurt and grieving over her. And yet, all that a man could have to bless his life you have had. You had your youth in kingship. There was I your son, ready to take it over, keep your house in order, so you had no childless death to fear, with the house left to be torn apart by other claims. You cannot justify your leaving me to death on grounds that I disrespected your old age. Always I showed all consideration. See what thanks I get from you and from the woman who gave me birth. Go on, get you other children — you cannot do it too soon — who will look after your old age, and lay you out when you are dead, and see you buried properly. I will not do it. This hand will never bury you. I am dead as far as you are concerned, and if, because I found another savior, I still look on the sun, I count myself that person's child and fond support. It is meaningless, the way the old men pray for death and complain of age and the long time they have to live. Let death only come close, not one of them still wants to die. Their age is not a burden any more.

CHORUS LEADER

Stop, stop. We have trouble enough already, child. You will exasperate your father with this talk.

PHERES

Big words, son. Who do you think you are cursing out like this? Some Lydian slave, some Phrygian that you bought? I am a free Thessalian noble, nobly born from a Thessalian. Are you forgetting that? You go too far with your high-handedness. You volley brash words at me, and fail to hit me, and then run away. I gave you life, and made you master of my house, and raised you. I am not obliged to die for you. I do not acknowledge any tradition among us that fathers should die for their sons. That is not Greek either. Your natural right is to find your own happiness or unhappiness. All you deserve from me, you have. You are lord of many. I have wide estates of land to leave you, just as my father left them to me. What harm have I done you then? What am I taking away from you? Do not die for me, I will not die for you. You like the sunlight. Don't you think your father does? I count the time I have to spend down there as long, and the time to live is little, but that little is sweet. You fought shamelessly for a way to escape death, and passed your proper moment, and are still alive because you killed her. Then, you wretch, you dare to call me coward, when you let your woman outdare you, and die for her magnificent young man? I see. You have found a clever scheme by which you never will die. You will always persuade the wife you have at the time to die for you instead. And you, so low, then dare blame your own people for not wanting to do this. Silence. I tell you, as you cherish your own life, all other people cherish theirs. And if you call us names, you will be called names, and the names are true.

CHORUS LEADER

Too much evil has been said in this speech and in that spoken before. Old sir, stop cursing your own son.

ADMETUS

No, speak, as I have spoken. If it hurts to hear the truth, you should not have made a mistake with me.

PHERES

I should have made a mistake if I had died for you.

ADMETUS

Is it the same thing to die old and to die young?

PHERES

Yes. We have only one life and not two to live.

ADMETUS

I think you would like to live a longer time than Zeus.

PHERES

Cursing your parents, when they have done you no wrong?

ADMETUS

Yes, for I found you much in love with a long life.

PHERES

Who is it you are burying? Did not someone die?

ADMETUS

And that she died, you foul wretch, proves your cowardice.

PHERES

You cannot say that we were involved in her death.

ADMETUS

Ah. I hope that some day you will stand in need of me.

PHERES

Go on, and court more women, so they all can die.

ADMETUS

Your fault. You were not willing to die.

PHERES

No, I was not. It is a sweet thing, this god's sunshine, sweet to see.

ADMETUS

That is an abject spirit, not a man's.

PHERES

You shall not mock an old man while you carry out your dead.

ADMETUS

You will die in evil memory, when you do die.

PHERES

I do not care what they say of me when I am dead.

ADMETUS

How old age loses all the sense of shame.

PHERES

She was not shameless, the woman you found; she was only stupid.

ADMETUS

Get out of here now and let me bury my dead.

PHERES

I'll go. You murdered her, and you can bury her. But you will have her brothers still to face. You'll pay, for Acastus is no longer counted as a man unless he sees you punished for his sister's blood.

ADMETUS

Go and be damned, you and that woman who lives with you. Grow old as you deserve, childless, although your son still lives. You shall not come again under the same roof with me. And if I had to proclaim by heralds that I disown my father's house, I should have so proclaimed.

(Alcestis, 614-738)

***

NURSE

Oh no, terrible! Why should your children share in the guilt of the crimes of their father? Why should you hate them? I'm utterly stricken with fear for your safety, poor children. Rulers have dangerous natures: subjected to little, controlling much, they are not inclined to relent from their passions. Better to live in the ways of fair-sharing: the height of ambition for me is to live out my life without much, but entirely secure. The word "moderation" sounds first in our speaking, and is easily best in enactment. Exaggeration can never provide sound balance for humans. And if ever a god gets angered against some household, the payoff's yet greater disaster.

(Medea, 115-130)

***

NURSE

You'd be right to conclude that the people of olden times were stupid and lacking in wisdom when they invented poems to accompany feasts, celebrations, and dinners, sweet ornamentations of life. Still no one has found out the way to abolish our harrowing griefs with poetic powers or with songs and elaborate strings— griefs that result in the deaths and terrible mishaps that overturn households. Yet that would have offered us profit: to medicine these troubles with music. Why bother with loudly voiced singing for nothing, when feasting is garnished with pleasure? All by itself the rich banquet provides full satisfaction for people.

(Medea, 189-204)

***

MEDEA:

We women are the most beset by trials of any species that has breath and power of thought. Firstly, we are obliged to buy a husband at excessive cost, and then accept him as the master of our body —that is even worse. And here's the throw that carries highest stakes: is he a good catch or a bad? For changing husbands is a blot upon a woman's good repute; and it's not possible to say no to the things a husband wants. A bride, when she arrives to join new ways and customs, needs to be a prophet to predict the ways to deal best with her new bedmate — she won't have learned that back at home. And then... then if, when we have spent a deal of trouble on these things, if then our husband lives with us bearing the yoke without its being forced, we have an enviable life. But if he does not: better death. But for a man— oh no—if ever he is irked with those he has at home, he goes elsewhere to get relief and ease his state of mind. He turns either to some close friend or to someone his age. Meanwhile we women are obliged to keep our eyes on just one person. They, men, allege that we enjoy a life secure from danger safe at home, while they confront the thrusting spears of war. That's nonsense: I would rather join the battle rank of shields three times than undergo birth-labor once. In any case, your story's not at all the same as mine: you have your city here, your father's house, delight in life, and company of friends, while I am citiless, deserted, subjected to humiliation by my husband. Manhandled from a foreign land like so much pirate loot, here I have no mother, brother, relative, no one to offer me a port, a refuge from catastrophe. So I would like to ask this one small thing of you: if I can find some means or some device to make my husband pay the penalty to quit me for the wrongs he's done, stay silent, please —also the man who's given him his daughter, and the bride herself. Although a woman is so fearful in all other ways — no good for battle or the sight of weaponry — when she's been wrongly treated in the field of sex, there is no other cast of mind more deadly, none.

(Medea, 230-266)

***

CHORUS:

My conclusion is this: that people who've never had children, and have no experience of them, are certainly happier far than those under parenthood's yoke. With no opportunity to experience children as joy, nor as causes of pain — they steer clear of many ordeals.

And those with that sweetness of growth, with children as plants in their house— I notice how all of the time they are worn down to shadows with cares. Struggling with how to nurture good health, then how they can leave them well off... and, after that, it's still unsure just whether this labor is spent to raise them as bad or as good.

And lastly I have to include one final disaster of all for humans. Supposing all's well— they've put aside plentiful means, their children have grown to the full, their character makeup is good— still, if destiny has it this way, then Death takes their bodies below, abducting your child's lovely life. Yet how can it profit the gods to pile upon humans this worst and most agonizing of blows — a fine for the bearing of children.

(Medea, 1090-1116)

***

THESEUS

What fools men are! You work and work for nothing, you teach ten thousand skills to one another, invent, discover everything. One thing only you do not know: one thing you never hunted for — a way to teach intelligence to fools.

(Hippolytus, 916-920)

[7r0773r]

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. I just watched Sonny's face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn't with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing—he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.

And, while Creole listened, Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

And Sonny hadn't been near a piano for over a year. And he wasn't on much better terms with his life, not the life that stretched before him now. He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have found a direction, panicked again, got stuck. And the face I saw on Sonny I'd never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the same time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by the fire and fury of the battle which was occurring in him up there.

Yet, watching Creole's face as they neared the end of the first set, I had the feeling that something had happened, something I hadn't heard. Then they finished, there was scattered applause, and then, without an instant's warning, Creole started into something else, it was almost sardonic, it was Am I Blue. And, as though he commanded, Sonny began to play. Something began to happen. And Creole let out the reins. The dry, low, black man said something awful on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old. Then they all came together again, and Sonny was part of the family again. I could tell this from his face. He seemed to have found, right there beneath his fingers, a damn brand-new piano. It seemed that he couldn't get over it. Then, for awhile, just being happy with Sonny, they seemed to be agreeing with him that brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.

Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny's blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn't trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.

Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother's face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father's brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel's tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

Then it was over. Creole and Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet, and grinning. There was a lot of applause and some of it was real. In the dark, the girl came by and I asked her to take drinks to the bandstand. There was a long pause, while they talked up there in the indigo light and after awhile I saw the girl put a Scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny. He didn't seem to notice it, but just before they started playing again, he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother's head like the very cup of trembling. (Sonny's Blues, pp. 137-41)

***

It was on a bridge, one tremendous, April morning, that I knew I had fallen in love. Harriet and I were walking hand in hand. The bridge was the Pont Royal, just before us was the great horloge, high and lifted up, saying ten to ten; beyond this, the golden statue of Joan of Arc, with her sword uplifted. Harriet and I were silent, for we had been quarreling about something. Now, when I look back, I think we had reached that state when an affair must either end or become something more than an affair.

I looked sideways at Harriet's face, which was still. Her dark-blue eyes were narrowed against the sun, and her full, pink lips were still slightly sulky, like a child's. In those days, she hardly ever wore make-up. I was in my shirt sleeves. Her face made me want to laugh and run my hand over her short dark hair. I wanted to pull her to me and say, Baby, don't be mad at me, and at that moment something tugged at my heart and made me catch my breath. There were millions of people all around us, but I was alone with Harriet. She was alone with me. Never, in all my life, until that moment, had I been alone with anyone. The world had always been with us, between us, defeating the quarrel we could not achieve, and making love impossible. During all the years of my life, until that moment, I had carried the menacing, the hostile, killing world with me everywhere. No matter what I was doing or saying or feeling, one eye had always been on the world—that world which I had learned to distrust almost as soon as I learned my name, that world on which I knew one could never turn one's back, the white man's world. And for the first time in my life I was free of it; it had not existed for me; I had been quarreling with my girl. It was our quarrel, it was entirely between us, it had nothing to do with anyone else in the world. For the first time in my life I had not been afraid of the patriotism of the mindless, in uniform or out, who would beat me up and treat the woman who was with me as though she were the lowest of untouchables. For the first time in my life I felt that no force jeopardized my right, my power, to possess and to protect a woman; for the first time, the first time, felt that the woman was not, in her own eyes or in the eyes of the world, degraded by my presence. (This Morning, This Evening, So Soon, pp. 157-58)

***

She put down the receiver, still amused and still trembling. After all, he had called her. But he would probably not have called her if he were not actually nourishing the hope that the gallery owner's daughter might find him interesting; in that case he would have to tell Ruth about her and it was better to have the way prepared. Paul was always preparing the way for one unlikely exploit or flight or another, it was the reason he told Ruth "everything." To tell everything is a very effective means of keeping secrets. Secrets hidden at the heart of midnight are simply waiting to be dragged to the light, as, on some unlucky high noon, they always are. But secrets shrouded in the glare of candor are bound to defeat even the most determined and agile inspector for the light is always changing and proves that the eye cannot be trusted. So Ruth knew about Paul nearly all there was to know, knew him better than anyone else on earth ever had or probably ever would, only—she did not know him well enough to stop him from being Paul.

While she was waiting for the elevator she realized, with mild astonishment, that she was actually hoping that the gallery owner's daughter would take Paul away. This hope resembled the desperation of someone suffering from a toothache who, in order to bring the toothache to an end, was almost willing to jump out of a window. But she found herself wondering if love really ought to be like a toothache. Love ought—she stepped out of the elevator, really wondering for a moment which way to turn—to be a means of being released from guilt and terror. But Paul's touch would never release her. He had power over her not because she was free but because she was guilty. To enforce his power over her he had only to keep her guilt awake. This did not demand malice on his part, it scarcely demanded perception—it only demanded that he have, as, in fact, he overwhelmingly did have, an instinct for his own convenience. His touch, which should have raised her, lifted her roughly only to throw her down hard; whenever he touched her, she became blacker and dirtier than ever; the loneliest place under heaven was in Paul's arms.

And yet—she went into his arms with such eagerness and such hope. She had once thought herself happy. Was this because she had been proud that he was white? But—it was she who was insisting on these colors. Her blackness was not Paul's fault. Neither was her guilt. She was punishing herself for something, a crime she could not remember. You dirty ... you black and dirty ... (Come Out the Wilderness, pp. 214-15)

[7r0773r]

American Melancholy by Joyce Carol Oates

EXSANGUINATION

Life as it unspools ever more eludes examination.

We wonder what is best— exsanguination in a rush, or in 1,000 small slashes.

***

THE FIRST ROOM

In every dream of a room the first room intrudes. No matter the years, the tears dried and forgotten, it is the skeleton of the first that protrudes.

***

THE MERCY

So much depends upon forgetting much

for our earliest yearnings never abandon us.

The stroke that wipes out memory is another word for mercy.

***

PALLIATIVE

1.

Hate hope! Arsenic for weeks we'd taken in micro-drops on credulous tongues.

Hope the thing with noisome wings clattering about our heads with a broom at last swatted to earth. Stomped, smashed.

Now, clarity of silence. Only the drip of minimal liquids—saline, Dilaudid. Only the labored and arrhythmic breathing as the chest rises, falls—rises, falls. Faintest of echoes—Give up on.

2.

Hold desperation like a playing card close to the heart reluctant to reveal what you feel but (yes) you risk the irrevocable loss too late.

And so on the brink of too late (when no one else is in the room) (for a hospice room can be crowded) (by "crowded" meaning more than two people) you tell your husband that you love him so much, what a wonderful husband he has been and he says—But I failed you by dying. And you protest—But why are you saying such a thing, you are not dying, we are talking Here together!— And he says Because I am dead.

As after the final biopsy he'd been incensed—They took my soul from me. They took me to the crematorium, I saw the sign. Don't try to tell me I didn't see the sign.

3.

Trapped in this bed like a prison. Is the car out front? Drive the car around. Where are the keys to the car? Joyce, don't leave. Joyce? We need to get the car. Where are the keys... I want to go home. Take me home. Joyce— don't leave me! What did we do with the car?

4.

In hospice time ceases. Hours lapse into days and days into night and again day, and night and the mouth once fierce in kissing and being kissed is slack, mute. And breathing slows, asymmetrical as a listing boat. And fever dreams rage beneath bluish eyelids quivering in secret life. Until at last the deepest sigh of a lifetime…

5.

After such struggle you must love the unrippled dark water in which the perfect cold O of the moon floats

[7r0773r]

Selected Poems by W.S. Graham

The Thermal Stair

For the painter Peter Lanyon killed in a gliding accident 1964

I called today, Peter, and you were away. I look out over Botallack and over Ding Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea.

Find me a thermal to speak and soar to you from Over Lanyon Quoit and the circling stones standing High on the moor over Gurnard's Head where some

Time three foxglove summers ago, you came. The days are shortening over Little Parc Owles. The poet or painter steers his life to maim

Himself somehow for the job. His job is Love Imagined into words or paint to make An object that will stand and will not move.

Peter, I called and you were away, speaking Only through what you made and at your best. Look, there above Botallack, the buzzard riding

The salt updraught slides off the broken air And out of sight to quarter a new place. The Celtic sea, the Methodist sea is there.

You said once in the Engine House below Morvah That words make their world In the same way as the painter's Mark surprises him Into seeing new. Sit here on the sparstone In this ruin where Once the early beam Engine pounded and broke The air with industry. Now the chuck of daws And the listening sea.

'Shall we go down' you said 'Before the light goes And stand under the old Tinworkings around Morvah and St Just?' You said 'Here is the sea Made by alfred wallis Or any poet or painter's Eye it encountered. Or is it better made By all those vesselled men Sometime it maintained? We all make it again.'

Give me your hand, Peter, To steady me on the word.

Seventy-two by sixty, Italy hangs on the wall. A woman stands with a drink In some polite place And looks at S A R A C I N E S C O And turns to mention space. That one if she could Would ride Artistically The thermals you once rode.

Peter, the phallic boys Begin to wink their lights. Godrevy and the Wolf Are calling Opening Time. We'll take the quickest way The tin singers made. Climb here where the hand Will not grasp on air. And that dark-suited man Has set the dominoes out On the Queen's table. Peter, we'll sit and drink And go in the sea's roar To Labrador with wallis Or rise on Lanyon's stair.

Uneasy, lovable man, give me your painting Hand to steady me taking the word-road home. Lanyon, why is it you're earlier away? Remember me wherever you listen from. Lanyon, dingdong dingdong from carn to carn. It seems tonight all Closing bells are tolling Across the Duchy shire wherever I turn.

***

I Leave This at Your Ear

For Nessie Dunsmuir

I leave this at your ear for when you wake, A creature in its abstract cage asleep. Your dreams blindfold you by the light they make.

The owl called from the naked-woman tree As I came down by the Kyle farm to hear Your house silent by the speaking sea.

I have come late but I have come before Later with slaked steps from stone to stone To hope to find you listening for the door.

I stand in the ticking room. My dear, I take A moth kiss from your breath. The shore gulls cry. I leave this at your ear for when you wake.

***

Approaches To How They Behave

What does it matter if the words I choose, in the order I choose them in, Go out into a silence I know Nothing about, there to be let In and entertained and charmed Out of their master's orders? And yet I would like to see where they go And how without me they behave.

2

Speaking is difficult and one tries To be exact and yet not to Exact the prime intention to death. On the other hand the appearance of things Must not be made to mean another Thing. It is a kind of triumph To see them and to put them down As what they are. The inadequacy Of the living, animal language drives Us all to metaphor and an attempt To organize the spaces we think We have made occur between the words.

3

The bad word and the bad word and The word which glamours me with some Quick face it pulls to make me let It leave me to go across In roughly your direction, hates To go out maybe so completely On another silence not its own.

4

Before I know it they are out Afloat in the head which freezes them. Then I suppose I take the best Away and leave the others arranged Like floating bergs to sink a convoy.

5

One word says to its mate O I do not think we go together Are we doing any good here Why do we find ourselves put down? The mate pleased to be spoken to Looks up from the line below And says well that doubtful god Who has us here is far from sure How we on our own tickle the chin Of the prince or the dame that lets us in.

6

The dark companion is a star Very present like a dark poem Far and unreadable just out At the edge of this poem floating. It is not more or less a dark Companion poem to the poem.

7

Language is expensive if We want to strut, busked out Showing our best on silence. Good Morning. That is a bonny doing Of verbs you wear with the celandine Catching the same sun as mine. You wear your dress like a prince but A country's prince beyond my ken. Through the chinks in your lyric coat My ear catches a royal glimpse Of fuzzed flesh, unworded body. Was there something you wanted to say? I myself dress up in what I can Afford on the broadway. Underneath My overcoat of the time's slang I am fashionable enough wearing The grave-clothes of my generous masters.

8

And what are you supposed to say I asked a new word but it kept mum. I had secretly admired always What I thought it was here for. But I was wrong when I looked it up Between the painted boards. It said Something it was never very likely I could fit in to a poem in my life.

9

The good word said I am not pressed For time. I have all the foxglove day And all my user's days to give You my attention. Shines the red Fox in the digitalis grove. Choose me choose me. Guess which Word I am here calling myself The best. If you can't fit me in To lying down here among the fox Glove towers of the moment, say I am yours the more you use me. Tomorrow Same place same time give me a ring.

10

Backwards the poem's just as good. We human angels as we read Read back as we gobble the words up. Allowing the poem to represent A recognizable landscape Sprouting green up or letting green With all its weight of love hang To gravity's sweet affection, Arse-versa it is the same object, Even although the last word seems To have sung first, or the breakfast lark Sings up from the bottom of the sea.

11

The poem is not a string of knots Tied for a meaning of another time And country, unreadable, found By chance. The poem is not a henge Or Easter Island emerged Longnose Or a tally used by early unknown Peoples. The words we breathe and puff Are our utensils down the dream Into the manhole. Replace the cover.

12

The words are mine. The thoughts are all Yours as they occur behind The bat of your vast unseen eyes. These words are as you see them put Down on the dead-still page. They have No ability above their station. Their station on silence is exact. What you do with them is nobody's business.

13

Running across the language lightly This morning in the hangingover Whistling light from the window, I Was tripped and caught into the whole Formal scheme which Art is. I had only meant to enjoy Dallying between the imaginary And imaginary's opposite With a thought or two up my sleeve.

14

Is the word? Yes Yes. But I hear A sound without words from another Person I can't see at my elbow. A sigh to be proud of. You? Me?

15

Having to construct the silence first To speak out on I realize The silence even itself floats At my ear-side with a character I have not met before. Hello Hello I shout but that silence Floats steady, will not be marked By an off-hand shout. For some reason It refuses to be broken now By what I thought was worth saying. If I wait a while, if I look out At the heavy greedy rooks on the wall It will disperse. Now I construct A new silence I hope to break.

***

The Night City

Unmet at Euston in a dream Of London under Turner's steam Misting the iron gantries, I Found myself running away From Scotland into the golden city.

I ran down Gray's Inn Road and ran Till I was under a black bridge. This was me at nineteen Late at night arriving between The buildings of the City of London.

And then I (O I have fallen down) Fell in my dream beside the Bank Of England's wall to bed, me With my money belt of Northern ice. I found Eliot and he said yes

And sprang into a Holmes cab. Boswell passed me in the fog Going to visit Whistler who Was with John Donne who had just seen Paul Potts shouting on Soho Green.

Midnight. I hear the moon Light chiming on St Paul's.

The City is empty. Night Watchmen are drinking their tea.

The Fire had burnt out. The Plague's pits had closed And gone into literature.

Between the big buildings I sat like a flea crouched In the stopped works of a watch.

***

Loch Thom

Just for the sake of recovering I walked backward from fifty-six Quick years of age wanting to see, And managed not to trip or stumble To find Loch Thom and turned round To see the stretch of my childhood Before me. Here is the loch. The same Long-beaked cry curls across The heather-edges of the water held Between the hills a boyhood's walk Up from Greenock. It is the morning.

And I am here with my mammy's Bramble jam scones in my pocket. The Firth is miles and I have come Back to find Loch Thom maybe In this light does not recognise me.

This is a lonely freshwater loch. No farms on the edge. Only Heather grouse-moor stretching Down to Greenock and One Hope Street or stretching away across Into the blue moors of Ayrshire.

2

And almost I am back again Wading the heather down to the edge To sit. The minnows go by in shoals Like iron-filings in the shallows. My mother is dead. My father is dead And all the trout I used to know Leaping from their sad rings are dead.

3

I drop my crumbs into the shallow Weed for the minnows and pinheads. You see that I will have to rise And turn round and get back where My running age will slow for a moment To let me on. It is a colder Stretch of water than I remember.

The curlew's cry travelling still Kills me fairly. In front of me The grouse flurry and settle. GOBACK GOBACK GOBACK FAREWELL LOCH THOM.

***

To Alexander Graham

Lying asleep walking Last night I met my father Who seemed pleased to see me. He wanted to speak. I saw His mouth saying something But the dream had no sound.

We were surrounded by Laid-up paddle steamers In The Old Quay in Greenock. I smelt the tar and the ropes.

It seemed that I was standing Beside the big iron cannon The tugs used to tie up to When I was a boy. I turned To see Dad standing just Across the causeway under That one lamp they keep on.

He recognised me immediately. I could see that. He was The handsome, same age With his good brows as when He would take me on Sundays Saying we'll go for a walk.

Dad, what am I doing here? What is it I am doing now? Are you proud of me? Going away, I knew You wanted to tell me something.

You stopped and almost turned back To say something. My father, I try to be the best In you you give me always.

Lying asleep turning Round in the quay-lit dark It was my father standing As real as life. I smelt The quay's tar and the ropes.

I think he wanted to speak. But the dream had no sound. I think I must have loved him.

***

To My Wife at Midnight

Are you to say goodnight And turn away under The blanket of your delight?

Are you to let me go Alone to sleep beside you Into the drifting snow?

Where we each reach, Sleeping alone together, Nobody can touch.

Is the cat's window open? Shall I turn into your back? And what is to happen?

What is to happen to us And what is to happen to each Of us asleep in our places?

2

I mean us both going Into sleep at our ages To sleep and get our fairing.

They have all gone home. Night beasts are coming out. The black wood of Madron

Is just waking up. I hear the rain outside To help me to go to sleep.

Nessie, dont let my soul Skip and miss a beat And cause me to fall.

3

Are you asleep I say Into the back of your neck For you not to hear me.

Are you asleep? I hear Your heart under the pillow Saying my dear my dear

My dear for all it's worth. Where is the dun's moor Which began your breath?

4

Ness, to tell you the truth I am drifting away Down to fish for the saithe.

Is the cat's window open? The weather is on my shoulder And I am drifting down

Into O can you hear me Among your Dunsmuir Clan? Are you coming out to play?

5

Did I behave badly On the field at Culloden? I lie sore-wounded now

By all activities, and The terrible acts of my time Are only a distant sound.

With responsibility I am drifting off Breathing regularly

Into my younger days To play the games of Greenock Beside the sugar-house quays.

6

Nessie Dunsmuir, I say Wheesht wheesht to myself To help me now to go

Under into somewhere In the redcoat rain. Buckle me for the war.

Are you to say goodnight And kiss me and fasten My drowsy armour tight?

My dear camp-follower, Hap the blanket round me And tuck in a flower.

Maybe from my sleep In the stoure at Culloden I'll see you here asleep

In your lonely place.

***

The Fifth of May

This morning shaving my brain to face the world I thought of Love and Life and Death and wee Meg Macintosh who sat in front of me In school in Greenock blushing at her desk. I find under the left nostril difficult, Those partisans of stiff hairs holding out In their tender glen beneath the rampart of The nose and my father's long upperlip.

***

Myself the Day Desires

Myself the day desires I thought So I woke early up and scrubbed My parts and spirit and went out As hero to see what I could find.

I walked across and I walked between Black Madron's trees with my stick Swishing the nettles of the queen And I gave the young brambles an extra lick.

And over my desiring head The morning sky was trailed by others. So I was out by these words led Between the hedges and the feathers.

If while I tell you this you want To interrupt with your some question Think twice. The dear I am infant Has started out and he is gone

Is gone on the blue rainlit road Away and away from what the words call Anything that I never could Have as my home at all.

[7r0773r]

Medusa Beach and Other Poems by Melissa Monroe [2]

Medusa Beach [excerpt]

If we're really heading back to "a system reminiscent of the Cambrian era," maybe it's a way of making a fresh start. The algae blooms that have smothered other life-forms are ambrosia for jellyfish. They feed and spawn, even unto the millionth generation, when some random misfolded protein may result in a new knot in a nerve net, which then may be favored by a change in the atmosphere, so the knot remains, repeats; more knots accumulate in a sort of living quipu, a record of the species' eons-long, perilous, wave-tossed journey from reflex to thought. One day, medusa bards may sing of the sweet salt billows of heaven and the parched tortures of hell, and praise the supreme power that clearly loves jellyfish best, and has therefore provided the perfect environment for their triumphal ascent. Where are you in this scenario? Maybe humans have ascended, too. Maybe you're a long-haul astronaut, navigating intergalactic abysses in a little capsule. Your Michelin Guide to the Milky Way beeps three times:Point of Interest coming up starboard, quadrant A. Ah yes, "the Blue Planet." You remember that from history class. Mich reads you a line from a protoextraorbital writer, Arthur C. Clarke: "How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly ocean." That's true— look at it glistening! The globe-enfolding medusa membrane creates a pearly sheen on the face of the waters. MichPix shows you close-ups: the major archipelagos: Alps, Andes, Himalayas, and, at maximum magnification, you think you can even see hints of some of the monuments pictured in Archive: Machu Picchu, Buri Khalifa, the Great Wall, the Pyramids, Googopolis, Fresh Kills….. dark flecks, like old splinters under the gently undulating jelly-skin. They're still prime real estate—an excellent substrate for polyp colonies. Many travelers have found images to capture this view: "a robin's egg," "an azulisphere," "a Cyclopean eye, all blue iris, glossed with cataract, staring dimly back at me as I fly by." Those who know the history of Terra naturally picture "a luminous blue medusa, afloat in a midnight ocean." A poet offers a haiku: "The party goes on. / No one even notices / the escaped balloon." A biologist sees "an isolated cell suspended in a dark medium, waiting for someone to tease out a phrase of its encrypted narrative, or, far more likely, to fail, wash it off the slide, and start again."

[7r0773r]

Medusa Beach and Other Poems by Melissa Monroe [1]

Riverwards—Directives and Spells for Use in a Borderland [excerpt]

LOVE CHARM

Choose the right moon: not too full if the beloved is small; sharp horns if he or she is already another's. Gather twenty-eight leaves of linden or beech in a rush basket, lined with fine blue cloth. In fine blue ink,

inscribe one leaf with the beloved's name. Repeat each night until the same moon returns, then go to the river, choosing a place where it runs deep and fast; scatter the leaves across the water, saying, as they whirl away:

For you (name] I hold my breath. For you my head spins, and my heart races out of control, light as these leaves. And as the passionate rapids wrap around my flanks, so may you, too, embrace me soon. Now jump, clothes and all.

You must go in over your head, or the charm will not take. Your shirt should fall up under your armpits and your hair should wave above you like the foliage of an underwater tree. The longer you stay down, the stronger the spell. By the time you pull yourself,

panting, back onto the bank, the beloved, asleep under a blue blanket, will already feel the current stirring, will reach eagerly out, almost awake, as if to grasp at something floating past, then sink into a deeper, clearer dream: your face

drifting pale but indelible among moonlit reeds. All night, while the blue ink bleeds into the blue stream, the beloved will be slowly suffused with desire for you, and at first dawn will rush headlong across drenched lawns into your arms, as the names swirl into the sea.

***

Pinocchio—The Real Story! [excerpt]

PINOCCHIO ON WISHES

"When you wish upon a star.... Oh, god, that schmaltzy song! I'll tell you something: if I could do it all over again, I'd wish that that busybody Blue Fairy had kept her nose out of my business. When I said I wanted to be real, what did I know? I was only a punk kid, a hunk of wood slated to be a table leg. Of course I thought I was too good for furniture, so I bought into the hype, took tap and voice, and worked my butt off until I made it to marionette. But being a hit on the puppet circuit wasn't enough. Maybe you had to be there to understand the atmosphere: the promises, the pressure: "No request is too extreme!" the line went. Now I'd say, "Why the hell not? If everyone got their heart's desire, the world would be a mess!" But back then, real was the thing. I saw myself in Technicolor flesh-and-blood, playing Gary Cooper-type roles. I auditioned, I nagged my agent, waited by the phone— finally the Fairy waved her wand and I became a real boy. Only no one ever told me what real was going to mean. Back at the toy shop, I never had to fret about the future; when I fell asleep in front of the fire and burned off my feet, all I had to do was holler, and the old man fixed me up good as new. Even when I hit the road, nothing could touch me. I got sprung from jail on a technicality, sweet-talked my way out of a stew pot. When muggers left me hanging from an oak tree, the Fairy came through and cut the rope. My narrowest escape was when Lampwick and I overdid it a bit on Pleasure Island and turned into donkeys. A greedy ringmaster made me jump through hoops until I went lame, then tied me to a millstone and dumped me in the sea. Lo and behold! A shoal of fish nibbled off my donkey flesh, and set my puppet skeleton tree again. Lampwick wasn't so lucky. When I saw him years later, in a stable, I had no clue that the bag of bones slumped in the stinking straw was him, until I heard my name whispered in donkey lingo. Yes, I saw the welts the whip had raised. And yes, I saw the flies dipping their tongues into the moist sores the harness had eaten into his back. I heard him breathing fast, gasping— but what could I have done? Ever since my dream came true, the Fairy has refused to take my calls. We're all on our own. Like I told that Lost Boy who cadges change outside the Spinning Teacups, trying to raise his fare back to Neverland: "You wished yourself out of your fairy tale, friend. Whose fault is it if you forgot to read the fine print? No returns. Wishing won't get you anywhere anymore. The stars are for decorative purposes only. Ever after ain't what it used to be— no pot of gold, no princess, no throne. Just the moral: caveat emptor. Your heart's desire is guaranteed to bite you in the ass, and if you're happy, brother, you can bet it's not the end."

[7r0773r]

Maqroll's Prayer by Álvaro Mutis, translated by Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, and Alastair Reid

Program for Poetry (excerpts)

MAN

From his essential dullness, his useless, worn-out gestures, his equivocal, tenacious desires, his "nowhere," his walled-in yearning to communicate, his continuous, laughable travels, his raising his shoulders like a hungry ape, his conventional, fearful laughter, his impoverished litany of passions, his prepared leaps without risk, his tepid, sterile entrails, from all this small, inelegant harmony the principal motif of the song should be assembled.

Do not fear the effort. Throughout the centuries there are those who have accomplished it beautifully. It does not matter if you get lost, become strange, leave the road and sit down to watch the troops pass by with a dense alcohol in your gaze. It does not matter.

BEASTS

Create the beasts! Invent their history. Sharpen their great claws. Strengthen their curved, tenacious beaks. Give them a calculated, secure itinerary.

Woe to those who do not keep a bestiary to enrich determined moments and serve as our companions in the future!

Let us extend the dominion of the beasts. Let them begin to enter the cities, let them create their refuges in bombed-out buildings, blown-up bridges, useless towers that commemorate forgotten dates. Let us enter the kingdom of the beasts. Our lives depend on their authority. They will open our best wounds.

[E.G.]

***

Morning Cleft

Fathom your misfortune, sound it out, know its most hidden recesses. Oil the machinery of your misfortune, set it on your path, use it to make your way, and knock on every door with the white cartilage of your misfortune. Compare it with the misfortunes of others and carefully measure the shock of its differences, the singular sharpness of its edges. Bear in mind at all times that its substance is your substance, the only port where you know each roadstead, each buoy, each signal from the warm land where you go ashore to reign like Crusoe among the multitude of shadows that brush past, that you bump into without understanding their aims and ways. Cultivate your misfortune, make it durable, nourish yourself with its sap, wrap yourself in a cloak woven from its most secret threads. Learn to tell it from all the rest; don't let it become familiar to others or allow your people to prolong it unduly. May it be like baptismal water for you sprung from the great municipal sewers, like streams that rise in slaughter yards. May your misfortune melt into your entrails; may it contain even now the chapters of your death, the elements of your surest abandonment. Never leave your misfortune aside, but rest on its verge as beside the white body from which desire has withdrawn. Keep your misfortune ready at all times, and don't be distracted or tricked into letting it slip away. Learn to recognize even its most fleeting signs: a shrug of the calliandra's delicate leaves, the opening of flowers in the first cool of evening, the solitude of a circus cage stranded in the mud of a road, the soot of the slums, the tin cup that doles out soup in the barracks, the untidy clothing of the blind, the hand bells that exhaust their call on the lot planted with eucalypts, the iodine of ocean voyages. Don't mix your misfortune with everyday business. Learn to keep it for the hours of your solace, and weave from it the true, the only lasting substance of your episode on earth.

(C.A.)

***

Each Poem

Each poem a bird that flees from the place marked by the scourge. Each poem a grim reaper's costume in streets and squares overflowing with the fatal wax of the defeated. Each poem a step toward death, a ransom in counterfeit coin, a shot at the target in the middle of the night, punching through the bridges over the river whose sleeping waters journey from the old city to the fields where day prepares its pyres. Each poem the rigid touch of one who lies on a hospital slab, an eager fishhook trawling the soft mud of tombs. Each poem a slow shipwreck of desire, a creaking of the masts and the rigging that bear the weight of life. Each poem a tumult of canvas over the water's icy roar as the snow-white apparel of the sail collapses. Each poem invading and tearing the bitter web of tedium. Each poem is born of a blind sentry who shouts the password of his ill fortune into the night's deep cavity. Dream water, spring of ashes, porous slaughterhouse stone, shaded wood of sempervivum, metal ringing for the condemned, funeral oil for the double-edged blade, poet's daily shroud, each poem scatters over the world the bitter grain of anguish.

(C.A.]

***

Song of the East

Around the corner an invisible angel is waiting; a vague mist, a faded specter will address you with a few words from the past. Within you, time, like channel water, pursues its gentle, hollowing work of days and weeks of nameless, unremembered years. Around the corner, the one you were not, the one who died of your being so much what you are, will continue to wait in vain. Not the faintest hunch or the faintest shadow to intimate what that encounter might have meant. And yet there lay the key to your brief happiness on earth.

(C.A.)

***

Sonata

Do you know what awaited you behind those harp notes, calling from another time, from other days? Do you know why a face, an expression, glimpsed from the train as it pulled up at the end of the journey, before you were swallowed by the city that drifts between fog and rain, comes back to visit you one day, with voiceless lips to speak the word that might have been about to save you? What a place to pitch your tents! Why this anchor blindly stirring up the depths, and you so unawares? A great expanse of water gently swaying in vast regions offered up to the afternoon sun; waters of the great river battling an utterly cruel and cold sea, which flings its waves at the sky before letting them sadly lapse away in the delta's muddy savanna. It may be possible. It may be they will tell you something there. Or remain fiercely silent, and you none the wiser. Do you remember when she came down to the dining room for breakfast and you saw her suddenly, more girl-like, more remote, more beautiful than ever? There too something lay in ambush. You could tell by a certain dull pain clutching at your chest. But somebody spoke. A server dropped a plate. Laughter at the next table, something broke the rope that was hauling you out of the deep well as the merchantmen drew and lifted up Joseph. Then you spoke and were left with nothing but the familiar sadness and the bittersweet charm of her wonder at the world, hoisted into the air of every day like a standard to signal your presence and the site of your battles. Who are you, then? Where have they suddenly sprung from, these matters to attend to in a port, and this theme woven by a viola trying to lead you to a certain square, to a quiet, old park, in whose pond the summer sailboats glide with delight? Not everything can be known. Not everything is yours. Not this time, anyway. But already you are learning to resign yourself and let another little piece of what is yours sink forever to the bottom, leaving you even more alone, more of a stranger, like a waiter in the midst of a hotel's morning commotion, target of orders, insults, and vague promises shouted in all the tongues of the earth.

[C.A.]

***

The Gaviero's Visit (excerpt)

"To learn, above all, to distrust memory. What we believe we remember is completely alien to, completely different from what really happened. So many moments of irritating, wearisome disgust are returned to us years later by memory as splendidly happy episodes. Nostalgia is the lie that speeds our approach to death. To live without remembering may be the secret of the gods.

"When I tell about my wanderings, my failures, my simpleminded deliriums and secret orgies, it is only to choke off, almost in midair, the animal screams, the piercing howls from the cave that would express more accurately what I really feel and what I really am. But I'm losing myself in digressions, and that isn't why I came."

His eyes took on a leaden stare, as if he were looking at a thick wall of colossal proportions. His lower lip trembled slightly. He folded his arms across his chest and began to rock slowly, as if trying to keep time to the sound of the river. A smell of fresh mud, of crushed vegetation and rotting sap, indicated that the waters were rising. The Gaviero was silent for a long time, until night fell with that dizzying explosion of darkness typical of the tropics. Intrepid fireflies danced in the warm silence of the coffee plantings. He began to speak, lost in another digression whose significance escaped me as he entered the darkest zones of his being. When he returned suddenly to events from his past, I could follow his monologue again.

"I've had few surprises in life," he said, "and none of them is worth the telling, but for me each has the mournful energy of a bell tolling catastrophe. One morning, in the stupefying heat of a river port, while I was putting on my clothes in a shabby room in a miserable brothel, I found a photograph of my father hanging on the wooden wall. He was sitting in a wicker rocking chair on the verandah of a white hotel in the Caribbean. During her long widowhood my mother always kept that photograph in the same spot on her night table. 'Who's that?' I asked the woman I'd spent the night with; only now could I see all the wretched disorder of her flesh, the animality of her face. 'My father,' she answered with a sorrowful smile that revealed her toothless mouth, and she covered her fat nakedness with a sheet soaked in perspiration and misery. 'I never knew him, but my mother, she worked here too, she always remembered him and even kept some of his letters, like that could keep her young forever.' I finished dressing and went out to the wide, unpaved street that was blasted by sun, blaring radios, the clatter of cutlery and dishes in the cafés and cantinas beginning to fill with their regular clientele of truck drivers, cattle dealers, and soldiers from the air base. I thought with faint sadness that this was precisely the corner of life I would never have wanted to turn. Bad luck.

"Another time I went to a hospital in the Amazon after an attack of malaria that was draining my strength and keeping me delirious with fever. The heat at night was unbearable, yet it saved me from the whirlpools of vertigo whose center was some trivial phrase or the tone of a voice I couldn't identify, the fever spinning around it until all my bones ached. In the next bed a trader who'd been bitten by a gangrene spider was fanning the black pustule that covered his left side. 'This'll dry up soon, this'll dry up soon and I'll get out and close the deal. I'll be so rich I'll forget all about this hospital and the goddamn jungle that's only fit for monkeys and alligators.' The deal had something to do with a complicated traffic in spare parts for the seaplanes that flew the area with preferential import licenses, issued by the Army, which made them exempt from customs inspection and taxes. At least that's what I dimly remember, because all night the man babbled about the smallest details of the affair, and one by one they became part of the whirling crises of my malaria. Finally, at dawn, I managed to fall asleep, but I was besieged by pain and panic that lasted all day and far into the night. 'Look, here are the papers. They'll get all screwed up. You'll see. Tomorrow I leave for sure,' he said one night, and repeated the words with fierce insistence as he brandished a handful of blue and pink papers covered with stamps and captions in three languages. The last thing I heard him say before I succumbed to a long bout of fever was: 'Oh, what a relief, what joy. This shit is over!' The thunder of a gunshot woke me. It sounded like the end of the world. I looked at my neighbor: his head, shattered by the bullet, was still quivering, as mushy as a rotten fruit. I was moved to another room, where I hung between life and death until the cool breezes of the rainy season brought me back to life.

"I don't know why I'm telling you this. I really came to leave these papers with you. You'll know what to do with them if we don't see each other again. They're letters from my youth, some pawn tickets, and a rough draft of the book I'll never finish. A study of the real reasons that Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentinois, went to the court of his brother-in-law, the king of Navarre, and helped him in the struggle against the king of Aragón. How he died at dawn, ambushed by soldiers in the outskirts of Viana. There are twists behind this story, dark areas I once thought were worth clarifying. That was years ago. I'm also leaving an iron cross that I found in an Almogávar ossuary in the garden of an abandoned mosque in an Anatolian suburb. It's always brought me good luck, but I think the time has come to travel without it. And here are the bills and vouchers that prove my innocence in that matter of the explosives factory at the Sereno mines. The Hungarian medium who was my companion at the time, and a Paraguayan partner and I—we were going to retire to Madeira on the profits, but they made off with everything, and I was the one who had to settle accounts. The case was closed years ago, but a certain urge for order made me hold on to these receipts, and now I don't want to carry them with me either.

"Well, I'll say goodbye. I'm going to take an empty barge to the Mártir Swamp, and if I pick up some passengers down-river, I'll have enough money to start again." He stood up and extended his hand with the gesture, part ceremonial, part military, that was so typical of him. Before I could urge him to stay the night and start downriver the next morning, he had disappeared into the coffee plantings, whistling a rather trite old song that had been the joy of our youth. I looked through his papers and found a good number of clues to the Gaviero's past life that he had never mentioned. Just then, down below, I heard the sound of his footsteps echoing against the zinc roof of the covered bridge that crosses the river. I felt his absence, and I began to recall his voice and gestures, and how much they had changed, and they came back to me now like an ominous warning that I would never see him again.

(E.G.]

[7r0773r]

Sophocles II, Edited by David Grene & Richmond Lattimore

AJAX And now, Ajax—what is to be done now? I am hated by the gods, that's plain; the Greek camp hates me: Troy and the ground I stand upon detest me. Shall I go, then, from this place where the ships ride, desert the Atridae, and cross the Aegean to my home? But when I get there, what face can I show to my father Telamon? How will he ever stand the sight of me if I stand there empty-handed, armed with no glory, when he himself won the crown of men's top praise? That won't bear thinking of. Well, then, shall I make a rush against the walls of Troy, fight with them all in single combat, do some notable exploit, and find my death in it? But that might give some comfort to the sons of Atreus. No. I must find some better way entirely— an enterprise which will prove to my old father that the son of his loins is not by nature a weakling. It's a contemptible thing for a man to want long life when his whole existence brings no relief from trouble. What joy is there in a long file of days, edging you forward toward the goal of death, then back again a little? I wouldn't give much for a man who warms himself with the comfort of vain hopes. Let a man nobly live or nobly die if he is a nobleman: I have said what I had to say.

(Ajax, 457-480)

***

This is the way things are within. If anyone counts upon one day ahead or even more, he is a fool. For there can be no tomorrow until we have safely passed the day that is with us still.

(The Women of Trachis, 943-946)

[7r0773r]

Sophocles I, Edited by David Grene & Richmond Lattimore

TEIRESIAS

TEIRESIAS Elders of Thebes, we two have come one road, two of us looking through one pair of eyes. This is the way of walking for the blind.

CREON Old Teiresias, what news has brought you here?

TEIRESIAS I'll tell you. You in turn must trust the prophet.

CREON I've always been attentive to your counsel.

TEIRESIAS And therefore you have steered this city straight.

CREON So I can say how helpful you have been.

TIRESIAS Again you are balanced on a razor's edge.

CREON What is it? How I shudder at your words!

TEIRESIAS You'll know, when you hear the signs that I have marked. I sat where every bird of heaven comes in my old place of augury, and heard bird cries I'd never known. They screeched about goaded by madness, inarticulate. I marked that they were tearing one another with claws of murder. I could hear the wing-beats. I was afraid, so straightaway I tried burnt sacrifice upon the flaming altar. No fire caught my offerings. Slimy ooze dripped on the ashes, smoked and sputtered there. Gall burst its bladder, vanished into vapor; the fat dripped from the bones and would not burn. These are the omens of the rites that failed, as this boy here has told me. He's my guide as I am guide to others. Why has this sickness struck against the state? Through your decision. All of the altars of the town are choked with leavings of the dogs and birds; their feast was on that fated, fallen son of Oedipus. So the gods accept no offering from us, not prayer, nor flame of sacrifice. The birds cry out a sound that I cannot distinguish, gorged with the greasy blood of that dead man. Think of these things, my son. All men may err, but error once committed, he's no fool nor unsuccessful, who can change his mind and cure the trouble he has fallen in. Stubbornness and stupidity are twins. Yield to the dead. Why goad him where he lies? What use to kill the dead a second time? I speak for your own good. And I am right. Learning from a wise counselor is not pain if what he speaks are profitable words.

CREON Old man, you all, like bowmen at a mark, have bent your bows at me. I've had my share of seers: I've been an item in your accounts. Make profit, trade in Lydian electrum, pure gold of India; that's your chief desire. But you will never cover up that corpse, not if the very eagles tear their food from him, and leave it at the throne of Zeus. I wouldn't give him up for burial in fear of that pollution. For I know no mortal being can pollute the gods. Yes, old Teiresias, human beings fall; the clever ones the furthest, when they plead a shameful case so well in hope of profit.

TEIRESIAS Alas! What man can tell me, has he thought at all ...

CREON What tired cliche's coming from your lips?

TERESIAS How the best of all possessions is good counsel.

CREON And so is foolishness the worst of all.

TEIRESIAS But you're infected with that same disease.

CREON I'm reluctant to be uncivil to a seer...

TEIRESIAS You're that already. You have said I lie.

CREON Well, the whole crew of seers are money-mad.

TEIRESIAS And the whole tribe of tyrants grab at gain.

CREON Do you realize you are talking to a king?

TEIRESIAS I know. Who helped you save this town you hold?

CREON You're a wise seer, but you love wickedness.

TEIRESIAS You'll bring me to speak the unspeakable, very soon.

CREON Well, speak it out. But do not speak for profit.

TEIRESIAS Do I seem to have spoken for profit, with regard to you?

CREON Know this, that you can't buy and sell my policies.

TEIRESIAS Know well yourself, the sun won't roll its course many more days, before you come to give corpse for these corpses, child of your own loins. For you've confused the upper and lower worlds. You settled a living person without honor in a tomb; you keep up here that which belongs below, a corpse unburied and unholy. Not you, nor any god on high should have any business with this. The violation's yours. So the patient, foul punishers lie in wait to track you down: the Furies sent by Hades and by all gods will even you with your victims. Now say that I am bribed! The time is close when men and women shall wail within your house, and all the cities that you fought in war whose sons had burial from wild beasts, or dogs, or birds that brought the stench of your great wrong back to each hearth, they all will move against you. A bowman, as you said, I send my shafts, since you provoked me, straight. You'll feel the wound. Boy, take me home now. Let him spend his rage on younger men, and learn to calm his tongue, and keep a better mind than now he does.

(Exit, to the side.) 

(Antigone, 988-1091)

***

CHORUS You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus— him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot— see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him! Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.

(Oedipus the King, 1523-1530)

***

OEDIPUS

Most gentle son of Aegeus! The immortal gods alone have neither age nor death! All other things almighty Time disquiets. Earth wastes away; the body wastes away; faith dies; distrust is born; and imperceptibly the spirit changes between a man and his friend, or between two cities. For some men soon, for others in later time, their pleasure sickens; or love comes again. And so with you and Thebes: the sweet season holds between you now; but time goes on, unmeasured Time, fathering numberless nights, unnumbered days: and on one day they'll break apart with spears this harmony— all for a trivial word. And then my sleeping and long-hidden corpse, cold in the earth, will drink hot blood of theirs, if Zeus endures; if his son's word is true. However: there's no felicity in speaking of hidden things. Let me come back to this: be careful that you keep your word to me; for if you do you'll never say of Oedipus that he was given refuge uselessly— or if you say it, then the gods have lied.

(Oedipus at Colonus, 608-628)

***

CHORUS [singing]

STROPHE

Though he has watched a decent age pass by, a man will sometimes still desire the world. I swear I see no wisdom in that man. The endless hours pile up a drift of pain more unrelieved each day; and as for pleasure, when he is sunken in excessive age you will not see his pleasure anywhere. The last attendant is the same for all, old men and young alike, as in its season man's heritage of underworld appears: there being then no epithalamion, no music and no dance. Death is the finish.

ANTISTROPHE

Not to be born surpasses thought and speech. The second best is to have seen the light and then to go back quickly whence we came. The feathery follies of his youth once over, what trouble is beyond the range of man? What heavy burden will he not endure? Jealousy, faction, quarreling, and battle— the bloodiness of war, the grief of war. And in the end he comes to strengthless age, abhorred by all men, without company, unfriended in that uttermost twilight where he must live with every bitter thing.

(Oedipus at Colonus, 1211-1238)