I'm going to read new work tonight.
Relatively new, that is.
And unfortunately, most of what I'm reading
is on the long side, so I will try
not to wear out my welcome by reading too much or too long.
The first poem I'm going to read is called "Semele Recycled,"
which is perhaps a more frivolous title
than the poem should have.
I've long been interested in trying
to read through the incrustations of history
and patriarchy back to what the Greek myths must have been
like in their prime, and I've always
been particularly interested in the myth of Dionysus,
because it is a very curious story indeed,
and you wonder what those women were doing out
on those Olympian hillsides, anyhow.
And was Dionysus, even though, granted,
somewhat androgynous, a man?
My lesbian novelist friend Bertha Harris
insists that Dionysus was not only a woman but a lesbian.
I don't go that far, but I am interested
in this whole early myth, probably one of the earliest
that we have, about dismemberment
and reassemblement, a form of the eternal return.
And so I've written about it in this form,
and it is also a love poem.
After you left me forever, I was broken into pieces,
and all the pieces flung into the river.
Then the legs crawled ashore and aimlessly wandered
the dusty cow track.
They became, for a while, a simple roadside shrine.
A tiny table set up between the thighs
held a dusty candle, weed and field flower
chains placed reverently there by children and old women.
My knees were hung with tin triangular medals
to cure all forms of hysterical disease.
After I died forever in the river,
my torso floated bloated in the stream,
catching on logs or stones among the eddies.
Whitewater formed around it, then dislodged it.
After a whirlwind trip, it bumped ashore.
A grizzled old man who scavenged along
the banks had already rescued my arms and put them by,
knowing everything has its uses sooner or later.
When he found my torso, he called it his canoe.
And, using my arms as paddles, he
rode me up and down the scummy river.
When catfish nibbled my fingers, he scooped them up
and blessed his reusable bait.
Clumsy but serviceable, that canoe.
The trail of blood that was its wake
attracted the carp and the eel and the river turtles, easily
landed, dazed by my tasty red.
A young lad found my head among the rushes
and placed it on a dry stone.
He carefully combed my hair with a bit of shell
and set small offerings before it,
which the birds and rats obligingly stole by night,
so it seemed I ate.
And the breeze wound through my mouth and empty sockets,
so my lungs would sigh and my dead tongue mutter.
Soon the villagers came to consult my oracular head
with its water weed crown.
Seers found occupation interpreting sighs,
and their papyrus rolls accumulated.
Meanwhile, young boys retrieved my eyes
they used for marbles in a simple game,
till somebody pretty sister snatched at them
and set them for luck in her bridal diadem.
Poor girl, when her future groom caught sight of her, all eyes,
he crossed himself in horror and stumbled away in haste
through her dowered meadows.
What then of my heart and organs, my sacred slit,
which loved you best of all?
They were caught in a fisherman's net
and tossed at night into a pen for swine.
But they shone so by moonlight that the sows stampeded,
trampled each other in fear to get away,
and the fisherman's wife, who had 13 living children
and was contemptuous of holy love, scraped the rest of me
onto the compost heap.
Then, in their various places and helpful functions,
the altar, oracle, awful canoe, and oars
learned the wild rumor of your return.
The altar leapt up and ran to the canoe, scattering candle
grease and wilted grasses.
Arms sprang to their sockets, blind hands with nibbled nails
grope their way, aided by loud lamentation,
to the bed of the bride, snatched up those unlucky eyes
and rammed them home.
Oh, what a bright day it was.
This empty body danced on the riverbank.
Hollow, it called, and searched among the fields
for those parts that steamed and simmered in the sun,
and never would have found them.
But then, your great voice rang out under the skies my name
and all those private names for the parts and places that
had loved you best.
And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.
The distraught old ladies, chasing their lost altar,
and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,
and the tumbling boys who wanted the magic marbles,
and the runaway groom and the fisherman's 13 children
set up such a clamor with their cry of miracle
that our two bodies met like a thunderclap in midday,
right to the corner of that wretched field
with its broken fence posts and startled skinny cattle.
We fell in a heap on the compost heap
and all our loving parts made love at once,
while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyes
and then went decently about their business.
And here it is moonlight again.
We've bathed in the river, and are sweet and wholesome
once more.
We kneel side by side in the sand,
we worship each other in whispers.
But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,
the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense and passion,
its bloody labor, its birth, and rebirth, and decay.