All right, I'll just read a few more.
I think I would like to read you a few
because-- so we started this series with mythology,
with fairy tales, Baba Yaga and Demeter,
and I have yet to write my Demeter poem.
But I've got my Persephone poem.
And I wanted to write a very irreverent Persephone poem.
Persephone-- classically, almost everybody
writes about Persephone about her having been victimized.
And perhaps that's a very profound part of the story
as she's snatched away by Hades to be his concubine and then
his wife.
But it's the 21st century.
Don't we believe everybody's a little bit
complicit in everything?
[LAUGHTER]
"Persephone speaks."
My father was the big guy--
generator, energy spill.
My mother was cereal--
corn, matter, sink.
Get real, I used to tell them, ditching their dream
that I would be forever daughter, picking flowers
in the meadow while they made action movies out
of everyone else's lives.
What they wanted for me was never what I wanted.
So abduction is not quite the word
for what my lover did to me--
for me is more like it.
Oh beautiful sin of falling under the rhythm of his need,
and finding I could answer stroke for stroke,
be bad, and claim my loving, and find the pleasure good.
How could I have known the hunger would persist
once I had left my mother's threshing floor, my father's
distant light?
Pulled into the underworld, I forgot what lay above--
the soil drying seedless, unable to revive, din of lamentation.
Not even the gods could abide.
My husband too is a God.
He struts like a jaguar.
His sex is an epic poem.
He loves the dead, because they tell no lies
and yield themselves completely to the future.
When he fed me the pomegranate that
would keep me coming to his dark bed, I did say thank you,
my goodness married to the limbo night inside.