I'm going to read one more new poem.
This is the long one and I'm kind
of ashamed of how many references it
has to various myths, stories, literary things.
That's the food of the inner soul
and the habit of a lifetime, so I'll just give you
a gloss on a couple of them.
The ones you don't know just think about something else.
The poem's opening lines refer to the German Romantic poet,
Friedrich Schiller, and his menage
a trois with two sisters, and his other love affair which
was with the French Revolution.
They both ended similarly in blood.
The girl picking flowers--
when the Earth opens and Hades rises up
to take her down to the underworld where she becomes
Persephone, the queen of the dead,
is from the myth of the Greek seasonal rebirth
myth of Demeter and Persephone.
And Tiresias is the blind prophet
in Oedipus Rex, who, because he is a prophet,
understands that his wisdom is useless to prevent the tragedy.
The poem's epigraph is from a poem by Betty Adcock,
from her wonderful new book, which is called Rough Fugue.
The lines are, "To grasp, like Prometheus, the fire--
without the power to give it away."
"Ars Poetica"
"At first a silhouette on the horizon, then turning solid,
like Schiller coming up the path to meet the adorable sisters,
and they, pretending not to watch,
their hearts, all the time, pounding,
driven by the same spring force that would tear them apart,
the same force that drives the salmon upriver,
against the current, the odds, back to the home pool.
Even as the autumn mind, in spite of itself,
turns backward, with the same feverish glow as autumn
gives to the summer's leaves a deceptive glamour, warming
the past with an amber light, like brandy held up
to the fire, or the sun sinking at dusk into the water
into the Baltic Sea each night, where,
in the mythical depths of Lithuanian folktale,
lies the amber castle of the female sun,
burning in the dark water, a globe the color of harvest,
aglow there in the depths of the past,
though the amber congealed sap of a once living force,
is broken into bits, and the mythic castle with it--
Strung now as beads, and hung, a charm,
around the neck of a daughter, like the one in a Greek dream,
picking flowers when the Earth opened.
And in a swirl of violet cape the pounding of hoofs,
the dark god broke out of the Earth,
driven by the same spring force, consequential and mortal,
and up there, hanging over the mythic fields of what
recurs and recurs, though never the same
and never to be reconciled--
what is that?
A hot air balloon filled with passengers
who paid to be raised in a basket,
to be up there looking down on the ground where they live,
a place shrunken now beneath their gaze,
while their bloated shadow floats
like a jellyfish in a green sea, barely a smudge on the pastures
below, the trace of their passage
less than a breath of smoke from a coal fired engine--
a blast of tarnished air from the actual past, heavy metal
delivered from memory.
useless to warn the girl, whose hand will always
be reaching out for the flowers, or the sisters inflamed
with Schiller, as he with the tricolor dream of a world he
could never inhabit--
useless to comfort the eyeless Tiresias
who knew how terrible was wisdom when it knew itself
useless, and useless to read the names on the shining
black wall of the Vietnam Memorial,
the text of exactly what war has accomplished--
and look, there, standing high above the tragic scene, not
the little figures of the wise ancients
that Yeats saw carved into the deep blue stone--
but there, standing high above Arlington against the blank
lapis of the sky, a horse with the torso and head of a man,
yes, it is Chiron, the last of the hybrids,
the wise and terribly wounded centaur for whom immortality
was a curse, and he gave it away to Prometheus,
who stole the gods' fire and gave it away as art gives
the power to give it away, for that fire is the gift that
cannot be held, for it will burn to an ash those born and born
again, war without end, who would hold it."