WEBVTT

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I'm going to read
one more new poem.

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This is the long
one and I'm kind

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of ashamed of how
many references it

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has to various myths,
stories, literary things.

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That's the food
of the inner soul

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and the habit of a lifetime,
so I'll just give you

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a gloss on a couple of them.

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The ones you don't know just
think about something else.

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The poem's opening lines refer
to the German Romantic poet,

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Friedrich Schiller,
and his menage

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a trois with two sisters, and
his other love affair which

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was with the French Revolution.

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They both ended
similarly in blood.

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The girl picking flowers--

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when the Earth opens
and Hades rises up

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to take her down to the
underworld where she becomes

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Persephone, the
queen of the dead,

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is from the myth of the
Greek seasonal rebirth

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myth of Demeter and Persephone.

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And Tiresias is
the blind prophet

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in Oedipus Rex, who,
because he is a prophet,

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understands that his wisdom is
useless to prevent the tragedy.

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The poem's epigraph is from
a poem by Betty Adcock,

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from her wonderful new book,
which is called Rough Fugue.

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The lines are, "To grasp,
like Prometheus, the fire--

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without the power
to give it away."

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"Ars Poetica"

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"At first a silhouette on the
horizon, then turning solid,

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like Schiller coming up the path
to meet the adorable sisters,

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and they, pretending
not to watch,

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their hearts, all
the time, pounding,

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driven by the same spring force
that would tear them apart,

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the same force that
drives the salmon upriver,

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against the current, the
odds, back to the home pool.

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Even as the autumn mind,
in spite of itself,

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turns backward, with the
same feverish glow as autumn

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gives to the summer's leaves
a deceptive glamour, warming

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the past with an amber
light, like brandy held up

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to the fire, or the sun
sinking at dusk into the water

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into the Baltic Sea
each night, where,

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in the mythical depths
of Lithuanian folktale,

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lies the amber castle
of the female sun,

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burning in the dark water, a
globe the color of harvest,

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aglow there in the
depths of the past,

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though the amber congealed
sap of a once living force,

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is broken into bits, and
the mythic castle with it--

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Strung now as beads,
and hung, a charm,

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around the neck of a daughter,
like the one in a Greek dream,

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picking flowers when
the Earth opened.

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And in a swirl of violet
cape the pounding of hoofs,

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the dark god broke
out of the Earth,

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driven by the same spring
force, consequential and mortal,

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and up there, hanging over
the mythic fields of what

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recurs and recurs,
though never the same

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and never to be reconciled--

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what is that?

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A hot air balloon
filled with passengers

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who paid to be
raised in a basket,

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to be up there looking down
on the ground where they live,

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a place shrunken now
beneath their gaze,

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while their bloated
shadow floats

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like a jellyfish in a green sea,
barely a smudge on the pastures

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below, the trace
of their passage

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less than a breath of smoke
from a coal fired engine--

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a blast of tarnished air from
the actual past, heavy metal

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delivered from memory.

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useless to warn the girl,
whose hand will always

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be reaching out for the
flowers, or the sisters inflamed

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with Schiller, as he with the
tricolor dream of a world he

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could never inhabit--

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useless to comfort
the eyeless Tiresias

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who knew how terrible was
wisdom when it knew itself

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useless, and useless to read
the names on the shining

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black wall of the
Vietnam Memorial,

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the text of exactly what
war has accomplished--

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and look, there, standing high
above the tragic scene, not

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the little figures
of the wise ancients

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that Yeats saw carved
into the deep blue stone--

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but there, standing high above
Arlington against the blank

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lapis of the sky, a horse with
the torso and head of a man,

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yes, it is Chiron, the
last of the hybrids,

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the wise and terribly wounded
centaur for whom immortality

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was a curse, and he gave
it away to Prometheus,

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who stole the gods' fire and
gave it away as art gives

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the power to give it away,
for that fire is the gift that

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cannot be held, for it will burn
to an ash those born and born

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again, war without end,
who would hold it."

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