In a dark night
A fuse burns.
Nothing else holds
The attention.
Only the fuse exists
Sparkling and lovely.
With such a fuse
Explosion must come soon.
And you wait.
And you watch.
Your focus narrows
To the bright light.
It must happen soon,
It’s all so enticing.
It must come,
It will come.
It doesn’t come.
The fuse just burns.
There is nothing
At the end of the fuse.
Many things are coming to an end.
None ends by my wish.
The feral cats will miss the bowls of food
I leave under the shelter for them
In the freezing rain.
Dying slowly must be like this —
Relinquishing responsibility,
The end of what you want,
Taking leave of what you know,
Saying goodbye
Forever.
Ruling classes descend from Zeus.
But one whom the Muses love
is lord of all the world’s beauty,
His tongue is smooth and sweet.
Even when fresh turbulence
shakes him and shivers
the pulse of his blood,
the poet, cheerful concierge to the Muses,
sings about ancient men and their prowess,
and of the always happy Gods
who live on Olympus, the ultimate acropolis.
This singing, this consonance of cunning
vibration frees him from the vortex
and cleans out the infection of sorrow
when the vivacious daughters of Mnemosyne,
with their infinite charms,
compel him to new beauty and thought.
— Hesiod, Theogony, my very free adaptation.
Prolegomena:
Oedipus: What do you mean?
You know of something but refuse to speak?
Tiresias: I will not bring this pain upon us both,
Neither upon you nor on myself. Why is it
You question me and waste your labor? I
Will tell you nothing.
Oedipus: You would provoke a stone! Tell it, you villain,
Tell it and do not stand there quietly
Unmoved and balking at the issue.
Tiresias: You blame my temper but you do not see
Your own that lives within you; it is me
You chide.
Oedipus: Who would not feel his temper rise
At words like these with which you shame?
Tiresias: Of themselves things will come, although I hide them
And breathe no word of them.
Oedipus: Since they will come
Tell them to me.
Tiresias: I will say nothing further.
Against this answer let your temper rage
As wildly as you can.
—Sophocles, Oedipus the King (David Greene Trans.)
A Need to Know
(Version zero)
Oh, Oedipus, Oedipus,
You just couldn’t let it go, could you?
Just had to keep pushing
Pushing harder the more clear it became.
Tiresias tried to warn you
Jocasta tried to warn you
The air and space themselves wanted
You to back off.
But you just had to know.
Was it better that way in the long run?
Not sure; it’s not an Aeschylean Trilogy
But Sophocles’ stand alone play.
My young tom cat, deep black
With the mind of a siamese
Is like that, too. He can’t just
Let things be. He just has to know
Everything about anything he sees
Or hears or smells. He’s a brilliant little rascal,
Although he can not vote.
We had the wood stove stoked up blazing
With oak last January. The top of it boiled water
Faster than a gas stove. He understood
The temp on the sides: his nose is
Heat-sensitive. But
He wondered about the top.
At various times on sequential nights
I clapped at him, yelled - even shot him
With a water bottle when he got that
Look in his eyes and crouched.
But he couldn’t get it out of his mind.
When it wasn’t lit, he would thoroughly
Investige the question: what’s the
Hidden meaning when fire crackles
And wind rushes out of the
Pipe through the roof so he
Jumped and landed four paws on
The searing sequel to his question.
It hurt him. It hurt him badly
The moon went full
Twice before he healed.
But he knew. He knew the answer.
And once he knew the answer
Turned his curious mind
To the movements of quail.
The first two brief monologues from Prometheus Bound — my “improvisation” — not a translation. I didn’t take it from the Greek but from David Greene’s translation in his and Lattimore’s Complete Greek Tragedies, Aeschylus II.
Last night, I was sitting outside after the first rain in months. The air was very clean. I was tired. It felt as though my mind was refusing to function, but I decided to simply accept the limitations I experienced. There was only a very slight chill. I began reading David Greene’s translation of Prometheus Bound aloud. As I read, I began to change the text to fit the way I wanted to hear it, reading through it several times aloud. Then I wrote down what I was reciting, with modifications as I wrote. So that’s all this is, just something for enjoyment. And, yes, I’m aware that I do great violence and much harm to the currently approved style of poetry and translation (not to mention what I’ve done to Aeschylus). But I’m bored with the currently accepted style (but not, most assuredly not, bored with Aeschylus).
(Version 0.2)
Power:
We’ve hit the world’s limit.
These are Scythian mountains, never climbed.
Haephustus! You must obey
The Father’s will laid upon you to nail
This miscreant to these craggy peaks
With shackles of unbreakable diamond chain.
After all, it was your adornment,
Blazing fire, the pantechnocrat, that he snatched
And passed on to dying men.
For this crime he shall pay dues to the Gods
That he may learn to submit and enjoy
The limitless supremacy of Zeus
And quit his pathetic philanthropic addiction.
Hephaestus:
In you His commands are perfectly executed,
Power and Violence, with zero impedance.
But my heart balks at slamming and chaining
A God to this snowy bluff.
He’s close family.
But I’m forced to take heart for it —
Slighting the Father leads to precarious situations.
Great Engineer, Son of Themis the Honest One,
You don’t want this. Neither do I.
Yet I’ll shackle you with weatherproof bronze
On this wilderness outcrop.
You won’t hear a mortal voice.
You won’t see a mortal’s body.
The sun will drill into your flesh
And cancer the glow of your skin.
When night intervenes
With her cape full of stars
You will bless her,
But at dawn the sun will
Burn ice from your frost-bitten limbs.
At each moment you will feel torture,
Varied for maximum effect,
Grind you down.
The one who will end it
Isn’t even sperm in his father’s testicles.
That’s your reward for philanthropic slumming.
You, a God, not afraid
Of the anger of Gods,
Perverted justice
And honored the low.
So now you keep watch
On this ugly cliff, always
Standing, knees unbending, sleepless.
Oh, you will cry, you will moan, you will pray,
But it won’t do any good.
Zeus has a titanium mind, prayer is soft,
And every new ruler is harsh.
What is the most difficult thing to do?
Nothing.
When the emotions rage, what is the best thing to do?
Nothing.
What is the best thing to say?
Nothing.
(version -0.000198843)
You may have, from among the body of gods
Any of them on your side in one situation and against
In another. Even if a steady, powerful goddess
Say Athena
Were always (basically) on your side
There would be times when she would work
Against you.
Oh, not the personal you
But the you who belongs to a group
A team, a city, a nation, a planet.
When your polis goes against her
Even if you resist them and
Try to slow them down
You will feel the disruption of time.
Each moment is a complex set of values
Now the one dominant, now another
Some nearly perpetual within the brief
Space of a human being’s lifetime.
Take me for instance.
One of the Muses
(I won’t name her)
Has always loved me.
She has even agreed
To bear children for me
Despite the deformities
In my genes.
Yes. All are stillborn.
Worse. Stillborn was
The good choice,
That they weren’t forced
To live among men
Most of whom
Would mock
And ridicule
The poor child.
Her love is a true love.
She enjoys being with me.
I treat her in complex ways.
I touch her.
Yet sometimes she says she’s busy.
She has rites to perform
People to meet
And places to see.
It’s just wretched
The way it feels
And yet
She hasn’t intended to punish me
I just happened to want
The wrong thing
At the wrong time.
It must be more than her absence
Objects imposing their silence
on wave after wave of despair.
It must be the long
Undisciplined train
Of my own disheveled mind
Flapping in a wind
Blown out of my eyes
And circling back round to my ears.
It must be more than disappointment
More than a simple
Lack of presence.
It must be.
(Version 0.1)
We reach out with both hands across an unbridgeable chasm
For the single crimson rose we feel will dispel the night.
Seeming to smile, nodding in a gentle breeze, does it
Invite us to take it and use it as our means of escape?
Through an assembly of machines and techniques,
Cantilevers, struts, cables, and pure will we span
The uncrossable deep to embrace both petal and thorn.
At first touch, the bloom seems to glow yet more brightly
As though a sun suddenly thrust its torch above
A distant horizon at midnight.
But this need to consume, to acquire, to possess
Lime-like leaches pigment from each petal, bleaching
Night, dawn, star, and flower to dull gray overcast
Where our beloved suffocates and struggles to get free.
And so it goes, again and again.
The sterile room, the unguents, the needles, the jars;
Quotidian reek of disinfected surface projected
Into seconds, minutes, hours, days…
By a longing that buzzes in a loose circuit.
We hack at the undergrowth.
We cast nets.
We finger the warm deep of eternity.
Variety swirls about us.
We feel poor.
We think, if only, just once, just one
Good meal to lift me out of this hunger
That would be enough. I would be happy.
The dissonant instruments,
The bright green,
The wind on a bridge,
Sand dunes of garish goods on display,
A lofty jest of Baudelaire,
The red light from candles,
And a bay
Set up harmonic vibrations
Electric arcs across the bases of our spines
Giving birth through occipital foramen
To ephemeral spirits of bliss.
(Version zero)
We reach out with both hands across an unbridgeable chasm
For the single crimson rose we feel will dispel the night.
Seeming to smile, nodding in a gentle breeze, does it
Invite us to take it and use it as our means of escape?
Through an assembly of machines and techniques,
Cantilevers, struts, cables, and pure will we span
The uncrossable deep to embrace both petal and thorn.
At first touch, the bloom seems to glow yet more brightly
As though a sun suddenly thrust its torch above
A distant horizon at midnight.
But this need to consume, to acquire, to possess
Lime-like leaches pigment from each petal, bleaching
Night, dawn, star, and flower to dull grey overcast
Where our beloved suffocates and struggles to get free.
And so it goes, again and again.
The sterile room, the unguents, the needles, the jars;
Quodidian reek of disinfected surface projected
Into seconds, minutes, hours, days…
By a longing that flickers in a loose bulb.
We hack at the undergrowth.
We cast nets.
We finger the warm deep of eternity.
Variety swirls about us.
We feel poor.
We think, if only, just once, just one
Good meal to lift me out of this hunger
That would be enough. I would be happy.
The dissonant instruments,
The bright green,
The wind on a bridge,
Sand dunes of garish goods on display,
A lofty jest of Baudelaire,
The red light from candles,
And a bay
Set up harmonic vibrations
Electric arcs across the bases of our spines
Giving birth through occipital foramen
To ephemeral spirits of bliss.
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