for George and Mary Dimock

Atropos: Or, the Future

He rushed out of the temple
And for all of his young good looks,
Excellence at wrestling,
High and manly pride,
The giddy world’s own darling,
He thought of suicide.
(The facts are clear and simple
But are not found in books.)

Think how the young suppose
That any minute now
Some darkly beautiful
Stranger’s leg or throat
Will speak out in the taut
Inflections of desire,
Will choose them, will allow
Each finger its own thought
And whatever it reaches for.
A vision without clothes
Tickles the genitalia
And makes blithe the heart.
But in this most of all
He was cut out for failure.

That morning smelled of hay.
But all that he found tempting
Was a high, weathered cliff.
Now at a subtle prompting
He hesitated. If
He ended down below
He had overcome the Fates;
The oracle was false;
The gods themselves were blind.
A fate he could contravene
Was certainly not Fate.
All lay in his power.
(How this came to his mind
No child of man can say.
The clear, rational light
Touches on less than half,
And “he who hesitates…”
For who could presume to know
The decisive, inward pulse
Of things?)
                  After an hour
He rose to his full height,
The master of himself.

That morning smelled of hay.
The day was clear. A moisture
Cooled at the tips of leaves.
The fields were overlaid
With light. It was harvest time.
Three swallows appraised the day,
And bearing aloft their lives,
Sailed into a wild climb,
Then spilled across the pasture
Like water over tiles.
One could have seen for miles
The sun on a knife-blade.
And there he stood, the hero,
With a lascivious wind
Sliding across his chest.
(The sort of thing that women,
Who are fools the whole world over,
Would fondle and adore
And stand before undressed.)
But deep within his loins
A bitterness is set.
He is already blind.

The faceless powers summon
To their eternal sorrow
The handsome, bold, and vain,
And those dark things are met
At a place where three roads join.
They touch with an open sore
The lips that he shall kiss.
And some day men may call me,
Because I’m old and plain
And never had a lover,
The authoress of this.

Clotho: Or, the Present

Well, there he stands, surrounded
By all his kith and kin,
Townspeople and friends,
As the evidence rolls in,
And don’t go telling me
The spectacle isn’t silly.

A prince in low disguise,
Moving among the humble
With kingly purposes,
Is an old, romantic posture,
And always popular.
He started on this career
By overthrowing Fate
(A splendid accomplishment,
And all done in an hour.)
That crucial day at the temple
When the birds crossed over the pasture
As was said by my sister, here.
Which goes to show that an omen
Is a mere tissue of lies
To please the superstitious
And keep the masses content.
From this initial success
He moved on without pause
To outwit and subdue a vicious
Beast with lion’s paws,
The wings of a great bird,
And the beasts and face of a woman.
This meant knowing no less
Than the universal state
Of man. Which is quite a lot.
(Construe this as you please.)

Now today an old abuse
Raises its head and festers
To the scandal and disease
Of all. He will weed it out
And cleanse the earth of it.
Clearly, if anyone could,
He can redeem these lands;
To doubt this would be absurd.
The finest faculties,
Courage and will and wit,
He has patiently put to use
For Truth and the Common Good,
And lordly above the taunts
Of his enemies, there he stands,
The father of his sisters,
His daughters their own aunts.

Some sentimental fool
Invented the Tragic Muse.
She doesn’t exist at all
For human life is composed
In reasonably equal parts
Of triumph and chagrin,
And the parts are so hotly fused
As to seem a single thing.
This is true as well
Of wisdom and ignorance
And of happiness and pain:
Nothing is purely itself
But is linked with its antidote
In cold self-mockery—
A fact with which only those
Born with a Comic sense
Can learn to content themselves.
While heroes die to maintain
Some part of existence clean
And in contaminate.

Now take this fellow here
Who is about to find
The summit of his life
Founded upon disaster.
Lovers can learn as much
Every night in bed,
For whatever flesh can touch
Is never quite enough.
They know it is tempting fate
To hold out for perfect bliss.
And yet the whole world over
Blind men will choose as master
To lead them the most blind.
And some day men may call me,
Because I’m old and tough,
And never had a lover,
The instrument of this.

Lachesis, or the Past

Well, now. You might suppose
There’s nothing left to be said.
Outcast, corrupt, and blind,
He knows it’s night when an owl
Wakes up to hoot at the wise,
And the owl inside his head
Looks out of sightless eyes,
Answers, and sinks its toes
Into the soft and bloody
Center of his mind.

But miles and miles away
Suffers another man.
He was young, open-hearted,
Strong in mind and body
When all these things began.
Every blessed night
He attends the moonstruck owl,
Familiar of the witness.
And remembers a dark day,
A new-born baby’s howl,
And an autumnal wetness.

The smallest sign of love
Is always an easy target
For the jealous and cynical.
Perhaps, indeed, they are right.
I leave it for you to say.
But to leave a little child,
Roped around the feet,
To the charities of a wolf
Was more than he could stomach.
He weighed this for an hour,
Then rose to his full height,
The master of himself.
And the last, clinching witness.
The great life he spared
He would return to punish
And punish him as well.

But recently his woes 
Are muted by the moon.
He no longer goes alone.
Thorns have befriended him,
And once he found his mother
Hiding under a stone.
She was fat, wet, and lame.
She said it was clever of him
To find her in the dark
But he always had been a wise one,
And warned him against snails.
And now his every word
Is free of all human hates
And human kindliness.
To be mad, as the world goes,
Is not the worst of fates.
(And please do not forget
There are those who find this comic.)

But what, you ask, of the hero?
(Ah well, I am very old
And they say I have a rambling
Or a devious sort of mind.)
At midnight and in rain
He advances without trembling
From sorrow onto sorrow
Toward a kind of light
The sun makes upon metal
Which perhaps even the blind
May secretly behold.
What the intelligence
Works out in pure delight
The body must learn in pain.
He has solved the Sphinx’s riddle
In his own ligaments.

And now in a green place,
Holy and unknown,
He has taken off his clothes.
Dust in the sliding light
Swims and is gone. Fruit
Thickens. The listless cello
Of flies tuning in shadows,
Wet bark and the silver click
Of water over stones
Are close about him where
He stands, an only witness
With no eyes in his face.
In spite of which he knows
Clear as he once had known,
Though bound both hand and foot,
The smell of mountain air
And an autumnal wetness.
And he sees, moreover,
Unfolding into the light
Three pairs of wings in flight,
Moving as water moves.
The strength, wisdom and bliss
Of their inhuman loves
They scatter near the temple.
And some day men may call me,
Because I’m old and simple
And never had a lover,
Responsible for this.