The Penelope series, “Counterpoint,” can be read on pp. 97-117 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948).
Discouraged, exhausted, unable to breathe without the stale and greedy odor of unwanted guests clawing into her pores, her mouth and throat—Penelope was no heroine. She was just tough, stubborn, and disgusted with the paltry minds and men around her. After Ulysses, who could blame her? She’d had a husband match her cleverness, see through and undo her strategies, twine her in his own confusions of honor and faith. She’d let herself be second choice once, and now her cousin was again the cause of her being seen not for herself. Being seen as the next best thing, some thing to be won out of failure, a little more power because of who and where she was.
Unlucky guests, unlucky suitors. It’s a rare woman who does anything solely for another even if she sacrifices nearly everything she has. Poor, dumb guests. Aching for love even as they wrestled for bits of power like dogs tangling for food dropped to the floor. They wanted to believe someone could be that faithful, that a woman could be so devoted to one man as to refuse every single other one. And that such devotion could be turned, betrayed, and become as pure as before with a new husband. A new father. Fickleness craves fidelity.
These, and other bitter thoughts, went through Penelope’s days as she wove and unwove the same piece of shroud, her father’s funeral wrap, for twenty years. How she must have hurt from the winding and unwinding, carefully undoing what had already cut her palms. Twenty years! Was her father still unburied, or did she come up with a new excuse? She must have been grateful for the interruptions of illness, menstruation, household tasks, emergencies. She must have worn through her skeins and had to start others, been carding and spinning as much as she wove.
And yet she must have been tempted to give up and give in, to let go and not have to continue to fight, to let her son find his own wars. Attention is intoxicating. There must have been some guests who raised the blood beneath her skin, who made her nights more sleepless than they already were. And yet she was stubborn, like Psyche, focused on her task, believing that if she waited long enough, she would either be alone or be married still with proof at home and in her belly. Yet she must have known she was close to menopause; her body must have given her signs of age and different wisdom.
Penelope. Clever, angry weaver queen. Helen was her cousin, Helen the unfaithful. Helen who ran away before her husband could. Helen whom Ulysses wanted and lost, making Penelope never the first. And yet they had been happy, she and Ulysses, enough that he feigned madness rather than leave her. Enough that after twenty years of Cyclops and sirens, lotos and Circe, he returned, determined to be with her. With HER.
Athena was her cousin, if Zeus fathered Helen and the Gemini. And Athena’s gift of weaving played in Penelope’s hands, frayed the edges of her dreams. Athena sent signs when Penelope wavered, reluctant for the cloth to fall from the loom. Just enough to lighten the dreariness. And then Ulysses came. Disguised, older, not with flowers or gifts. With violence and blood, clearing out her suitors and littering her floor. I can smell the sweet awful spatters on her dress, across the loom. So much time and effort put into protecting the bleached wool, the semblance of purity. And her husband slaughters his way to her and expects a welcome. Penelope is no romantic, no heroine with long enchanted hair or special skills. She is old, tired, filthy. And spitting, hornet mad.
There are at least three endings to this myth. Happily ever after is the dullest and least believable, that she and Ulysses reconciled and stayed Ithaca-bound for their remaining years. Another ending undermines them both, adultery with Circe matched by infidelity with a guest, named and yet early and easily killed, forgotten, when Ulysses swung his club. Ulysses is less forgiving of Penelope’s betrayal than she of his—he exiles her, and she wanders, cursed not by gods but by the man who could never find his way home without divine intervention.
The third ending is odd; a new player appears. Penelope leaves Ulysses and wanders, yet meets Hermes on her travels. They marry, and Penelope has a second son, the god Pan, who in his wildness and cleverness is music and desire, promiscuity with no urge for faith or faithfulness.
Which is true? The archetype that speaks the most in the story you create of and for yourself. They’re all archetypes, these myths, not really real yet speaking for each of us in some experience of desire, lost love, belief, despair, and weariness. The women are weary, or they are lost. The men are unable to realize their desire without ruining that which they desire. What is found eludes the finder, or destroys what touches its form. And yet we wait; we try; we make different endings to the same story that keep us wandering and coming back. Finding our way home to unravel at night what we’ve made through the day, choosing what works. Rejecting the ideal for real. “Believing in something like air” (Jill Leininger), believing in something like truth.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Human, once-removed--Psyche
The Psyche series, “Once Removed,” can be read on pp. 55-72 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948).
Oh, Psyche. She hurts to look at, always doing the wrong thing, always given more to do than she has hands to do. Filled with love and confusion, listening to jealousy and fear, humiliated by a moment of doubtful action, a mother-in-law’s grief and anger. They try so hard, these women, to love the men in their care. They fall back on themselves and their undeveloped hearts when left alone.
The Psyche series, Once Removed, begins with someone else’s story, another woman given impossible tasks. The miller’s daughter was locked up and ordered to spin straw into gold. Like Psyche, this nameless woman had to rely on dangerous help and sacrifice who she might become and create in order to have a chance at any future at all.
Then Psyche enters, in the next poem, spilling candle wax on her husband Eros. He is a stranger to her in the day and a dark but loving presence in her nights. The wax burns his skin and wakes him—some strange law of Greek divinity decrees he must leave instantly and never see her again. Sight equals knowledge here, and knowledge and love cannot live together.
Psyche, still shaking from this loss, is now tormented by his mother. Venus appears, not as the goddess of beauty but of justice, and she becomes Nemesis in her pursuit of Psyche’s destruction for shaming her son. Psyche must clean and count; Psyche must pay the unpayable.
And Psyche counts, not seeds but memories and days. Lost in her mind and heart, she finds helpers when and where she least expects, ants and birds to carry and sort. It is not enough. Venus wants more, wants the death of this unwanted, unloved daughter-in-law. So she sends Psyche to meet death, a journey no one but Orpheus has survived. And Psyche is no musician, has no talents but beauty and healing.
Psyche knows she will die if she makes another mis-step. She knows that Eros will never come back if she does not return. The trip to meet Persephone and Pluto is nearly as frightening as the trip to the living world. She must face this dreaded couple who rule the world no waking person sees, and she must ask the Queen of death and spring to share her beauty with the Goddess who breathes beauty from her smile. Woman to woman to woman—Psyche doesn’t stand a chance.
Yet Psyche is surprised. Pluto and Persephone know mismatched and impossible love, mutually exclusive choices. They welcome her and offer the one moment of divine compassion Psyche knows in this entire myth. They give her what she needs. And this love, this mercy, nearly break her—she has prepared herself for pain.
More counting—Psyche keeps herself focused on the journey back by numbering her steps, refusing to look left or right or behind. She has this one last task—to focus—before she can see her husband again. And she has no guarantees. She is a different woman than before. Stronger, sharper, and more sure. Angry even in her hope. Even the bats and spirits cannot shift her feet.
It’s daylight when she emerges. Eros comes to meet her. The first time they have seen each other in the sun since he rescued her from a sea god’s rape. Now she has rescued him although she doesn’t know why he needs rescue, nor where he’s been. And she wants him to feel the pain she has felt. She pierces him with one of his own arrows, reversing the mistake that first brought them together. It is her desire and love that want to be met.
And he bleeds and becomes less than a god, only a man, this time a husband she can see and touch and hold. They weep and laugh together, seeing that in looking at each other after grief and separation, they know the other in themselves and love each other deeply.
Psyche to me is another voiceless myth who has much to say. Her connection with Persephone is key to finding the depth of her pain and the strength in her choices. Lost, abandoned Psyche became the hunter who caught her god and made him lovable. She took away his singular power to choose other’s matches (the original e-Harmony) by choosing him for her own. And in the choosing and the loneliness and the strength, Psyche found her own divinity. Human, once-removed.
Oh, Psyche. She hurts to look at, always doing the wrong thing, always given more to do than she has hands to do. Filled with love and confusion, listening to jealousy and fear, humiliated by a moment of doubtful action, a mother-in-law’s grief and anger. They try so hard, these women, to love the men in their care. They fall back on themselves and their undeveloped hearts when left alone.
The Psyche series, Once Removed, begins with someone else’s story, another woman given impossible tasks. The miller’s daughter was locked up and ordered to spin straw into gold. Like Psyche, this nameless woman had to rely on dangerous help and sacrifice who she might become and create in order to have a chance at any future at all.
Then Psyche enters, in the next poem, spilling candle wax on her husband Eros. He is a stranger to her in the day and a dark but loving presence in her nights. The wax burns his skin and wakes him—some strange law of Greek divinity decrees he must leave instantly and never see her again. Sight equals knowledge here, and knowledge and love cannot live together.
Psyche, still shaking from this loss, is now tormented by his mother. Venus appears, not as the goddess of beauty but of justice, and she becomes Nemesis in her pursuit of Psyche’s destruction for shaming her son. Psyche must clean and count; Psyche must pay the unpayable.
And Psyche counts, not seeds but memories and days. Lost in her mind and heart, she finds helpers when and where she least expects, ants and birds to carry and sort. It is not enough. Venus wants more, wants the death of this unwanted, unloved daughter-in-law. So she sends Psyche to meet death, a journey no one but Orpheus has survived. And Psyche is no musician, has no talents but beauty and healing.
Psyche knows she will die if she makes another mis-step. She knows that Eros will never come back if she does not return. The trip to meet Persephone and Pluto is nearly as frightening as the trip to the living world. She must face this dreaded couple who rule the world no waking person sees, and she must ask the Queen of death and spring to share her beauty with the Goddess who breathes beauty from her smile. Woman to woman to woman—Psyche doesn’t stand a chance.
Yet Psyche is surprised. Pluto and Persephone know mismatched and impossible love, mutually exclusive choices. They welcome her and offer the one moment of divine compassion Psyche knows in this entire myth. They give her what she needs. And this love, this mercy, nearly break her—she has prepared herself for pain.
More counting—Psyche keeps herself focused on the journey back by numbering her steps, refusing to look left or right or behind. She has this one last task—to focus—before she can see her husband again. And she has no guarantees. She is a different woman than before. Stronger, sharper, and more sure. Angry even in her hope. Even the bats and spirits cannot shift her feet.
It’s daylight when she emerges. Eros comes to meet her. The first time they have seen each other in the sun since he rescued her from a sea god’s rape. Now she has rescued him although she doesn’t know why he needs rescue, nor where he’s been. And she wants him to feel the pain she has felt. She pierces him with one of his own arrows, reversing the mistake that first brought them together. It is her desire and love that want to be met.
And he bleeds and becomes less than a god, only a man, this time a husband she can see and touch and hold. They weep and laugh together, seeing that in looking at each other after grief and separation, they know the other in themselves and love each other deeply.
Psyche to me is another voiceless myth who has much to say. Her connection with Persephone is key to finding the depth of her pain and the strength in her choices. Lost, abandoned Psyche became the hunter who caught her god and made him lovable. She took away his singular power to choose other’s matches (the original e-Harmony) by choosing him for her own. And in the choosing and the loneliness and the strength, Psyche found her own divinity. Human, once-removed.
Relocation
“London” can be read on pp. 126-127 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948)
a flurry of breaths—“London” is scattered across the page like breaths snatched between words. It’s a sonnet in a series of sonnets (“Joy” and “Syncope” are also in heart speech this) I wrote as I grew into a place I thought would never fit.
Tell me why I stay here—My first year in New York, I broke yet another of my “I’m not going to do that” promises. I had vowed never to live on the East Coast and especially not in a city as thick and dense and over-stimulated as this. I wanted mountains, ocean, desert, and space. Spareness and horizon. And of course I found myself driving from Oregon to Pennsylvania in the space of a week, first south through the Siskiyous and then east across the deserts, the Divide, the sudden clusters of townships and hills, soybean fields and trees.
the frenzy for crumbs shouldering brothers to curbs—I was not prepared for the city despite visits in the ‘80s, despite traveling and living in US and European cities in earlier parts of my life. Six years in forested, rivered Oregon had dulled my agility. I had lost the sense of crowds, the athleticism required for hip checks, blocking, taking a charge.
fringed with vain shadows obscuring the light—There was a moment of horror when I stepped onto the subway car and saw a pool of blood on the seat I’d been ready to grab. Moments of utter confusion when directions and lines and numbers/letters had no pattern or system internally mapped—the constant shifting, running, and straining to hear/see were like bodysurfing in riptides, pulled off my feet and tangled in waves, kelp, sand, and rocks.
surround me with pigeons fluffing their breasts—the first place I’ve lived where strangers start conversations in the middle, speaking to anyone close enough to address, blurting out intimate and unrelated observations and complaints. So much reaching for connection, posturing for attention, and offered simply for the pleasure of being a little larger in the crowd, of making the city of knots on a string more like lace than measurement.
savoring haste over hunger—“You don’t like the city very much, do you?” observed one of my French students when I shared this poem in class. And I was surprised, because I did like the city, in the way one likes family one can’t live with but always feels affection for, the mutual agreement to love the differences one can’t understand but tolerates for deeper connections.
Offer me tastes I’ll refuse to forget—There are people who love the gulping nature of this place, the ravenous energy to get, make, and be more. And I have not escaped. Yet I love those days, those minutes, when there is something truly, truly slow, some ache that develops into emptiness and then desire that rumbles inside and makes embarrassing comments, like the stranger standing next to me as we wait for the train.
to long for this din—and yet “London”, which is about London as well as New York and all these cities of stink and staleness and compressed sights and sounds, tells me I can learn to live anywhere and love the place I’m in, just as Helen, in whose series “London” crowds, learned her cities and shock and elbow room.
a flurry of breaths—“London” is scattered across the page like breaths snatched between words. It’s a sonnet in a series of sonnets (“Joy” and “Syncope” are also in heart speech this) I wrote as I grew into a place I thought would never fit.
Tell me why I stay here—My first year in New York, I broke yet another of my “I’m not going to do that” promises. I had vowed never to live on the East Coast and especially not in a city as thick and dense and over-stimulated as this. I wanted mountains, ocean, desert, and space. Spareness and horizon. And of course I found myself driving from Oregon to Pennsylvania in the space of a week, first south through the Siskiyous and then east across the deserts, the Divide, the sudden clusters of townships and hills, soybean fields and trees.
the frenzy for crumbs shouldering brothers to curbs—I was not prepared for the city despite visits in the ‘80s, despite traveling and living in US and European cities in earlier parts of my life. Six years in forested, rivered Oregon had dulled my agility. I had lost the sense of crowds, the athleticism required for hip checks, blocking, taking a charge.
fringed with vain shadows obscuring the light—There was a moment of horror when I stepped onto the subway car and saw a pool of blood on the seat I’d been ready to grab. Moments of utter confusion when directions and lines and numbers/letters had no pattern or system internally mapped—the constant shifting, running, and straining to hear/see were like bodysurfing in riptides, pulled off my feet and tangled in waves, kelp, sand, and rocks.
surround me with pigeons fluffing their breasts—the first place I’ve lived where strangers start conversations in the middle, speaking to anyone close enough to address, blurting out intimate and unrelated observations and complaints. So much reaching for connection, posturing for attention, and offered simply for the pleasure of being a little larger in the crowd, of making the city of knots on a string more like lace than measurement.
savoring haste over hunger—“You don’t like the city very much, do you?” observed one of my French students when I shared this poem in class. And I was surprised, because I did like the city, in the way one likes family one can’t live with but always feels affection for, the mutual agreement to love the differences one can’t understand but tolerates for deeper connections.
Offer me tastes I’ll refuse to forget—There are people who love the gulping nature of this place, the ravenous energy to get, make, and be more. And I have not escaped. Yet I love those days, those minutes, when there is something truly, truly slow, some ache that develops into emptiness and then desire that rumbles inside and makes embarrassing comments, like the stranger standing next to me as we wait for the train.
to long for this din—and yet “London”, which is about London as well as New York and all these cities of stink and staleness and compressed sights and sounds, tells me I can learn to live anywhere and love the place I’m in, just as Helen, in whose series “London” crowds, learned her cities and shock and elbow room.
Santa Fe--Glory & Relief
“Santa Fe,” can be read on p.89 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948)
It’s those blurry memories of something done more than once, something done by others we knew as children, that come back and reform into nostalgia. And there are these rituals we create that have only the sacredness we find in them, not the awe given by holy speech or writing, not the sense of Otherness in a space dedicated to surrendering self to community and community to what makes us feel part of something more. These rituals we make as children, chanting about not stepping on cracks, linking pinky fingers to establish a pact, spitting in our palms and mixing saliva as if sharing what helps us speak and swallow made our intentions more powerful.
My brother and his friends loved the danger of small town risks—setting up skateboard slaloms on scarcely driven roads, designing hang gliders and sailing off hillsides into iceplant and tumbleweeds…one of their favorites was to hang out by the train tracks that bordered the city’s only park, looking for dropped metal, tempting the trains to transform pennies into thin shimmers of copper, oblong and smooth where once they had been round, thick, and raised.
They did this every time they were near the tracks, scrounging for pennies, yelping when they found a “wheatback”, comparing dates and designs. Later, when I was with my friends, feeling less exposed but still timid, I would try the same trick with less success.
The trains, many from the Santa Fe line, were freight rather than passenger. I didn’t actually know there were still passenger trains until I was older. My friends and I counted cars and guessed how many more would pass before we saw the caboose. Some cars were closed and gave no hint of their insides. Others had open doors, still others no roofs. The company’s logos were painted on the walls and doors.
To really flatten a penny, you had to place the penny where it would feel the most pressure from the train’s wheels. This meant standing on the track and finding the most worn parts of the rails, already shiny and scratched, and then balancing the coins as centrally as possible. The rails themselves were not always flat enough to palm the pennies, and vibrations from the trains could throw them off onto the ground.
Then you had to wait for the train to pass. 10 minutes, 20, sometimes nearly an hour—you could get distracted or have to go home before the train was gone. And the pennies, if they were still on the rails, were as hot as they were glossy. Picking up a hot, melted, polished cent—what a thrill, as if no one had ever done this before.
So I remembered my brother and this shiny, one cent moment he spent again and again. The collection of copper slivers on his dresser. And the moments that are so ordinary and so sacred because we are so fully present and full of risks and joy.
It’s those blurry memories of something done more than once, something done by others we knew as children, that come back and reform into nostalgia. And there are these rituals we create that have only the sacredness we find in them, not the awe given by holy speech or writing, not the sense of Otherness in a space dedicated to surrendering self to community and community to what makes us feel part of something more. These rituals we make as children, chanting about not stepping on cracks, linking pinky fingers to establish a pact, spitting in our palms and mixing saliva as if sharing what helps us speak and swallow made our intentions more powerful.
My brother and his friends loved the danger of small town risks—setting up skateboard slaloms on scarcely driven roads, designing hang gliders and sailing off hillsides into iceplant and tumbleweeds…one of their favorites was to hang out by the train tracks that bordered the city’s only park, looking for dropped metal, tempting the trains to transform pennies into thin shimmers of copper, oblong and smooth where once they had been round, thick, and raised.
They did this every time they were near the tracks, scrounging for pennies, yelping when they found a “wheatback”, comparing dates and designs. Later, when I was with my friends, feeling less exposed but still timid, I would try the same trick with less success.
The trains, many from the Santa Fe line, were freight rather than passenger. I didn’t actually know there were still passenger trains until I was older. My friends and I counted cars and guessed how many more would pass before we saw the caboose. Some cars were closed and gave no hint of their insides. Others had open doors, still others no roofs. The company’s logos were painted on the walls and doors.
To really flatten a penny, you had to place the penny where it would feel the most pressure from the train’s wheels. This meant standing on the track and finding the most worn parts of the rails, already shiny and scratched, and then balancing the coins as centrally as possible. The rails themselves were not always flat enough to palm the pennies, and vibrations from the trains could throw them off onto the ground.
Then you had to wait for the train to pass. 10 minutes, 20, sometimes nearly an hour—you could get distracted or have to go home before the train was gone. And the pennies, if they were still on the rails, were as hot as they were glossy. Picking up a hot, melted, polished cent—what a thrill, as if no one had ever done this before.
So I remembered my brother and this shiny, one cent moment he spent again and again. The collection of copper slivers on his dresser. And the moments that are so ordinary and so sacred because we are so fully present and full of risks and joy.
Remedy--Fighting and Falling for Love
The Persephone series, “Remedy,” can be read on pp. 35-48 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948)
There is a torsion in each series of myth-provoked poems, somewhat like Michelangelo’s Prisoners struggling out of stone, reforming themselves even as they remake their origins. In “Remedy”, Persephone turns the tables on Hades, fighting for mastery even as he tears her from the spring she walks upon the grass, the mother who supports her steps.
The myth is one of our most familiar, translated in many cultures to a young man sacrificed in spring, the time of birth and renewal, whose loss brings darkness and famine to those left behind. It is the transition from an eternal beauty and youth to a seasonal rotation, a range of emotions rather than a perpetual bliss. Isn’t this what myth teaches us, to be human rather than divine?
Here, Hades and Persephone, whose voices are scarcely heard in other retellings, form the center of the story. This young, innocent barely woman dragged from one phase of her life into another, suddenly sexualized and violated by a stranger. The older man, seized with desire that overtakes him just as much as the object of his desire is torn from her sense of who she is. Refusing to control desire, desire then violates both the violator and the violated.
Yet here Persephone is not helpless. She fights; she claws; she bruises and bloodies her attacker. And in the contortions of bodies and elements, air to earth, she becomes the victor. She knocks out her opponent, who falls to his unconscious and mortal realm as if concussed, as if dead. What is Hades’ place, who is Hades, if not death and the reminder that anything we imagine can be killed as well as born?
And in the grappling and refusals to let go, to be contained, Persephone and Hades leave desire for something more real. They find compassion for innocence and trauma, for fear and wounds, for what takes them from what they thought of themselves and who they must be. Hades is charmed by Persephone’s first experiences of her hands and mouth and nose in intimate exploration, so different than touching fresh earth, new grass, bright flowers. Persephone crumbles within herself, finding her heart, as she sees the one who stole her now stolen of his senses, now helpless and near dissolution. She learns to love as she learns her own strength, his fragility.
Which becomes grief as she realizes who she is and cannot be as long as her lover is gone from her knowing. Which deepens into bereavement and isolation as she realizes her mother is also lost, is refusing to honor her daughter’s new self and help ease the transition into maturity and pain. The loss of a mother and a lover is only superseded by the loss of a child. And neither of these goddesses, in their compassion for others, have compassion for each other. And so both wander and grieve alone, rage and damage their worlds alone.
Yet Persephone has made her choice. She will mature. It is not a beautiful world for her to rule, this place of death and transition, yet it is the world she is offered. Her spring is not hers; it is a gift of her mother’s, and she cannot come into herself if she does not find a place for herself. This is what Hades offers, and in her understanding of the complexities of what it means to be human, to share bruises and laughter, she becomes the queen who will have compassion for Psyche and help her to deepen into love and to accept emotion and trials as necessary steps in loving well and in trusting that love will waken and return in its own time.
There is a torsion in each series of myth-provoked poems, somewhat like Michelangelo’s Prisoners struggling out of stone, reforming themselves even as they remake their origins. In “Remedy”, Persephone turns the tables on Hades, fighting for mastery even as he tears her from the spring she walks upon the grass, the mother who supports her steps.
The myth is one of our most familiar, translated in many cultures to a young man sacrificed in spring, the time of birth and renewal, whose loss brings darkness and famine to those left behind. It is the transition from an eternal beauty and youth to a seasonal rotation, a range of emotions rather than a perpetual bliss. Isn’t this what myth teaches us, to be human rather than divine?
Here, Hades and Persephone, whose voices are scarcely heard in other retellings, form the center of the story. This young, innocent barely woman dragged from one phase of her life into another, suddenly sexualized and violated by a stranger. The older man, seized with desire that overtakes him just as much as the object of his desire is torn from her sense of who she is. Refusing to control desire, desire then violates both the violator and the violated.
Yet here Persephone is not helpless. She fights; she claws; she bruises and bloodies her attacker. And in the contortions of bodies and elements, air to earth, she becomes the victor. She knocks out her opponent, who falls to his unconscious and mortal realm as if concussed, as if dead. What is Hades’ place, who is Hades, if not death and the reminder that anything we imagine can be killed as well as born?
And in the grappling and refusals to let go, to be contained, Persephone and Hades leave desire for something more real. They find compassion for innocence and trauma, for fear and wounds, for what takes them from what they thought of themselves and who they must be. Hades is charmed by Persephone’s first experiences of her hands and mouth and nose in intimate exploration, so different than touching fresh earth, new grass, bright flowers. Persephone crumbles within herself, finding her heart, as she sees the one who stole her now stolen of his senses, now helpless and near dissolution. She learns to love as she learns her own strength, his fragility.
Which becomes grief as she realizes who she is and cannot be as long as her lover is gone from her knowing. Which deepens into bereavement and isolation as she realizes her mother is also lost, is refusing to honor her daughter’s new self and help ease the transition into maturity and pain. The loss of a mother and a lover is only superseded by the loss of a child. And neither of these goddesses, in their compassion for others, have compassion for each other. And so both wander and grieve alone, rage and damage their worlds alone.
Yet Persephone has made her choice. She will mature. It is not a beautiful world for her to rule, this place of death and transition, yet it is the world she is offered. Her spring is not hers; it is a gift of her mother’s, and she cannot come into herself if she does not find a place for herself. This is what Hades offers, and in her understanding of the complexities of what it means to be human, to share bruises and laughter, she becomes the queen who will have compassion for Psyche and help her to deepen into love and to accept emotion and trials as necessary steps in loving well and in trusting that love will waken and return in its own time.
Matrimony--Chrome, Utility, and Vision
“Matrimony” can be read on p. 117 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948)
He photographed his wife’s hand splayed across the hubcap of a tire, his wife the painter’s hand spread to cover the core of an object rather than to reveal the shape and movement of exposure. The deliberate layering and tension of light on the black gloss of the car, on the chrome between and beyond fingers, on the back of the hand that seems to be its own source of light—Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz are not necessary, yet the photo would not exist without their interplay and intention.
I was in Dubuque, Iowa, helping install an art exhibit, “Moved by the Machine,” curated by my dear and extraordinarily talented cousin Josephine Shea. Two Steiglitz photos were on display, accompanied by art devoted to the American (and in some cases, European) fascination with the automobile. There had been a cross-country road trip in which I picked up and delivered Shannon Goff’s cardboard “Dashboard”, six feet of cardboard sculpted into a larger than life, yes, dashboard, from Boston to Detroit, then collected the curator and more art and drove through Chicago to Dubuque to the museum. Two days later, I was helping to finish the installation and write labels and vinyl text while I soaked in the interplay of sculpture, painting, photography, video, and bird calls. And O’Keeffe’s hand in Stieglitz’s image hummed in me.
What did he do, drag her by the wrist from her easel and canvas out to place her hand on the car? She must not have been painting: nothing is caught in her knuckles; nothing clings to her cuticles. Yet what impatience must she have breathed to be pulled into his work when so much of her own remained to be done!
Yes, projection, projection, projection. And yet, imagine the push and pull so often written about, these two visual artists with such different creative compulsions, generational assumptions, married in spite of their individuality, partnered in spite of each wanting to lead. And so, “Matrimony”: competing arts, visions, and perceptions of the hand. For one an object to portray as an image, for the other, a tool to create images. And for both, this tension of relation between man and woman, man/woman and machine, the viewer and the viewed. The placement of the represented to be presented. What we look at tells us so much about who we are.
He photographed his wife’s hand splayed across the hubcap of a tire, his wife the painter’s hand spread to cover the core of an object rather than to reveal the shape and movement of exposure. The deliberate layering and tension of light on the black gloss of the car, on the chrome between and beyond fingers, on the back of the hand that seems to be its own source of light—Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz are not necessary, yet the photo would not exist without their interplay and intention.
I was in Dubuque, Iowa, helping install an art exhibit, “Moved by the Machine,” curated by my dear and extraordinarily talented cousin Josephine Shea. Two Steiglitz photos were on display, accompanied by art devoted to the American (and in some cases, European) fascination with the automobile. There had been a cross-country road trip in which I picked up and delivered Shannon Goff’s cardboard “Dashboard”, six feet of cardboard sculpted into a larger than life, yes, dashboard, from Boston to Detroit, then collected the curator and more art and drove through Chicago to Dubuque to the museum. Two days later, I was helping to finish the installation and write labels and vinyl text while I soaked in the interplay of sculpture, painting, photography, video, and bird calls. And O’Keeffe’s hand in Stieglitz’s image hummed in me.
What did he do, drag her by the wrist from her easel and canvas out to place her hand on the car? She must not have been painting: nothing is caught in her knuckles; nothing clings to her cuticles. Yet what impatience must she have breathed to be pulled into his work when so much of her own remained to be done!
Yes, projection, projection, projection. And yet, imagine the push and pull so often written about, these two visual artists with such different creative compulsions, generational assumptions, married in spite of their individuality, partnered in spite of each wanting to lead. And so, “Matrimony”: competing arts, visions, and perceptions of the hand. For one an object to portray as an image, for the other, a tool to create images. And for both, this tension of relation between man and woman, man/woman and machine, the viewer and the viewed. The placement of the represented to be presented. What we look at tells us so much about who we are.
Diana--The Ambiguity of Desire
The Diana series, “Fleet Desire,” can be read on pp. 19-31 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948)
The Ambiguity of Desire
She is the goddess of the crescent moon long before she is the virgin twin sister of Apollo and protector of the forests and wild places of the blood and heart. Diana, woman as untouchable, as utterly desired and utterly apart. Woman as possibility and enigma. The darkness and light muting and radiating into the unattained.
There are seven series of poems in heart, speech, this, each exploring particular moments of myth for a Greek goddess, demi-goddess, or mortal woman. Each woman is at a point of emotional and physical transformation expressed through the ambiguities of her relationship to commitment and desire.
It’s one of the wonderful things about myth, that there is no absolute one version that obviates all others although certainly there are favorites and those considered to be more “legitimate” than others. With Diana, who appears in so much of central Asia, northern Africa, and southern Europe, the myths chosen say much about approaches to desire as the habitations of culture and geography as they do about the need for archetypal figures to express what seems to extend and exceed the understanding of the self.
The Diana of heart, speech, this is the wild, athletic goddess who delights in her body and the challenges of living within and against her nature. She is complete within herself, and she has no desire outside of herself. Thus she becomes cruel because the desire of others is a nuisance, not an invitation or countering strength. “Fleet Desire” titles this series just as Diana is known for her speed and the men who want her for the desire that kills them at the moment they realize the impossibility of their hunger.
Mars and Venus may show that justice is irrelevant when love and war are combined; doesn’t Diana force us to recognize that the fairness of desire is simply in the destructiveness of unequal expression?
Diana runs through these poems, sensuous without being sensual, unaware of what it would mean to be in relationship with another. An other. She is only in herself. And hunters, so many hunters, Orion and Actaeon among them, see her and are caught just as her hair is caught by the vines and branches hanging from the trees that frame her speed.
There is a tendency in heterosexual love to make a distinction between lover and loved, to make an object of the desired, to make the wanted one a solution to the question raised by need. Diana violates this difference. She refuses to be objectified. Seen as a home (how often are women equated with homes, places of refuge and generation?), as music and prayer, as prey to be hunted, caught, and devoured, Diana is not seen as herself. And her own sight is no clearer (“her gaze, un-silvered,/ splashed upon him, blur-/ring”) as she is incapable of reflecting what she sees. Don’t we use others as our mirrors? Diana is incapable of reflecting although she raises reflections in others. And this failure destroys those who want to see themselves in her. In trying to possess what is not a possession, these men become dispossessed and unhomed.
The Ambiguity of Desire
She is the goddess of the crescent moon long before she is the virgin twin sister of Apollo and protector of the forests and wild places of the blood and heart. Diana, woman as untouchable, as utterly desired and utterly apart. Woman as possibility and enigma. The darkness and light muting and radiating into the unattained.
There are seven series of poems in heart, speech, this, each exploring particular moments of myth for a Greek goddess, demi-goddess, or mortal woman. Each woman is at a point of emotional and physical transformation expressed through the ambiguities of her relationship to commitment and desire.
It’s one of the wonderful things about myth, that there is no absolute one version that obviates all others although certainly there are favorites and those considered to be more “legitimate” than others. With Diana, who appears in so much of central Asia, northern Africa, and southern Europe, the myths chosen say much about approaches to desire as the habitations of culture and geography as they do about the need for archetypal figures to express what seems to extend and exceed the understanding of the self.
The Diana of heart, speech, this is the wild, athletic goddess who delights in her body and the challenges of living within and against her nature. She is complete within herself, and she has no desire outside of herself. Thus she becomes cruel because the desire of others is a nuisance, not an invitation or countering strength. “Fleet Desire” titles this series just as Diana is known for her speed and the men who want her for the desire that kills them at the moment they realize the impossibility of their hunger.
Mars and Venus may show that justice is irrelevant when love and war are combined; doesn’t Diana force us to recognize that the fairness of desire is simply in the destructiveness of unequal expression?
Diana runs through these poems, sensuous without being sensual, unaware of what it would mean to be in relationship with another. An other. She is only in herself. And hunters, so many hunters, Orion and Actaeon among them, see her and are caught just as her hair is caught by the vines and branches hanging from the trees that frame her speed.
There is a tendency in heterosexual love to make a distinction between lover and loved, to make an object of the desired, to make the wanted one a solution to the question raised by need. Diana violates this difference. She refuses to be objectified. Seen as a home (how often are women equated with homes, places of refuge and generation?), as music and prayer, as prey to be hunted, caught, and devoured, Diana is not seen as herself. And her own sight is no clearer (“her gaze, un-silvered,/ splashed upon him, blur-/ring”) as she is incapable of reflecting what she sees. Don’t we use others as our mirrors? Diana is incapable of reflecting although she raises reflections in others. And this failure destroys those who want to see themselves in her. In trying to possess what is not a possession, these men become dispossessed and unhomed.
Book, Title, City
Why title a poem for a city about to be fractured by war? Why title a book not for the war but for something both more general and more individual? “Baghdad” is an inexplicable poem that insisted on its becoming.
“Baghdad” can be read on pp. 139-140 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948)
Before and After
The inspiration: it was March 2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq. A former student of mine was living in Riyadh; we were communicating about the transitions in our lives. My heart hurt for him and the other Arabian students whose lives and assumptions had been already torn apart by September 11; I was deeply concerned for their well-being as the war became closer and closer to its violent and uncontrollable being.
I wrote this student to apologize and express my concern for his and his family’s safety. I assumed that this war, as the previous had, would expand far beyond the borders of the targeted country and that cities and citizens with little connection to the protagonists would be destroyed.
He responded with a phrase that comes from learning to speak one’s own tongue in a second, giving meanings a language might not have known it was capable of expressing. “It hearts me,” he wrote, “to speak of this.” And his heart/hurt became the voice wanting response, the voice pushing me to make a poem out of his fragmentation and mine, out of the shattering that had been part of the world I’d always known and that was now surfacing more urgently again.
The poem was revised to its present form in the spring of 2006 shortly after the death of my fiancé, who had suffered a stroke and struggled through six months of coma before waking and fighting to recover his voice and strength. He was unable to survive a heart attack on April 2, 2006.
The pattern: it’s an ecstatic poem, a pantoum broken across the page. Images repeated and broken, wounded in their reappearance, bearing traces of coherence like scars. Pantoums in English are simplified from a Malaysian verse form: it’s repetition that works like a braid, with the second and fourth lines of each stanza’s becoming the first and third of the next grouping of lines (four lines grouped together make a quatrain). The poem curls back on itself by bringing by the first and third lines, in reverse order, as the last set of even lines. And the end, like the snake swallowing its tail, is in the beginning.
The images: The Splintered, Howling Self
"It hearts me, he writes, to speak of this." In a written statement about a written statement, the writer is not named. The "this" is not made explicit. The poem opens with statements that call themselves into question, following not the response to what is written but the response to a word used out of expectation, a word that calls the self as reader into question.
The next line pushes the participants further from each other, further from the line. "We furl back from these notes, you and I." The he and the you disappear until only the 1st person is left. The reader of the poem is now face to face with the speaker. The he in profile and the you that were addressed can no longer be seen.
There is a recoil here ("coiling like a knife-stroked ribbon"), a forced shape and a flexibility that enact a physical transformation to the cutting off and artificial containment of something formerly living and connected to a larger organism. The lily's stem, once cut and left to stand in water rather than soil, splits itself and begins to spiral toward the surface where exposure will drain its sustaining fluid and speed its decay.
The lily's stem is named here but not the lily. One sees the flower without seeing the flower. It is the stem as support and self-destruction that is described, the evidence of action in a setting of inertia.
As the stem becomes cord, the body itself becomes a line, stretching across the poem as a tension between the retreat of the plural first person and the resistant stasis of the lily, now seen un-stemmed. The body is strung: it is intentional, constructed, segmented and fluidly connected.
Again, it is a poem of identity destined and created, self destroyed and reconstructed.
The question of shape appears: "Like beads in the form of melons." The artificial represents the natural, the round/oval represents wholeness and maturity, the ripeness ready to be harvested and consumed. Is that the aim of developing the self? To ripen to the point of consumption?
There are multiple ways of seeing refracted here. In this poem, seeing is challenged to reconcile and balance opposites not as opposites but as options. There is an impossible depth to sight suggested by "in the eyes behind my eyes."
Then the I asserts itself by falling, another falling back or retreat from the stability and centrality associated with identity. The I not only falls but startles ("clatters") and disintegrates ("splinters"). The lost balance is broken control. The fall is liberation, release from intentionality into accident and happenstance.
Fallen, the I is "fierce to stretch beyond myself and run." This is no beaten victim on the floor, no shattered identity unable to gather itself. There is more power and desire in the scattered self than in what was contained, delimited, and erect. This is the first mention of desire and the first constructive extension beyond limitations. The self desires to be more than itself, more than self, to overcome in an explosion of movement.
"For time has never been my problem." Why has time never been the self's problem? Either it is not a question or it is not a factor. Perhaps for this self there is no conception or ripening toward a goal. Perhaps there is no temporality. No mortality.
And yet, within the self the heart is as contained as the lily, as oval and ready to splinter as the beads shaped like melons. The heart is wounded and trapped. It "howls." The heart is the self's voice, the self who has addressed the you but not itself as self until now.
"I am smeared with dreams, bloody and chaste." Unlike Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose self is “smeared, bleared with toil,” the I here is blurred with the unconscious self, an unconscious that is itself ambivalent, innocence and implication confused like fingerpaints slurred across paper and skin.
The unconscious, confusion, and clairvoyance leave the I literate and dumb: “I read my future in leaves fresh-plucked from branches,/my past lost to my tongue.” The future is visible the immediacy of the present. New growth is plucked like petals, like the lily whose stem is echoed in these branches. The past, however, is lost as the branch is lost to the leaves and the roots are lost to the stem. What cannot be held cannot be spoken. Broken connection=not only silence but an inability to break silence. The tongue cannot find what would make its identity coherent. The self de-stabilizes through the plucking, coiling, and reading. Is presence the silencing of the past?
The search for another present, a different spatio-temporal consciousness, persists. “Still, I twist, seeking somewhere else to wake.” Perhaps the self is the root here and has confused its self-consciousness with its extension and appearance in a world where the unconscious has been self-presentation rather than an intentional, woven identity, the knife-stroked ribbon sought at the return, an image in which both ends are also beginnings, and the fabric of the I can be re-formed both externally and internally to reach for “heart, speech, this.”
The Resolution: A Knife-Stroked Ribbon
The chain set in motion by the pantoum coils back on itself in the repetition of lines and images. The chain, like beads, like melons, splinters in the self’s turning away from an external relationship with a familiar other into self-examination as an internal relationship with an estranged, scattered self. The form reflects the content; the broken self that cannot retain its past is itself the source of its own movement and cohesion. Repetition and return indicate a self capable of relation and continuity. It is resiliency in the spiral followed down the page and through the ribbon, the stem, the unstrung beads, the self that twists toward futures, spaces, somewhere else to breathe. In the act of respiration and inspiration, the speaker recovers the loss of identity, expression, and place.
“Baghdad” can be read on pp. 139-140 of heart speech this (Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 9 780982 530948)
Before and After
The inspiration: it was March 2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq. A former student of mine was living in Riyadh; we were communicating about the transitions in our lives. My heart hurt for him and the other Arabian students whose lives and assumptions had been already torn apart by September 11; I was deeply concerned for their well-being as the war became closer and closer to its violent and uncontrollable being.
I wrote this student to apologize and express my concern for his and his family’s safety. I assumed that this war, as the previous had, would expand far beyond the borders of the targeted country and that cities and citizens with little connection to the protagonists would be destroyed.
He responded with a phrase that comes from learning to speak one’s own tongue in a second, giving meanings a language might not have known it was capable of expressing. “It hearts me,” he wrote, “to speak of this.” And his heart/hurt became the voice wanting response, the voice pushing me to make a poem out of his fragmentation and mine, out of the shattering that had been part of the world I’d always known and that was now surfacing more urgently again.
The poem was revised to its present form in the spring of 2006 shortly after the death of my fiancé, who had suffered a stroke and struggled through six months of coma before waking and fighting to recover his voice and strength. He was unable to survive a heart attack on April 2, 2006.
The pattern: it’s an ecstatic poem, a pantoum broken across the page. Images repeated and broken, wounded in their reappearance, bearing traces of coherence like scars. Pantoums in English are simplified from a Malaysian verse form: it’s repetition that works like a braid, with the second and fourth lines of each stanza’s becoming the first and third of the next grouping of lines (four lines grouped together make a quatrain). The poem curls back on itself by bringing by the first and third lines, in reverse order, as the last set of even lines. And the end, like the snake swallowing its tail, is in the beginning.
The images: The Splintered, Howling Self
"It hearts me, he writes, to speak of this." In a written statement about a written statement, the writer is not named. The "this" is not made explicit. The poem opens with statements that call themselves into question, following not the response to what is written but the response to a word used out of expectation, a word that calls the self as reader into question.
The next line pushes the participants further from each other, further from the line. "We furl back from these notes, you and I." The he and the you disappear until only the 1st person is left. The reader of the poem is now face to face with the speaker. The he in profile and the you that were addressed can no longer be seen.
There is a recoil here ("coiling like a knife-stroked ribbon"), a forced shape and a flexibility that enact a physical transformation to the cutting off and artificial containment of something formerly living and connected to a larger organism. The lily's stem, once cut and left to stand in water rather than soil, splits itself and begins to spiral toward the surface where exposure will drain its sustaining fluid and speed its decay.
The lily's stem is named here but not the lily. One sees the flower without seeing the flower. It is the stem as support and self-destruction that is described, the evidence of action in a setting of inertia.
As the stem becomes cord, the body itself becomes a line, stretching across the poem as a tension between the retreat of the plural first person and the resistant stasis of the lily, now seen un-stemmed. The body is strung: it is intentional, constructed, segmented and fluidly connected.
Again, it is a poem of identity destined and created, self destroyed and reconstructed.
The question of shape appears: "Like beads in the form of melons." The artificial represents the natural, the round/oval represents wholeness and maturity, the ripeness ready to be harvested and consumed. Is that the aim of developing the self? To ripen to the point of consumption?
There are multiple ways of seeing refracted here. In this poem, seeing is challenged to reconcile and balance opposites not as opposites but as options. There is an impossible depth to sight suggested by "in the eyes behind my eyes."
Then the I asserts itself by falling, another falling back or retreat from the stability and centrality associated with identity. The I not only falls but startles ("clatters") and disintegrates ("splinters"). The lost balance is broken control. The fall is liberation, release from intentionality into accident and happenstance.
Fallen, the I is "fierce to stretch beyond myself and run." This is no beaten victim on the floor, no shattered identity unable to gather itself. There is more power and desire in the scattered self than in what was contained, delimited, and erect. This is the first mention of desire and the first constructive extension beyond limitations. The self desires to be more than itself, more than self, to overcome in an explosion of movement.
"For time has never been my problem." Why has time never been the self's problem? Either it is not a question or it is not a factor. Perhaps for this self there is no conception or ripening toward a goal. Perhaps there is no temporality. No mortality.
And yet, within the self the heart is as contained as the lily, as oval and ready to splinter as the beads shaped like melons. The heart is wounded and trapped. It "howls." The heart is the self's voice, the self who has addressed the you but not itself as self until now.
"I am smeared with dreams, bloody and chaste." Unlike Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose self is “smeared, bleared with toil,” the I here is blurred with the unconscious self, an unconscious that is itself ambivalent, innocence and implication confused like fingerpaints slurred across paper and skin.
The unconscious, confusion, and clairvoyance leave the I literate and dumb: “I read my future in leaves fresh-plucked from branches,/my past lost to my tongue.” The future is visible the immediacy of the present. New growth is plucked like petals, like the lily whose stem is echoed in these branches. The past, however, is lost as the branch is lost to the leaves and the roots are lost to the stem. What cannot be held cannot be spoken. Broken connection=not only silence but an inability to break silence. The tongue cannot find what would make its identity coherent. The self de-stabilizes through the plucking, coiling, and reading. Is presence the silencing of the past?
The search for another present, a different spatio-temporal consciousness, persists. “Still, I twist, seeking somewhere else to wake.” Perhaps the self is the root here and has confused its self-consciousness with its extension and appearance in a world where the unconscious has been self-presentation rather than an intentional, woven identity, the knife-stroked ribbon sought at the return, an image in which both ends are also beginnings, and the fabric of the I can be re-formed both externally and internally to reach for “heart, speech, this.”
The Resolution: A Knife-Stroked Ribbon
The chain set in motion by the pantoum coils back on itself in the repetition of lines and images. The chain, like beads, like melons, splinters in the self’s turning away from an external relationship with a familiar other into self-examination as an internal relationship with an estranged, scattered self. The form reflects the content; the broken self that cannot retain its past is itself the source of its own movement and cohesion. Repetition and return indicate a self capable of relation and continuity. It is resiliency in the spiral followed down the page and through the ribbon, the stem, the unstrung beads, the self that twists toward futures, spaces, somewhere else to breathe. In the act of respiration and inspiration, the speaker recovers the loss of identity, expression, and place.
heart, speech, this--introduction
There are stories within stories in this book, myths and memories and might-have-beens. Love stories, ruptures, alienations. And like all poetry, what the reader brings to the work creates a different poem with each scanning of a line, each taking apart and putting together of images and sounds.
In these essays, I will think and feel through some of what occurs to me as I reinsert myself in this work that in some ways is no longer mine as if I were reinserting myself in a life I no longer own.
Here is what the book came to be: seven series of poems exploring women of Greek myth, each series with its own poetic form and voice, interrupted and conversing with poems more contemporary, less narrative, in both traditional and nonce forms. These women, some goddesses, some mortal, some half-mortal, half-divine, are more often described than given voices in the myths. And I wondered, still wonder, what they might say, how they might understand the fear and violence and brokenness in which they found themselves, and I wondered, still wonder, what it would mean to interpret these stories as experiences of ambiguous loss (see Pauline Boss’ work), of knowing and not knowing the presence of those they loved.
Although the myths explored are Greek with Roman additions, many of the poems evoke other parts of the globe. Persia, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Italy, England, Arizona, New Mexico, New York, Japan—the poems wander and tangle themselves in places and times of earth and sea and fire. Exile is as strong a theme of love fractured and made more than it was.
“Scheherazade” opens “heart”, the first half of the book, with warring desires between words and sense—hunger, thirst, and affection grabbing for the space that wanted to be a story. And the story becomes the “fleet desire” of Diana chased by Actaeon, Orion, and the dogs with which they hunt.
Diana is followed by Persephone, confused by her own violent responses to desire, and Persephone gives way to Psyche and the desperate, impossible work of rescuing the disappeared. Athena finds desire within herself and the development of strength in isolation, refusing just as her half-sister Diana to be caught.
“Speech”, the book’s second half, goes deeper into ambiguous loss with the experiences of women at war—Leda’s rape, Penelope’s wait for Odysseus, Helen’s infidelity and return, Athena’s anger, Athena’s peace. They are women connected by blood as well as conflict, and my retellings of their myths imagine greater independence, justice questioned and applied, resolutions that sustain the impossibility of solutions.
At times, these essays will explore the series and at times, the individual poems interspersed in each section. Feel free to comment, question, add more information, and post your own poems, stories, reinterpretations in response.
In these essays, I will think and feel through some of what occurs to me as I reinsert myself in this work that in some ways is no longer mine as if I were reinserting myself in a life I no longer own.
Here is what the book came to be: seven series of poems exploring women of Greek myth, each series with its own poetic form and voice, interrupted and conversing with poems more contemporary, less narrative, in both traditional and nonce forms. These women, some goddesses, some mortal, some half-mortal, half-divine, are more often described than given voices in the myths. And I wondered, still wonder, what they might say, how they might understand the fear and violence and brokenness in which they found themselves, and I wondered, still wonder, what it would mean to interpret these stories as experiences of ambiguous loss (see Pauline Boss’ work), of knowing and not knowing the presence of those they loved.
Although the myths explored are Greek with Roman additions, many of the poems evoke other parts of the globe. Persia, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Italy, England, Arizona, New Mexico, New York, Japan—the poems wander and tangle themselves in places and times of earth and sea and fire. Exile is as strong a theme of love fractured and made more than it was.
“Scheherazade” opens “heart”, the first half of the book, with warring desires between words and sense—hunger, thirst, and affection grabbing for the space that wanted to be a story. And the story becomes the “fleet desire” of Diana chased by Actaeon, Orion, and the dogs with which they hunt.
Diana is followed by Persephone, confused by her own violent responses to desire, and Persephone gives way to Psyche and the desperate, impossible work of rescuing the disappeared. Athena finds desire within herself and the development of strength in isolation, refusing just as her half-sister Diana to be caught.
“Speech”, the book’s second half, goes deeper into ambiguous loss with the experiences of women at war—Leda’s rape, Penelope’s wait for Odysseus, Helen’s infidelity and return, Athena’s anger, Athena’s peace. They are women connected by blood as well as conflict, and my retellings of their myths imagine greater independence, justice questioned and applied, resolutions that sustain the impossibility of solutions.
At times, these essays will explore the series and at times, the individual poems interspersed in each section. Feel free to comment, question, add more information, and post your own poems, stories, reinterpretations in response.
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