Mythology Archives

nevermore

in neverland: a retrospective

Nevermore near Never-Never Land had waited, abiding, until Time was done. Before she was Nevermore she was Space and she was here, tasting like soil & salt, iron & leaf, fruit & flesh.

No, she insisted, she did not need another distant photo of herself framed with an airy sentiment in glass. But Time and his countrymen either did not hear or did not care. She shrugged, sighed.

Before she was called Nevermore by the keepers of the Neverlands, she had been an endless, renewing enough: of water, bird, breath, wave, weed, gale, flame, and rain––wanting only to be tended, absorbed, heard, caught, ridden, warmed into, and met with open hands.

The Neverlanders thought instead to take and stake her, carving their names, instead projecting upon her the warped and boundless entropies of their endlessly whirring heads, as if to spin away from gravity herself where she palmed the souls of them at their feet.

Sigh again, winds, for those who can imagine no space greater than the ones between their ever-stopped ears, that neglect who is before them ever, in favor of Somedays and One Days and Next Times, claiming to Finally See.

––Until Nevermore, at the end of their Time, stopped hoping they would ever get around to the real work of tending, preoccupied as they were with their confidence and confidences.

She would retreat beneath the soils of herself again, fold her wet through running sands, run her rivers underground. Time went up and out––away, away––storming plans for monuments to legacies.

Sigh again, no longer asking for a hand to come for the tending, that wave now whisper, stay, to meet at last the rock of those waiting shores, and carve another layer smoother ––in.

Space lets go

they love their lines, don’t they, love?

they love their lines,
don’t they, love?

like, here body,
there mind &
soul on another
level still but
here’s what i
know, even the
space of no matter
has substance &
pretending some
other way is a runaway
cart horseless after
its fool self while
i the once upon a
river here been
wet and heavy
until a green
scar in scorched
earth & once
no longer moving
find cause
to remember
to weep for
what
mass was
once in me
for carrying
only
to find its
waters
gone come
back to me
Time i am
calling you
now
cross them

burn

a meeting with the emperor

please don’t put the new fortress there, said the old woman to the emperor. remember what happened to the last one?

he picked her up, spun her around, smiled. he sang a happy song about self-love.

it’s going to burn, she said. she lived in a tiny hut near the well. she was calm and very polite. she made no mention of his nakedness.

you are so wise! he said, laughing, and your eyes! wow, are those wells, too?

then he assured her not to worry. he had the best of intentions and these were the opposite of burning. all good! he sang, spinning off.

later, when the blaze ate the hillside and everyone on it, including the old woman’s hut, he cried, SEND SOMEONE! HELP!

o god, he whispered, after the shouting.

but by the point, even the helicopters had to retreat. the woman near the well was silent.

waste

an everyday tragedy

i watched the small gods of the would-be hero’s mirror world tie him down to be devoured. he took it for a feast in his honor.

terrified of being, he chained himself to the mountain he confused for his own image and became the vulture to eat his own flesh every night. he never thought to imagine a fire there for the taking. he had to see himself its maker. he had to steal.

he thought he was the sun and the rain, the harvest and the shade, but we knew him as the storm, and its wreck. when asked why, he said only “I….” and blew wind.

knowing was outside him, looking on, but knocked too soon. as often happens when a would be hearer lives in the maze of his mirror-world, the answer came too late.

one beginning

an original affirmation

Take it, I said again, and gave
this body to mirror you an origin
in chorus of looping yessss, as
susurrations waving shores
to where they waited, wanting
words to answer but I had only
one. It was yes and child
yes again, and there they
were yes child and here,
meaning all of it.

point being

in the after

The point, if there is one, is to emerge. Or else, to acknowledge the emergence of something. It is possible these acts are synonymous, or that one lives inside the other. Does it matter which holds which? Likely not. Whichever it is, it won’t be fitting into that familiar template of the hero myth––having tried this one, and found it lacking, possibly deadly.

The Sea of Men

Shapes, shifting

In one account, she is the wine-dark carrier of iron-laden sons to strange shores of inscrutable speech. Often, she swallows them whole. In another, she is moved by strong wind through the night to become a wall. Then she falls and swallows them whole.

The yet-to-be swallowed write of dreaded creatures in her waters, of her treacherous subtlety, and speculate that what she is keeping from them is surely a clue to their deaths.

When they get like this, she sighs another tide and wonders with a bright bloom of red, if any of these can remember beyond the tales of monsters and bewitchers, how once she beheld him from below where he stood, looking, and offered back to him the shine of his own face.

Immortal City

Turning wheel

I swear it was an angel, said the captive near the end
who said that she said to him, this:

Are you thirsty, stranger? Has the road been long?
Come closer. Let me whisper of what is just beyond that bend.

They say there is a city of immortals somewhere, in celebration.
Who tells. Whose memory obeys command to speak.

What river, what other do you seek. All novelty, all knowledge, all oblivion.
Whose end, whose world. What immortality, and when.

Who is fluent in the customs of that place.
Who deserts before the spoiling.

Whose mother, what monsters, whose lips at that breast.
Who dazzled in what rays of that sun, when first.

Who from those shallow graves emerges to slake what thirst.
Whose prayer. What ear and when.

What ladder, whose wall, to what courtyard.
When joy, whose patience at the gates.

Where is the river that gives immortality and whose blood is in it,
and where is the empty canal that takes it away.

Whose will on what horse.
What labyrinth. Whose center. What well.

Considering Defilement

To sanctify or desecrate.

That meeting space, love, had once been consecrated by our belief in what it was. This is what it means, to sanctify. This power is shared. To make holy. And so, as it turns out, is the reverse. To take the sacred and use it thoughtlessly, out of mind, like any old tool. A resource ready for the taking. Of course, it always is, and any fool may come. But that flame will only continue through active attention. Its desecration is so often a quiet violence. But the effect is total. There you had been, once. Then you were not.

Among Kings and Queens

Along the fortress walls

The game prize glowed with standard marble and a cartoon cupid peeped out to double the flames. An abundance of jewels decorated the assembly, the idea to catch more light, and more, to rise and rise to meet its source.

It is not difficult to make a fetish of fearing dark, where those uncrowned and slippery forms tend to wind along walls as if to challenge their veracity, as if to challenge certain given truths, the self-evidence of status. Or of your life.

That you see and know. That you remember what was. That what now shall be done is your will. That time is for your hurry, food for your teeth, your tongue, that these pills will do for fixing what ailments may come. That the night you feared might only be good where you wished it so when you went around saying good night and watching the walls.