Category: Mythology

The Making of Myths

Of the stuff of facts.

How crystal on one side, flame on another: one self-organizing, the other of order from noise. How both rivet the gaze. How depth must be hidden on the surface. Why what is hidden is often of no interest. Except when one is looking for something merely possible. Except where merely possible looms a vast atmosphere to contain whole cosmos, where the opus has no definitive form and is instead a series of attempts to reach it. What monster in the waves before the days of recorded history waits beneath the surface beyond detection, to re-emerge as who.

Anticlea

In the underworld.

He came here looking for the blind prophet. Through a hole he came down from the living, from his way by which he and the ways of his men were lost, again. Not to admit any wrong, not to admit the penance due those who anger the gods, but I knew my son. His stubborn stance. I was there with the other dead mothers and our stance was reaching from where we waited below the land of the living beneath where they burned the false claims they would make in slaying other sons––and our daughters, too, in the name of their stakes and how high they made them, where the air thinned. I knew my son and I saw his desperation in that heat. See me, I called to him. He looked up and I saw it on his face. Mother, he said. 

He still knew the word. Yes, I said. Now go, I said to him, from this fire while you still live.  

It was too hot and too loud for him to hear more though I meant to remind him back to the life he knew before he knew to wave flags above the graves of other mothers. Where he was barefoot and fed before he thought to scorch the land he meant to take.  To add, take this body, son, that I gave you, and return it to the living earth.

***

Anticlea is the mother of Odysseus, who encounters her son in the underworld where he has come to find the blind prophet, Tiresias, to tell him the way back home. 

Histories in Gold

Records of conquest.

Once, amid covenant of salt and lamps to burn every evening through quiet, into dark, one had the idea to cut the groves. He suggested this to others. He knew what vanities to stoke, whose appetites were violent enough to take pleasure in the raid, as though doing so would bring a final calm, an end to the torment of those despairs and passions that would strike at midday and midnight. 

But what followed were empty pleasures, and now these hungers were of greater volume. From there, they built the walled cities and armies of men to protect them, and these grew notions of valor that were married to the work of weapons and attendant armors, of seizing and attendant claims, might and its supporting rights. With these, they enacted many plunders; called these Victory, claimed them Saving, recorded as the Project of Civilization. 

There was much claiming in those days, of the spoils of war. Over time it became unfashionable to call out the spoils; stating the obvious was something only a dullard would do. But the claim of the owners was birthed in violence when they ran off with the sheep, and when the salt loses its flavor over time, who remembers those first trees?

Babies in Boomland

Riding fault lines.

Consider the weight of water after rains against fault lines and the weight of our collected lives, how it takes not so many earthquake memories to learn that it is a matter of time until the next one, but this is the land of billboards training the witness into submission to a hunger that drives on to speed out branching interstate miles into state route highways flying toward the next bite, flesh riding the wind of the last win into the next investment cheered by a chorus calling Act Fast, Act Now, Don’t Miss. Out. It’s coming, they told us, the screens our suns in constant revolution around us, projecting new worlds of pleasure and war. Something rumbled and we caught each other’s eyes, looking up. What is that? one of us asked, and the voice of an invisible speaker said Now.

In Stations

Before the last stop.

We would feel it at the edges of our breaths, something shining we imagined could launch us. Into some finitude and with open hands waiting at the end of the long tunnel at the top of the stairs after the last stop. But it wasn’t like that. When it came, we were still in the station, packed and––as we described ourselves so often, then––ready to go. Then, an announcement over the speakers in the lobby. But there is no world but this one. Where did we think? A voice demanded. We were going.

To Break a Wall

Notes from Crete.

There is a certain pitch to plans made in prison, not

like the half-baked dreams of anywhere else. The wings

as real as the wax, and the sun, the son the sum of the

parts you gave, dreaming him. There are flowered

children elsewhere in a field that never knew walls

except on set and you cannot blame them for the

glow of their faces how they won’t age it takes

absorption to do that but to these it’s all water

rolling, the waves        the waves        the duck’s

back                all joy              and fun            except

for the highlights        the chase scenes         so

good for ratings          so good for saying       watch

look what I did. No sense explaining to the scions

of such gentle suns how yours will kill you, quick.

Offer anyway what you have of shelter and an

ear to the running stream of tears. They roll

off the backs of them              stop looking for

logic    they roll because        those backs are

the backs of                the sons of the sun, 

o child

how I wish                    to pretend.

The Sisters

In the late days of long wars.

We wanted to mend, so kept company with our mothers’ ghosts. Our yesterdays were wounded and came to us until every bed was full. 

O muse. Your song was bleeding out. 

We brought cloths and went to you. We wrapped you tight and held against the flow. It entered then.

We are still, holding. 

Flight and Son

For want of wings.

Before the feathers fell, a morning star and six moons gone. But still, the golden chains, the prayer. O bird in one hand. May you not be killed by the stone in the other. But the exile was long and the cliff just high enough to launch himself home, son of suns, into light. And the light, in recognition, danced to see him until it took him back. 

***

Inspired by the story of Icarus.

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