When kore meant girl, young woman, only,
and rape meant carry off to heaven,
I bent to pick some low blue flowers,
that was all, the only violence,
then a hand on the small of my back.
Europa-like, I held to his horns
as one might in a dream,
swimming almost,
floating beside him, awed
by the patient work of the dead,
the undoing of lives,
untangling of rootlets,
recounting of stars,
entwining of the infinitesimal
helixes of being again,
in the underworld, where
our bruised, torn speech goes to forget us
and words remember themselves. The one they call unseen, unseeable
led me down into his mind
to know himself in me.
I wanted to tell him,
want to tell you,
how I, the one called unsaid,
unspeakable, found I could speak,
an Eve or Mary, all the Eurydices
carried away, girl ecstatics, seers
of thresholds everywhere, transgressive
knowers of speckled creatures,
unwritten laws of the grain,
rain makers, bringers and threshers,
bearers of apples, bearers
of words hard to bear. Where does the scent of violets go?
Every poem a rebirth, a mystery.
He was not a monster,
I was not a child. So beautiful are the words of Hades,
Plato says in Cratylus,
even the Sirens are overcome.
He translated violets,
even their fragrance,
the cries of gulls and lovers
from memory, islands and rivers,
all for the striving dead. Plato said Hades refuses bodies,
consorting only with souls.
Like all lovers, we loved unwisely,
fluently resurrecting ourselves
in the lambent dark,
leaving the world to fend for itself,
one seed was enough to bind us. Only love can bear love,
bind itself, unbind
and sacrifice itself,
dispel the fear of death.
All the rites teach only this. |