Thursday, 23 June 2016

Danaë



They say the sun is a hole in the sky,
and we are spared the furnace it reveals
only by the whim and contrivance of the gods
who have enclosed us in this dark space.
They have punctured the firmament with stars,
pierced the membrane they wrapped around us,
to remind us of their world beyond the upper air.  

We pitch our tent and find its canvass torn:
its tatters dance in desert storms,
and light reveals the defects in its weave
which the stars unpick with their fingers
insistently probing the gauzy fabric of night
until eventually everything unravels and is lost
in the blast of blistering sand.  

The moon is gentler. For her we rest
captive in cool shadows at the bottom of a well.
She slides the lid off from time to time
to routinely observe her captives with sad pleasure
through the shifting aperture and interval of her movements,
sliding the lid back over again, perhaps pausing briefly,  
peering one last time through a thin crescent of light,
before eclipsing us in darkness. 

Man wanders,
and raises his tent in the ruins of a temple.
He cannot tell the shelter and the sky apart in the storm.
He starves and begs surrounded by wealth he cannot understand
destitute among riches he can never receive.
He arms his camp against the night with stories
and trembles and treats the world like firewood
to burn and brandish in fear and anger at the dark.

Working from first principles
I arrive at the inevitable conclusion
that working from first principles is futile,
the last implicit in the first.
There is no freedom in this equation.
Emptiness is all there is.
So I empty myself,
pour out every urge and inclination on the rocks,
like the wine dark sea,
and withdraw forever to perfect vacancy,
consenting to imprisonment by Acrisius
in his impenetrable bronze citadel.




It's featureless walls are welded to the cliff-top,
and stretch into the clouds, standing sentry
on a vertiginous isle surrounded on all sides by sea
plunging into an unfathomable abyss.
The isle emerges from the deepest trench
the earth's upheavals can wrench open.
Its roots extend to the earth's core.
He has built his tower on a volcano,
an obscene chimney that delivers
the earth's innards up its throat
directly into the heavens through its blasphemous pore
that mimics and mocks the work of the gods,
scorning the strata and debris of a geography of litter
in which Man gropes and despairs,
the soil a shambles, the air thickening with fumes
over a seething sea, the world a ruin,
turmoil from which I am now sequestered,
the memory of life locked up in a chamber
on top of a narrow and precipitous pillar.

But why not let a tyrant's paranoia
be the demiurge of my thoughts and dreams
and roll up my experiences within the sleeve
of this single slim cylinder of bronze?
We all limit and conceal ourselves
to allow ourselves to seem
the person others imagine we are,
and all substance itself is a veil
with which the gods themselves hide their absence,
only occasionally violating it to cherry-pick
our miniscule miseries for their amusement.
It is only in the deliberate subtlety of fiction,
the massage and manipulation of falsehood,
that their deception is foiled
and the truth can be revealed
by the right combination
of the available lies: it is a trick
the shuffling of lies in stories can reveal
and we are the sleight by which
the god’s hand is concealed.


 
That's my story.
Rape, infanticide, cannibalism ... all the good stuff.
But it must be told by others:
everything you hear me say is an accident,
an unintentional interruption of my silence,
a spillage from a vessel I try to keep perfectly still
since every moment is as infinite
as the eternity it ends.
Let these moments be perfect
or let them not occur at all.   
One cannot survive exposure to divinity.
One endures its scalding intensity
only as long as it takes to know the end of time has come.
If glimpsed in peripheral vision, perhaps,
it assumes a lasting shape, a chimerical terror ,
as monstrous myths manoeuvre in and out
of the corner of the eye,


but those who surrender and submit
to the ultimate overthrow of the self
in motherhood,
abandoning their bodies to run the risk
of spouting bull-headed Asterion from their womb,
like Pasiphae, or like Leda,
to win the fate of hatching Helen,
can receive it, can bear witness to divinity,
and it is seen shimmering through half shut eyes
like liquid metal,
as though our tawdry threadbare sky
was transformed to gold, fracturing and flaking,
and descending like liquid autumn
as the god-trodden body is lost
to a god-disgorged seed
as anonymous as the future it makes
forced on it by a god
whose love would be considered promiscuous
were it not perfect


This knowledge has a price:
this belly is not made of bronze,
and the world is now a desert of brine
on which I am cast adrift,
my progeny attached to my breast,
the son predicted in a prophecy
whose utterance was forbidden,
a promise of flesh in an age of metal.




We pass from one amniosis to the next,
from my inner ocean which birth has delimited
within the world’s horizons, to this other amniosis,
with a moment’s pain to mark the passing
and now he sleeps again,
curled up like a little nut within this bark
beneath the crystal caul of night,
a captive of the stars,
and I have become infinite to him,
and he has become the afterlife to me 
and all that came before us.

From the first, ancient lipid membrane,
adhering to some small defect on the surface of a stone
on the slopes of an underwater volcano long ago,
drawn like a curtain to protect and conceal fugitive molecules
dancing in secret, microscopic innovation,
learning how to tirelessly replicate their steps,
winding each other up in their untimely embrace,
coiled around each other in helical intimacy
before being sent in plumes of life billowing out
into the eternal seas from a nursery of hot young rocks,

from that first eruption of living mud
to the confluence of blood in my baby's veins,
seeping through the pages of history,
cascading from the massacre of ancestors,
the lessons of their failures tumbling through chemical chronicles
bleeding through the gaps between the words
while their remains lie mutilated by the grave’s slow worm-churn,
their blood inundating him, setting the sea
on which he starts his very own ripple with a fingertip
red with fire in my darkening mind
as all these pasts coincide and coalesce in him now,

he is the afterlife.
From that once celebrated antecedent,
whose exploits now unravel in obscurity,
to the most unremarkable organism
that is now no more than a drop of blood
in the ocean of time on which we drift,
he is the afterlife,

and he is mine,
for we are bound together in blood
and as I wade each day through red darkness
I will look back and observe my descendants on the shore
where they have already taken their place, as I take mine,
beyond the banks and shoals of time,
and together we watch the stars shine
at midday in the midst of this eternal mind,

and I will protect him against his father,
and I will wear snakes for hair if I must,
and I will cite my own autochthony
to over-rule all judgements against him,
and his children will only hear lies about me,
and I will become everything I hate to save him, 
and I will give him my bones to beat me with,
and I know he is formed from shimmering metal
and not windfall seed, and I will gladly die
if my obscurity will give him life.


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