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.