Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Anchises to Aphrodite
ANCHISES TO APHRODITE
“You are a different woman after this midnight.”
“You were only five foot, two
when you jerked back
The top of the two egg-yellow sheets
covering this eider-down mattress.”
“I have said you looked like a goddess,
and I named several,
You know Artemis, Athena, etc.;
but then I was only using a trope, speaking
figuratively as if from a rhetoric book,
but now, I believe when I use such endearments
now the endearments are literal.”
“Now you are as large as a Swede that Felleni
exaggerated in a poster placed in the middle
of a city.”
“Your blonde hair brushes off the cobwebs
on the ceiling.”
“It is proverbial wisdom that when a mortal
such as a Trojan army officer as I am
has sex with a goddess, the consequence
upsets the Greek myth moral sytem.
The role of dominance had been reversed,
And I will suffer for upsetting
a pre-established order.
I don’t want to suffer,
Be a cripple the rest of my life,
Or in the future with a mortal wife
have children that are born blind.
Aphrodite, have mercy,
Have mercy,
Let me live a normal life to a normal old age.
But let me not suffer all my life,
let my offsprings have to suffer
because I had this one short moment
of supreme happiness.
I beg you, Aphrodite, have mercy.”
Aphrodite said nothing,
but became five feet, two again
And left the room, laughing.
Duane Locke
Posted over on Badosa
This poem spoke to me today. I was surfing this morning, looking for things to include in a lesson on The Legends of Ancient Rome. I was particularly musing on how Troy was such a pivotal moment in the mythological and legendary history of the Mediterranean, and how Aphrodite was the cause of so much grief and pain in that history.
ReplyDelete