From the Headland at Cumae

People expected that the evil would finally drain away.
—Aleksander Wat, My Century

Faded and baked here to a tawny grit,

spills of blood and seed from humanity

called from it for its crimes against mute earth

gully in footpaths, dribble down to the sea,

payment now and forever drawn from birth

through flesh’s sunny darkness. Light yeasts in it.

And if I find the slope to crumbled temples

of that light’s god dragging at me through heat,

shallow degrees of slant up to remnant stone,

then something more than burnt air, or the repeat

of weight known as time, pulls heavily in this zone,

something the bone brings, terrible through simple.

Phoibos, slayer at distances with shock,

sower of plague and arrower of healing,

tension of bright-dark beyond spanning, love

will not quite cast out evil while revealing

your fissionables. The raven was your dove.

Heavy isotopes hum with crickets in rock.

Neither woman nor man, my driver laughed

when his lights torched writhings down the far shoulder,

cross-dresser in the night beyond Naples, huge,

sinuous, crooning as we shot past. Life seems older

in its variant forms, drawn by the centrifuge

to the rim and swinging, swayed in time’s dream uncalfed.

For the vast thrower, shafter of quivering force,

sex was filigree in whoever served.

Pythoness, yes, wombed keeper of those coils

in the wet cellar where tongue darted and swerved.

But her own throat when it swelled with voice knew toils

past a man’s strength, torqued bulging from the source.

And that young man fitted with bone and thong

and membrane from his withers by his father

the maze molder, when he climbed into flame

itself in the high nucleus, dripped as slather

down the sky’s maw. Union there, with an aim

at the center, crisped on a central soundless gong,

sizzling from his overreach extended

back on itself and down, the soundless hurry

of the sea far below minutely riven,

trembling in place, diamonds in blue slurry

nowhere disturbed yet flecking everywhere, driven—

all this boy’s cry endlessly thin, suspended.

The sybil when at last her throat disgorged

its burdens rumbled like a pawing bull,

or the bull-fiend on Krete, and shrilly warbled.

Birds ride the bull’s hump in stone graphs, that full

barbarity at poise piercing now the garbled

clang of Ikaros, over us tensile and forged.

This is the crumbling whistle of shells and frags

in their close arc. Philosophy gets precise

when it turns practical. This in our background whir.

Archimedes, old Fermi in your eyes,

naked, ecstatic with theorems that assure

conclusion, your city falls, your hacked flesh sags.

There was a sprig which, if you bore it in hand

on landing here, your pilot drowned and your herald

crushed in the surf, would bend and seem to listen—

there was a branch that trailed her voice through imperiled

corridors to throats of the dead, and glistened,

then brought you back to your breath near shining sand.

And there was pelt from the solar scavenger,

its blond mane tossing with your workings, turning

catastrophe to triumph, lion crud

strewn now on waves, coat of the charger burning

obsidian cobalt platinum and mud

in craters of the shaker and avenger.

Eroded skull of this squat promontory,

nubbled shrine over cave by surf hypnotized

before deeps enameled with fire’s mosaic,

you are the structure lucid though pulverized

behind the logics, and the omens prosaic

in their spelling out, and the blaze of story.

Give me your light! I am the darkened thing

seeking it. Give me your fire and your cry!

But hood me from sulfurs she inhaled when she twisted

over the fissure, give me your hand from the sky

we have fallen into. Give, yes, what you insisted

she utter, rasped uncoilings of your spring!

And then release me to the animal

shy of speech yet steady in ecstasies,

your cousin the outsider’s gaze through life,

the drink of it down, and finally mind as frieze

eternally in metamorphic strife

released, sea stone and cloud infinitely small.

And there the migrant and his wanderers

may find the new land, and their future wars

may roll, exhausted in hissing foam, to sink

over the fish spines, and the blunderers

of fulfillment stare at samsaric wink

of ocean, stare and find sleep that dissolves the curse.

Source: M and other poems (TriQuarterly Books, 1996)