Echo, and: Letter, and: Sea Daffodils

Abstract

Echo, and: Letter, and: Sea Daffodils A. E. Stallings (bio) Echo What tales we tell what tales What ails? About the girls gone quiet Yet The story-telling ones once Who entertained the heart art Till suddenly they ceased. eased What makes the tongue inert? hurt. What turns the voice to swords Words, Cutting the throat? What takes aches, The name from the alibi I Of the body? We were stern: turn Stories, we said, are lies, ice, We told her, don’t repeat them. eat them. [End Page 360] Letter Daughter, yours is a different alphabet,For every word I know, you know another.You are only half mine, and halfA language hard to learn. In AmericaWhen I point out geese winging overhead,A wedge aimed like an arrow out of winter,I say, look, they are flying in a V —The metaphor so old it’s lost its spellAlthough it’s new to you. And yet you readThe white page of the sky your own way.“Maybe,” you say, “a V that’s upside down,“Or a Lambda,” adding, for me, “A Greek L.” [End Page 361] Sea Daffodils Pancratium maritimum for A. M. How the tattooed day-trippers nearly trampled them like flotsam, not blossoms,How it was illegal to pick them on Santorini, yet matrons gathered bouquets of them to their black-clad bosoms. How beside the seaside parking lot, in a moon-bleached waste,They seem both dissolute and chaste. How they danced in bridal white on the beach, as awaiting the sacrificeThat will unbridle the snorting winds, if it suffice. How briefer than youth they are, more fragile than plighted troth,And only pollinated by the hawk moth, The dithering moth that only flies when the winds are nearly becalmed.How in winter they turn inward, self-embalmed In their papery layers of onion-stingy bulbs, jar-like, Canopic.How older than any epic. How they meadow the edges of islands when they make landShuttling their ropey roots through the weft of unraveling sand. [End Page 362] How (you’ve said I’ve said), English daffodils misspellArchaic and infernal asphodel How once their tattered banners of surrender have been furled,They hunker from the world To bristle again like the wan shades of warriors sprung out of battle,How their seedpods, makeshift sistrums, rattle With seeds like black dice, like flinders of volcanic glass,But light as Styrofoam or pumice To float out and deploySwart as the hollow hulls that sailed for Troy, Among the trackless sea-roads, bobbing in the wavesLike jettisoned life jackets, then planted in shallow graves Above which the wind vowels, circumflexed, Erasmian.How this perfume, neither tuberose nor jasmine Has shipwrecked here in their alabaster chalicesSuch longueurs from the faded frescoes of Minoan palaces. [End Page 363] A. E. Stallings A. E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. She has recently published a new verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days (Penguin Classics), and a new collection of poetry, Like (with FSG). Copyright © 2019 The University of the South