Four Poems

Abstract

Four Poems RACHEL HADAS Troys In medias res, or call it a beginning, here is Helen running away from her dull husband. No, abducted—violation that meant war, ten years of siege and slaughter all for beauty. Then victory or defeat: at last, an end? This war’s stories do not ever end. They peter out, loop back to the beginning. Greek heroes who had failed to win this beauty but sworn to defend whoever married Helen (they must have known he’d lose her), went to war, returning home victorious, yes? No. Because who finally triumphed? No one. Muddled start, murky middle, opaque end. What opened and then stanched the wounds of war? It’s tempting to go back to some beginning or middle. Ten years in, a homesick Helen calls herself “dogface,” damning her own beauty in Homer, whose rendition has a beauty that trumps all other versions we know. The watermark on every page spells Helen. Was she at Troy at the end? Was there a mistake from the beginning? Did Greeks and Trojans fight a ten-year war arion 24.3 winter 2017 for reasons that are themselves a cause of war? Amidst competing story lines, seek beauty in the apple, the contest—back to that beginning— but not in clarity. Each yes has a no. Motives drown in indeterminate endings. Always the name of Helen glimmers balefully. Greek puns on the name of Helen as hell, destruction, disasters of war. The heroine survives all kinds of endings and comes home cloaked in the same radiant beauty. Or did she never leave home? Did a phantom—no, press replay, and we’re back at the beginning. Achilles? Iphigenia? All those others? Beauty? Yes. Beginnings? Oh yes. Endings? Too many. None. Helen. Always a war. four poems 14 In Aulis: One Version We live our lives along the in-between. There is no clear-cut line, there is no border to demarcate the unseen from the seen. Here comes the princess, escorted by the queen. Step down from the chariot, my daughter. We live our lives along the in-between. Iphigenia eagerly jumps down. Let me go ahead and hug my father. Between the unseen and the seen youthful innocence and beauty run. This sleeping baby is her little brother. We live our lives along the in-between. In one of several sequels, having grown into a man, Orestes kills his mother. Between the seen and the unseen, before the scarlet setting of the sun, someone will lead the princess to an altar. We live our lives along the in-between zone that divides the seen from the unseen. Rachel Hadas 15 Cyan Beard of Poseidon, prow of a boat, a wave: changeable, nameless color of the sea which scooped up by the handful has no color but washes earth with its profundity and power, its hue wordless until this Greek word for deep blue. More diluted, blue of sky, of eye? Blue of the blood draining as we die so that cyanosis is a symptom? Default: the stuff we move through, bath of an element sweet and salty too. Call it cyan. Imagine the gradations: blue to blue to blue. Cyan-beard Poseidon dove beneath the cyan waves on which a cyan-prowed boat plowed gaily over the white foam toward home. four poems 16 Old Fortress, Corfu; First Cemetery, Athens A thin moon’s rising in a sky darkening now, still pearly-clear. Bats in the twilight wheel and veer. The stately pile past which we stroll— the British officers’ barracks once— has morphed into the music school (open window; grumble of percussion, and woodwinds squeal) of the same university we visited this morning. In a hall on the other side of town (the lecture topic was translation), the Department of Interpretation is housed in what was an asylum. The quad where inmates took the air, a modest green, is now a square where students sit and smoke and text. One purpose blends into the next. To retrofit seems Corfiot: barracks and madhouse into school; palace into art museum. What changes and what stays the same? Constants: the moon, the bay, the bats. Perched on...