Hellenic Park

I

 

the first one that we made

was so the first one that we made was

from the amber dactyle was so human

but then she raised her was you’d never think we stole her

from the amber necklace where you’d never

where her dactyle hid so human you’d

her eyes so human you’d never think my

but then she raised her eyes my god

and spoke

 

My name is Clytemnestre, daughter of

Immortal Leda, and Tyndarus the old,

And by these steps where I’ve undone my eyes

I come to lay Apollo’s virgin lyre:

 

II

 

Cassandra warned me not to make her but I made her.

Warned me about her warnings, too, which I

still can’t believe that I did not believe.

She dressed in black, touched her glasses, did the maths

and told me that Oedipus Rex would crash out of his precinct,

lumber and howl, in rage

because, you know, he cannot see you.

 

Odysseus was the first to flee the island,

built a ship out of shampoo bottles and sailed

in a flourish of Nereids, and the rest followed.

Now they are loose: Helen in sunglasses and a foulard,

the femme fatale I never should have made,

got the captain to ship her off (then kill himself, poor sod),

Perseus with the Medusa’s head in a rucksack, Dedalus

with blu tack wings and Hercules who swam

I think to California. Should anyone find this recording,

know that this is how it all started.

If you hear them singing, run.

 

III

 

the fat guy tried to steal the originals

and sell them to Oxford or Yale, maybe Penguins – who knows.

The joke’s on him. He never knew our amber

was fragmentary, more stutter than hymn:

we’d filled the gaps the only way we could, with strands

from English metre, Alexandrines, some Pope and Byron,

the Italian Romantics, Christian allegorists,

and when all else failed, lots of Latin.

I spoke with Phaedra first and knew the metal

burning in her veins was only plated tin,

Hyperion’s flowers made of plastic,

I could not find one – one – whose blood had not

been watered down in later floods, sifted

through 4000 years of lies, prayers, love letters,

dialects, excuses, promises, lies, orations,

lies, lies, lies.

 

when the fat guy crashed across that fence

a harp took hold of him, paralysed him,

undid in song his glasses, his belly, his greed

had him and raised him from the mud and didn’t let him go

till he was part of the song himself.

He never even recognised Rilke’s German,

and died, happy, mumbling I’m a man

who heard the song of Orpheus

 

IV

 

I never cloned the right word for this, never.

It must have passed as a drop in the cataracts

of years and myths, and who’s to find it now?

Names, names, it’s like watching movie credits

that never reach the bottom of the dark.

And yet not one of them could say it.

I don’t mind dying, it’s that type of failure

nobody can transcend, but why can’t I find

my own word, the word to say myself

and keep it safe and buried in the rock?

And what kind of a goddess are you, history,

that after all these sacrifices you exact

you’ll only ever tell your version, leave us mute?

This, and not the eagle, flays Prometheus:

his version was switched over with Pandora’s.

In this bunker, ancient birds of prey besiege me too.

The archaeologist and the children are lost somewhere

in the labyrinth, the mathematician lies dying

from the tip of Hector’s spear.

Someday I will return. I have bled

my code in a jar and spared you the effort.