from Eidolon (Shearsman, 2015)
i.
It was not me, but a phantom
Whose oath
a variable star
mouldering in the reliquary
is doubt.
I have not unsealed love, its taproot
mouthing blackness
nor seized the fairer woman
to purge from her her song –
This hell-house of primogeniture, bookish
and pale quartering what is also
its own and only rule
this: fire
and the fire that comes from fire.
iv.
I do not insist that we retain the old names
I would know you
ever, light as the seed
vi.
Helen denuded Helen
a place of palor where
silk shrinks around her throat
exits the office
mindless purposeless walking
into and out of
through and over
up and around
into and out of
hands waving mindless purpose
metal tint to everything Stesichoros blinded
for watching her
cross the street
outside and into
the car, horn blaring
v.
U.S. National Interests: Matters of vital interest to the United States to include national security, public safety, national economic security, the safe and reliable functioning of “critical infrastructure,” and the availability of “key resources.” [PPD (Presidential Policy Directive) 20, Top Secret]
It has of course occurred to me that this conversation
is being recorded but what you say
does not anyway belong to me
xi.
Fear testimony
wrought across a battlefield
her ghost
speaks not for itself
from the painful womb
of reincarnation
What roads and what gates
we are always standing in how is it
I am so far again from your gate?
xvii.
In a hotel drawer in 1952 next to King James
a public service message from Conrad Hilton—
“America on its knees:
not beaten there by the hammer & sickle, but FREELY, INTELLIGENTLY, RESPONSIBLY, CONFIDENTLY, POWERFULLY.
America now knows it can destroy communism & win the battle for peace. We need fear nothing or no one… …except GOD.”
Uncle Sam
a pitifully silvered Abe Lincoln
his sinewy hands pray
“World Peace Through International Trade and Travel”
“before the darkness falls”
before “the pestilence”
and “the terror that flies by night”
Old Connie must have been a superstitious man
lone bed in a hive of strangers
turning out every morning
its own wide-eyed Lazarus
Helen misplaced in a room blotting her lipstick
on industrial-quality tissue Helen making small talk
“I am a woman of pleasure” [H.D.]
there was no “sea-enchantment in his eyes”
xix.
Helen of Sparta of Troy in Egypt
of no known address of no known nationality
refugee of no known conflict
stateless without property
disappearing under a veil
of treason
xx.
Her father in his dotage wielded reason like a butcher
As a child his hands on the heavy barrow
he cried open-mouthed
at labouring so young
Father wishing now to retire and divide his kingdom
summoned his daughters to court
posturing at the pulpit
and though he would never take hot irons
to their dissident arms
on the temple doors
(as they do with widows)
his daughters could not
lie.
xxi.
Helen dethroned disinherited Helen at the crossroads of marriage
what love is given to a woman
whose father
is the king of the gods?
Light apple of gold in the grass inedible in its beauty
xxiv.
“what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?” [Freud]
He is convinced always looking at his dinner plate
that somehow he is being cheated
he examines his wife’s face in this way also
what fair arrangement of pork and runner beans
of eyes, nose and mouth
would satisfy the white lie of its presentation?
I’d like to go dancing. I’d like to go on vacation.
He rests his fork and knife watches with a wish her gradual anguish
xxv.
Helen is instrumental
Laws permit me to refuse your advances
although I have eaten the salt from your table
As for your hospitality—
I like it anywhere just fine
so long as I’m coming or going
Helen is not all but
scattered like grain
Vituperate ghost meaning
to greet herself to make room
for herself at the table
to eat a meal of dry meat and vinegar
Helen is not vital
xxvi.
Blue moon
Full Sturgeon Moon
Full Red Moon
Green Corn Moon
Grain Moon
dredged up at midnight over Delos
a colossus in pieces wellspring of phalluses
glittering rock of the amphitheatre
barium and silver
chist and marble
The Switzerland of pre-history of the winding Cyclades
sacred site of unholy sale and savage trade
Las Vegas meets Versailles
in the mouths of lions
Delos meaning “visible”
pulled like a sequined rug into an adjoining room
by the arms of Poseidon
so that Apollo could be born
[his twin sister Artemis an afterthought]
Blotted out moon for the dark purpose of making bastards into gods
Delos like hot white phosphorus
so holy even invading armies asked to be blessed as they passed
xxvii.
Helen polyvalent Helen in a range of other destinies
traded at port the port—its own fate
a cradle of violence a will towards sanctuary pirated Helen
illuminated transcript
of the gossip
round the twin marble fountains of the agora
xxx.
I am not the virgin mother lamenting in the hills above Ephesus
I am the invective injuring these dry plains studded with stone pines
I am the lateral commemorate of war
as the steps up to my hiding place suggest
I am the birther of sacrifice received back into
The earth heavenly rockface
if you knew my real name you would not
use it so lightly
xxxii.
An idea is not a woman but many women
the composite of an idea
Ours is an older civilization re-made
dramatis personae recast by different troupes
rebuilt in the style
of Ionian capitals
and fluted pilasters
put through the ringer of the magisterium
we see the real Helen
is the false we
is the eidolon
xxxv.
Tiresias, in all matters sacred you are ever-present
as the eunuch in rites of fertility
virile only in speech
you cut a waifish glance
at the cameras
escorted before the Assembly
to receive due punishment
demoted with dishonour you announce
your intention to live
as a woman in prison
how fitting to be turned out of the world of men
the andron shuts in
its flash of medals
Tiresius, the scrolls in the library
cannot be burned
by the invading Goths
like papyri endlessly scrolling down and up
invisible electric
For everything its frame to each an accordance with its own laws
Codex suggests an end (a teleology?)
but here we are you say
in the age of immortal beauty
where no more classified secrets
or unrecorded moments
lie in the destruction layer
of pottery and bones
§
from “Afterword: Under Helen’s Breath”
I take my cue, if you like, from Helen’s multiple forms and her indefensible silences and it is my primary interest to reinterpret Helen for a new age, with new concerns and new fearful eidolons of false value and worthless commodity. Just as the tragedians of antiquity transmuted concerns of their day into mythological structures, it is my hope to demonstrate the spectral nature of unrecorded or suppressed narratives, scapegoated for the greater purposes of citizenry, nation-building and global dominance. Of all the great scenes and speeches in tragedies performed in classical antiquity, by far the most poignant and fitting for my purpose is the god Poseidon’s lament just after the fall of Troy, the city of his patronage. Facing a smouldering ruin, Poseidon recounts the story so well known of the city’s fall to an assembled audience (the gods speak! they grieve!) and he details what is to come immediately in the action of the play. The most piteous widows and mothers of Troy’s heroes (Hector, Priam, Paris), who have scratched their faces with their fingernails and torn their hair out of their skulls and are ravaged by madness, are to be divvied up by the senior Greek warriors to become the slaves of the men that killed their husbands, brothers, sons. Poseidon judges the scene thus by saying “now I must leave / Illion the famous, leave my alters. When desolation / Falls like a blight, the day for the worship of gods is past.” Abandoned as these women are and made into the spoils of war, heaped onto ships weighted with Trojan loot, even the gods are forced to turn away. This put me in mind of the oft-quoted line from Derek Walcott’s poem, “Sea Grapes”: “the Classics can console, but not enough.” Can we afford to read the enslavement of women by the noble Greeks so detachedly? Can we model, as we have, a civilization on one that exploits, ensnares and silences women, the more “advanced” it becomes? Where women are traded as prizes and their narratives of “goddess, princess, whore” are determined not by any will or intent but by the wholesale utility of their being apportioned with blame? If the Trojan was not about “the face that launched a thousand ships,” then it was about secure and much sought-after access to trade routes into Asia from the Mediterranean, regional dominance, strategic placement in the path of invading armies from the Middle East, etc., etc., etc. The Illiad begins with Achilles and Agamemnon, fighting on the same side, arguing over a slave girl, Briseis, brought in to comfort men languishing without their wives for a decade, but these men could just as easily be arguing over oilfields, gas pipelines, disputed borders, far-flung and well-appointed military bases in Turkey or the Sinai peninsula. No, the classics cannot console because, like modernity, antiquity is a buffed-up version of heroism, passed through many hands and attributed to many consequences; it is a narratological failure and if it is impersonal, as Woolf writes, then this allows for greater violence to take place within the textual choreography.
[…]
As Jacques Derrida defined it in his now seminal work Archive Fever, “archival violence” is the consigning of texts to an archival unity, a oneness which affirms the unique exemplarity of the author and his work. Derrida wrote, “As soon as there is the One, there is murder, wounding, transformation…. It becomes what it is, the very violence—that it does to itself. Self-determination as violence.” Though in this context Derrida is specifically referring to the “totalizing assemblage” of a culturally constructed people and the violence that is committed by unifying their individual hopes and motives into “One,” his metaphor expands beyond this into the abuse of the power to consign. Who gives Helen her voice and what need unites it into a single constant loathsome creature? Helen is as much the city of Troy as its famed plains and high walls. It might as well be Helen smouldering on the great pyre of defeat, even though she escapes unscathed in the Odyssey and is restored to her husband’s side by the eidolon’s unique guarantee of Helen’s chastity. Worst of all it is Helen’s silence—or the silencing of Helen—by epic, tragic, poetic narratives (save Gorgias and Euripedes) that makes it difficult to forgive. She makes no attempt to author her story and her keeping schtum is a symptom of the archive. After all, we don’t make archives of things that have not fallen somehow into obscurity or are in no need of preserving, archives are guided by the principles of silence—the fear of silence, the substantiating of silence, the insertion forcibly of the place where silence ends and begins, and this is to a large extent artificial. Maybe Helen was giving her reasons, sharing from within her cage of incomparable beauty (and its natural correlative—commodity) her side of the story or her refusal to join in the myth-making of Helen “under her breath”? Poetry relies on the gathering of fragments and is happy to let things lie disconnected but by the box, folder, site of archival consignment in which it exists reluctantly, petulantly, without conclusion. In our modern age, it is easy, perhaps too easy, to imagine the ghost of Helen is ever-present, rising out of the unmourned grave to offer her warning to those of us busied by violence, greed and the causing of needless suffering.