The Greek Gods

Look: the trees are not themselves
today: the boughs / the needles /
the cons do not bend to slap me.
Cattails, in lake Como of seaweed:
of rainbowed fish and blue colour
that is not really blue. I know that.
The lake looks like that—that blue
thistle—because of the wavelength
of the reflecting light. It is not
because of the sky or the Greek
Gods who, in ancient times, drank
from chalices and—fed—cupped,
loosened to the earth the white
wine we know, have known,
all this time, as rain and more rain,
that water we drink from taps
the way bees drink nectar.
We have known and—have imagined.
How wrong we were.

On Icarus

Icarus the meteor, wing and wax

the scattered rocks. Remember, there

is only this much and this

much of wax today; if from

him, then from what wax held,

loosened over the Aegean Sea

his wings.


No one today will wax

a stone floor, if of limestone,

of granite, if of marble etc.,

they will leave it, keep the stone

colour: like lime, hive, like the coyote’s

fur-like cargo. Nor will many remember

Daedalus and his son who in crossing,

yes, a calm sea, sea-plunged from heat.

There was a splash, and the plowers

continued to plow.



/



Icarus is the sunlight, wax and wing
the warmth, the painted flesh
to be cut apart. Why did he fall
if his wings were by wax fastened?
What wax we use today, is it from him,
that sea-plummet; is it what was left:
why we can wax the floor
and zeal the letter?

On Leda and the Swan

i. Leda: introduction



Below you below it, this is how she parades on each heat-
crippled field dappled not in shadow, but in sun:
as if a swan, whose wings ascend,
descend,

come away and away in ledaean white,
her feet going, oh how her feet goes
brush/ fail brush/fail in the wind.



ii. Zeus: watching


You watch her from above, already having decided
how fair a swan-form would be. (How lovely still
she is.) What she is, who she is, what does that matter
before seduction?


iii. Leda and the Swan: yearning


Here, on all-dappled field, she in unmoving as a sound
(can it be: wings unbroken, soft, in the air?) severs
the silence. She looks up, she tilts her head to the sky.
How she stare
at you in swan-form, all-white descending

from sky and from them, from all things expected,
half-expected. Part of your point to find,

to damp on someone else your hunger.

How her body shake when you land beside her.