BOOK 5, Part 3: Calypso
Read
To Eros
By Alfonsina Storni
I caught you by the neck
on the shore of the sea, while you shot
arrows from your quiver to wound me
and on the ground I saw your flowered crown.
I disemboweled your stomach like a doll's
and examined your deceitful wheels,
and deeply hidden in your golden pulleys
I found a trapdoor that said: sex.
On the beach I held you, now a sad heap,
up to the sun, accomplice of your deeds,
before a chorus of frightened sirens.
Your deceitful godmother, the moon
was climbing through the crest of the dawn,
and I threw you into the mouth of the waves.
Go to site to read in its entirety.
By Alfonsina Storni
I caught you by the neck
on the shore of the sea, while you shot
arrows from your quiver to wound me
and on the ground I saw your flowered crown.
I disemboweled your stomach like a doll's
and examined your deceitful wheels,
and deeply hidden in your golden pulleys
I found a trapdoor that said: sex.
On the beach I held you, now a sad heap,
up to the sun, accomplice of your deeds,
before a chorus of frightened sirens.
Your deceitful godmother, the moon
was climbing through the crest of the dawn,
and I threw you into the mouth of the waves.
Go to site to read in its entirety.
Read
When Calypso met Sappho
A free verse poem by R.M. Carter
She was half-drowned
after throwing herself off the cliffs
into the waters surrounding the Isle of Lesbos,
a mythical land I could never reach
even with the stride of a Titan.
Lungs still filled with liquid cries to Poseidon,
my dolphins found her on a bed of sea moss,
foreign oils lost to the ocean,
carried her on their silver backs
to Ogygia, my paradise prison.
I laid her onto the glinting sand
away from the tide that reached out to reclaim her.
A poets’ laurel wreath rusted copper flakes
onto skin, smooth as a marble statue
that glittered in the reflection of Zeus’s simmering golden orb.
That night at dusk,
the king of the gods lowered his eternal glare to my father in the West.
She reclined her head onto my eager lap,
told me of her love rejected by Phaon.
And I mourned my Odysseus,
slagged off that bitch Penelope
and cursed family ties
unbreakable as Clotho’s fated threads.
She guided my tear-stained hands on the lyre,
my mentor taught me
how to pluck the strings of my heart-harp anew.
In time I had long ago ceased to count,
I began to see my confinement with fresh eyes.
The sea breeze that had flayed, lashed and stung my bronze skin,
now felt gentle as honey.
We would walk naked along the shore
our voices entwined, alluring as sirens,
oh how we captivated each other to that island.
My lyricist composed songs just for me,
I crowned her the tenth muse then and there
and swore that I could die by just listening to them.
She talked of her girls back at home,
and it struck me how similar we were,
both doomed to love mortals who couldn’t stay.
Whilst she composed wedding songs,
I collected fragments of my heart amongst the seashells.
After seven years of heavenly bliss
I tied the raft to a pod’s fins,
prepared bread and wine for the voyage,
but not before I begged her to nevermore write words of matrimony,
to remain with me, as my immortal wife.
Warned that my island could never again be found,
that the moment she was gone from my sight
she would be long dead.
But I let her go,
my beloved Sappho.
Aphrodite appeared beside me as I watched her sail away,
dolphins soaring over the waves like the cupids’ bow of Sappho’s lips,
my heart following her further than the rest of me ever could.
The deathless daughter of Zeus told me
‘not to worry sweetie,
for in this battle I’ll forever be at your side.’
Go to site to read in its entirety.
A free verse poem by R.M. Carter
She was half-drowned
after throwing herself off the cliffs
into the waters surrounding the Isle of Lesbos,
a mythical land I could never reach
even with the stride of a Titan.
Lungs still filled with liquid cries to Poseidon,
my dolphins found her on a bed of sea moss,
foreign oils lost to the ocean,
carried her on their silver backs
to Ogygia, my paradise prison.
I laid her onto the glinting sand
away from the tide that reached out to reclaim her.
A poets’ laurel wreath rusted copper flakes
onto skin, smooth as a marble statue
that glittered in the reflection of Zeus’s simmering golden orb.
That night at dusk,
the king of the gods lowered his eternal glare to my father in the West.
She reclined her head onto my eager lap,
told me of her love rejected by Phaon.
And I mourned my Odysseus,
slagged off that bitch Penelope
and cursed family ties
unbreakable as Clotho’s fated threads.
She guided my tear-stained hands on the lyre,
my mentor taught me
how to pluck the strings of my heart-harp anew.
In time I had long ago ceased to count,
I began to see my confinement with fresh eyes.
The sea breeze that had flayed, lashed and stung my bronze skin,
now felt gentle as honey.
We would walk naked along the shore
our voices entwined, alluring as sirens,
oh how we captivated each other to that island.
My lyricist composed songs just for me,
I crowned her the tenth muse then and there
and swore that I could die by just listening to them.
She talked of her girls back at home,
and it struck me how similar we were,
both doomed to love mortals who couldn’t stay.
Whilst she composed wedding songs,
I collected fragments of my heart amongst the seashells.
After seven years of heavenly bliss
I tied the raft to a pod’s fins,
prepared bread and wine for the voyage,
but not before I begged her to nevermore write words of matrimony,
to remain with me, as my immortal wife.
Warned that my island could never again be found,
that the moment she was gone from my sight
she would be long dead.
But I let her go,
my beloved Sappho.
Aphrodite appeared beside me as I watched her sail away,
dolphins soaring over the waves like the cupids’ bow of Sappho’s lips,
my heart following her further than the rest of me ever could.
The deathless daughter of Zeus told me
‘not to worry sweetie,
for in this battle I’ll forever be at your side.’
Go to site to read in its entirety.
Video
La Figlia Che Piange (The Weeping Girl)
by T. S. Eliot
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair --
Lean on a garden urn --
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair --
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise --
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and a shake of the hand.
She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight, and the noon's repose.
by T. S. Eliot
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair --
Lean on a garden urn --
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair --
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise --
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and a shake of the hand.
She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight, and the noon's repose.
Read
For the Union Dead
BY Robert Lowell
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
Go to site to read in its entirety.
BY Robert Lowell
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
Go to site to read in its entirety.