Cassandra

Another mythology poem.  This one's about the princess of Troy who could see the future but whose warnings were never believed.

     Cassandra

As a child, I always ignored my mother,
and caught cold without my coat, fell
when I ran too fast, burned myself on
plates she said were hot. Only my vision
survived the light too dim to read by.

Now I know what it is to be the unbelieved:
my beloved Troy in ruins, my lover and me
slaughtered, and my soul finding no solace
in saying, like my mother, I told you so. I told you so.

Danae

Another mythological poem, helped along by a painting by Gustav Klimt. 

For those of you whose mythology is rusty, Danae's father, King Acrisius,  locks her in a bronze tower to keep her from having a son who, an oracle prophesied, would kill him.  Zeus visits her there as golden rain, resulting in the birth of Perseus, the Avenger.  Her father Acrisius then casts his daughter and grandson adrift in a boat or chest, hoping they die, but instead they are rescued and end up in the court of King Polydectes.  This king falls in love with Danae, but she is too involved in raising her son to notice.  Polydectes tries to eliminate Perseus by sending him on what he expects to be a fatal quest for the head of Medusa.  In Perseus's absence, Polydectes presses Danae to marry him.  Perseus returns (along with Princess Andromeda, who he has rescued from a sea monster along the way) and interrupts the wedding, turning Polydectes to stone with Medusa's head.  When he and his mother return to their home, Acrisius flees. Perseus attends an ahtletic competition, and his discus accidentally flies into the crowd, killing a spectator - who turns out being his grandfather, Acrisius. 

      Danae

My father tried to keep me pure, as if
my virginity would cancel his mortality,
but phallic towers make poor prophylactics.

Didn’t he know after such isolation
any stranger would seem a god
and any son would be a vengeance?

So Perseus was my sole salvation.
He would travel where I could never go
as Polydectes planned to make me his own –
but all he brought back were monsters,
a Gorgon’s head and a bride-to-be.

When you flee your fate in this rounded world,
the farther you run, the closer you come
to where you began. I know this now
as my father lies dead from a discus
he could not sidestep, my son ascends
the throne and a marriage bed, and I become
an old woman trapped in an ageing body
with nothing but a memory of my own
wetness turning to a shower of golden rain.

.

Galatea

Another mythological poem.  The sculptor Pygmalion fell in love with his own statue, Galatea.  She was modeled after Aphrodite, and that goddess brought her to life for him.

     Galatea

It’s not easy being Aphrodite
made marble and put on a pedestal
to be shaped by one man’s desires.

It’s even harder to be made flesh
and step down into his world without
disappointing him, so I first turned part

of him to stone, hoping he would love his
own lust, even if he did not love me,
and would not notice my imperfections.

But then the real miracle occurred:
as we aged together, he saw my flaws-
my wrinkles, my worries, my silly fears-
and did not look away.

In this way we found something stronger than stone,
human love Aphrodite has never known.

Close Shave

Last June, I fully shaved my face for the first time in forty years.

      Close Shave

I got rid of my beard
to get of rid of the years
that grayed it, but then found
the skin beneath had sagged
and folded where it had
once been firm, and when I
cut myself, I bleed.

Polyphemus

I'm thinking of starting a series of poems based on mythology.  Have already done one on Medusa and John Barth's book Chimera got me thinking about doing some more.

      Polyphemus

1.
Even before my blindness,
my eyesight was not the best.
We one-eyed creatures lack depth
perception and are not known
for our vision’s breadth.

My world was my cave,
my sheep, and my isle, all bound
by the boundless sea. An outcast
of outcasts- my bitter brothers.
shunning me as the bitterest

Since I’d fallen farthest,
from Zeus’s favorite forger
of custom thunderbolts for
all occasions, to the one
he blamed for his own error.

Imprison the armorer
and let the killer go free.
It was He who struck Apollo’s
sons, not my brothers and me,
but what the gods will, will be.

2.
Our visitors are few,
mostly shipwrecked sailors
too scared by our stature
or anything but sobs and screams,
incoherent rapture.

Until one spoke up calmly,
modestly calling himself
No One and offering me
the gift of wine. I promised
to eat him last – as welcome company.
And my reward for sparing
his life? Sharp stick, sharper poke
and the blind rage of betrayal.
“No One has done this!” I roared,
stupid straight man to a stupid joke.

Then I almost had the last
laugh, for No One had his blind
spot, too: his pride calling out
his real name- and my father’s curse.
Ill winds blew his boat from bad to worse.

But his trials turned to triumphs,
his trip became The Odyssey;
my brief infamy sparked his eternal fame.
I became the unsightly sideshow freak
who helped No One make his name.

Putting Away the Spoons

This is the last poem I'll be writing to a Monday deadline.  I'll keep posting poems as I write them, though, so keep checking back periodically. (If this is you first time on my blog, check out my earlier poems as well.  There are more than 200 of them.)

  Putting Away the Spoons

When I unload the dishwasher.
I place the spoons in separate stacks:
one for the curved handles,
another for the flat.
A bit of neatness
in this messy life.

But when my wife’s sister
came to live with us –
her blood and brain polluted
by the waste her failing liver
could not purge – my systems
were upset by her addled efforts
to be helpful: bug spray mistaken
for carpet cleaner, the vacuum
constantly clogged with debris
she couldn’t see, and the silverware
a jumbled mess until her final days.

Now, after a few years of order,
our daughter has returned home
with her cats, her lizards, and her tears
mourning her boyfriend’s overdose,
gradually getting her life together.
And when I see the spoons
in disarray again, I know a little
disorder is better than early death.

Deja Vu

I'll be ending the weekly postings on this blog next week. I did daily postings for the first 181 days of this year but find that the well is running dry. Necessity has become the mother of prevention.  I will still post poems when I write them but will be taking a break from writing to a deadline since it no longer seems to be serving its creative purpose.  Here's a poem about that uninspired feeling. (It uses the poet's traditional trick of writing about not being able to write.)

    Déjà Vu

I’ve written this poem before,
starting with desperation
hoping for inspiration
but ending with nothing more.