more filled with the strange and divine understanding
of the mystery of Love
that Dante spoke of in his
Paradiso,
all the
scattered leaves
of the universe gatheredâ
legato con amore
âand as
I spoke, I seemed
to rise without effort, like an eagle with his wings
spread wide on an updraft
past Zeus's shins to his bolt-square knees, past his belly
and chest
(still gesturing, lecturing, compressing all life to the
burning globe
of a family knit by unalterable loveâmy own
humble family,
for where but in a wife, after twenty-one years of
loyalty and faith,
sorrows and shocks that would shake down mountains,
and a joyous holiness
that theory and defense leave empty and foolish as
program notes
or the weight in ounces of a lily at twilightâwhere
else can a man
learn surely of things inexpressible?), and I rose
to the very
brow of Zeus, high above drifting haze, above life, and stopped mid-sentence. I gazed all around me
in alarm.
   I was standing on a mountain, miles past the timber, a place cased
thickly in ice,
snowdust everywhere like fire in a furnace. My shoes
were frozen,
my fingers were blue. “Goddess!” I howled. The
old fat farm-wife,
whiskered like a goat and as dull of eye as a child
without wits,
came smiling toward me like a ship's prow sliding
out of mist. She stood
and looked at me awhile with her drooling grin,
then turned her back
and squatted, inviting me to ride. I climbed on.
Immediately I seemed
much warmer. As we started down she sang a foolish
sort of song,
its music vaguely like an echo of Apollo's tuning of
his harp:
“On Cold Mountain
The lone round moon
Lights the whole clear cloudless sky.
Honor this priceless natural treasure
Concealed in five shadows,
Sunk deep in the flesh.”
We came down to the clouds, then down to the
timberline;
came to a view of high villagesâgoatsheds, barns
on stilts.
We came to a river. The foul witch sang:
âWhen men see old Lill
They all say she's crazy
And not much to look at
â
Dressed in rags and hides.
They don't get what I say
And I don't talk their language
All I can say to those I meet:
“Try and make it to Cold Mountain.
Hmmmmm.'“
My double appeared at the door of a cowbarn, pulling
at his hatbrim.
“I think your vision has no rules,” he said. “Mere
literary scraps.
The
somnium animale
of a man who reads too much.
I see traces of a fear that literature may be nothing
but a game,
and stark reality the chaos remaining when the
last game's played.”
What could I say to such cynicism? My heart beat wildly and I jumped from the old woman's back to snatch up
a handful of stones.
He saw my purposeâmy double, or whoeverâ and clutching the brim of his hat in one hand he went
limping for the woods.
“Is
nothing serious?”
I yelled, pelting him. He squealed
like a pig.
He was gone. I wrung my fingers, whispering,
Is nothing serious?
The goddess had vanished.
“Sirius! Sirius!”
the dark
trees sang.
“Let it be,” the deep-voiced thunder rumbled, beyond
tall pillars,
beyond tall oaks like skeletal hands still snatching
at nothing
in the cockshut sky. They lighted the torches, for
the day had gone dark
prematurely, grown sullen as a nun full of grudges.
King Kreon rose,
stretched out his hands for silence, but the flashing sky
boomed on,
drowning his announcement, drowning the applause of
the assembled sea-kings.
Then Jason rose, smiling, and spokeâgray rain on
the palace grounds
pounding on flagstones and walls, filling lakes with
activity, drumming
on the square unmarked tomb of the forgotten kingâ
and the crowd applauded,
rising to honor him as he reached for the hand of
the princess. She rose,
radiant with love, as joyful as morning, all linen
and gold,
flashing like fire in the light of the torches,
her glory of victory.
   In the vine-hung house below, the fleece lay singing
in the gleam
of candlelight, and the women gathered as seamstresses
stared
in awe at the cloth they must cut and sew. To some
it seemed
they might sooner cut plackets in the land itself, make
seams in the sky,
for the cloth held forests whose golden leaves flickered,
and extensive valleys,
cities and hamlets, overgrown thorps where peasants
labored,
hunched under lightning, preparing their sheds for
winter. Among
the seamstresses, the daughter of Aietes walked,
cold marble,
explaining her wishes, not weeping now, all carriers
of feeling
closed like doors. It seemed to the women gathered
in the house
no lady on earth was more beautiful to seeâher hair
spun goldâ
or more cruelly wronged. When the scissors approached
it, the cloth cried out.
   That night there was music in the palace of Kreonâ
flourishes and tuckets
of trumpets, bright chatter of drums. In the rafters,
ravens watched;
in the room's dark corners, fat-coiled snakes, heads
shyly lowered,
drawn by prescience of death. Tall priests in white
came inâ
white clouds of incense, hymns in modes now fallen
to disuse
mysterious and common as abandoned clothes. In
the lower hall
a young bull white as snow, red-eyed, breathed
heavily, waiting
in the flickering room. His nose was troubled by smells
unfamiliar
and ominous, his heart by loneliness and fear. He
watched
human beings hurrying around him, throwing high
shadows on the walls.
One came toward him with a shape. He bellowed in
terror. A blow,
sharp pain. A dark mist clouded his sight, and
his heavy limbs fell.
   Medeia said now, standing in the room with her
Corinthian women,
no jewel more bright than the fire in her eyes,
no waterfall,
crimsoned by sunrise but shining within, more lovely
than her hair,
her low voice charged with her days and years (no
instrument of wood
or wire or brass could touch that sound, as the
singer proves,
shattering the dome of the orchestra, climbing on
eagle's wings,
measured, alive to old pains, old joys, in a landscape
of stone-
cold hills, bright flame of cloud), “I would not keep
from you,
women of Corinth, more than I need of my purpose
in this.
If my looks seem dark, full of violence, pray do not
fear me or hate me,
remembering rumors. I am, whatever else, a woman, like you, but a woman betrayed and crushed,
fallen on disaster.”
   Silence in the palace. And then the sweet
shrill-singing priest,
his soft left hand on Pyripta's, his right on Jason's.
When he paused,
a flash of lightning shocked the room, and the room's
high pillars
sang out like men, an unearthly choir. Deaf as a stone, the priest held a golden ring to Pyripta, another to Jason.
The towering central door burst open, as if struck
full force
by a battering ram. Slaves rushed to close it. A voice
like the moan
of a mountain exploding said, “No, turn back!”
But the panelled door
was closed. And now the floor spoke out, roaring,
“No! Take care!”
There was not one man in the hall who failed to
hear it. I saw them.
But Jason and the princess kissed; the kings applauded.
His eyes
had Hera in them, and Athena. And old King Kreon
smiled.
   Medeia said: “Now all pleasure in life is exhausted. I have no desireâno faintest tremor of desireâ
but for death.
The man I loved more than earth itself, his leastmost
wish
the wind I ran in, his griefs my wintersâmy child,
my husbandâ
has proved more worthless than the world by the
darkest of philosophies.
Surely of all things living and feeling, women are
the creatures
unhappiest. By a rich dowery, at bestâat worst by deeds like mineâwe purchase our bodies' slavery,
the right
to creep, stoop, cajole, flatter, run up and down, labor in the nightâand we say thank God for it,
tooâbetter that
than lose the tyrant. You know the saw: “No
wise man rides
a nag to war, or beds a misshapen old woman.' Like
horses
worn out in service, they trade us off. Divorce is
their playthingâ
ruiner of women, whatever the woman may think
in her hour
of escape. For there is no honor for women in divorce;
for men
no shame. Who can fathom the subtleties of it? Yet
true it is
that the woman divorced is presumed obscurely
dangerous,
a failure in the mystic groves, unloved by the gods,
while the man
is pitied as a victim, sought out and gently attended to by soft-lipped blissoming maidens. Then this: by
ancient custom,
the bride must abandon all things familiar for the
strange new ways
of her husband's house, divine like a seerâsince she
never learned
these things at homeâhow best to deal with the animal
she's trapped,
slow-witted, moody, his body deadly as a weapon.
If in this
the wife is successful, her life is such joy that the
gods themselves
must envy her: her dear lord lies like a sachet of myrrh between her breasts. In poverty or wealth, her bed is
all green,
and her husband, in her mind, is like a young stag.
When he stands at the gate,
the lord of her heart is more noble than the towering
cedars of the east.
But woeful the life of the woman whose husband
is vexed by the yoke!
He flies to find solace elsewhere; as he pleases
he comes and goes,
while his wife looks to him alone for comfort.
   “How different your life and mine, good women of Corinth! You have friends,
and you live at your ease
in the city of your fathers. But I, forlorn and homeless,
despised
by my once-dear lord, a war-prize captured from
a faraway land,
I have no mother or brother or kinsman to lend me
harbor
in a clattering storm of troubles. I therefore beg of you one favor: If I should find some means, some stratagem to requite my lord for these cruel wrongs, never
betray me!
Though a woman may be in all else fearful, in the hour
when she's wronged
in wedlock there is no spirit on earth more murderous.”
   So she spoke, staring at the outer stormâthe
darkening garden,
oaktrees and heavy old olive trees twisting, snapping
like grass,
in the god-filled, blustering wind. The hemlocks by
the wall stood hunched,
crushed under eagres of slashing water. When
lightning flashed,
cinereal, the shattered rosebushes writhing on the stones
in churning
spray formed a ghostly furnace, swirls of heatless fire. No torches burned by the walls of the palace above,
and the glow
leaking from within was gray and unsteady, like
a dragon's eyes
by a new stone bier in a cluttered and cobwebbed vault,
a stone-walled
crowd set deep in the earth. In the roar of the storm,
no sound
came down to the room where Medeia stood with her
seamstresses,
no faintest whisper of a trumpet, but like a vast
sepulchre,
a palace in the ancient kingdom of Mu sunk deep
in the Atlantic,
the great house loomed, the hour of its trouble come
round. The women
gazed in sorrow at Medeia. “We'll not betray you,”
one said.
Some, needles flying on the golden cloth, were afraid
of her,
the room full of shadows not easily explained.
And some shed tears.
   So through the night they sewed, minutely following
the instructions
of Aietes' daughter. And sometimes among the eleven
a twelfth
sat stitching, measuring, easing seamsâa fat
old farm-wife
with the eyes of a wolfâthe goddess of the witchcraft,
Hekate.
   And so through the night in the palace of Kreon
the revels ran on,
the slave in black, Ipnolebes, watching with eyes
like smoke.
   Thus swiftly, shamefully marriedâor so it seemed
to manyâ
the lord of the Argonauts turned on his children and
wife, his mind
supported by high-sounding reasons and noble
intentions. Near dawn,