Explore Poems: Greek & Roman Mythology

was, according to Virgil, always a fickle, unstable thing. Woman. Wyf. Merger of wife and man. To indicate: not-girl. Not-yet-claimed, not-yet weeping. And aren’t they often weeping? The mother, tearing her hair out, running toward the battle lines, filling heaven...

He and I sought together,
over the spattered table,
rhymes and flowers,
gifts for a name.

He said, among others,
I will bring
(and the phrase was just and good,
but not as good as mine,)
"the narcissus that loves the rain."

We strove for a name,
while the light of...

Over and back,
the long waves crawl
and track the sand with foam;
night darkens and the sea
takes on that desperate tone
of dark that wives put on
when all their love is done.

Over and back,
the tangled thread falls slack,
over and up and on;
over and...

I know not what to do—
My mind is reft.
Is song's gift best?
Is love's gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
Now sleep has pressed
Weight on your eyelids.

Shall I break your rest,
Devouring, eager?
Is love's gift best?—
Nay, song's the loveliest.
Yet, were you lost,
What...

Over Skype, I try to document my mother’s
bald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,
and science has proven what it had to prove:
every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother’s first.
Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood’s crypt,
where prayer...

                                                            Hunger like her mama
                                                            Most strong in White gaze as in
                                                            a Cowbird’s flirtation
                                                            Sprouted in eyes to tongues
                                                            to bellies pregnant with stolen milk
                                                            to restless hands
                                                            These fingernails filled with Black body,

Some are transformed just once
And live their whole lives after in that shape.
Others have a facility
For changing themselves as they please.

Days of rain. The drey outside my window would keel
and the wind would plunder. My heart was valent
with possibility: I could be anyone now, half woman,
half asterism. Fragmental as a new year. Patron saint
of the rutilant and cindering. I could...

i.
 
Dog. The time you take home, the time you take away from home.
The insistence, the instance worried at with your thick tongue.
 
Stink. Because of what you found on the ground and put in your gut.
Harry. As in beset, or beast....

A dolphin fell in love with me.
Probably because of my looks—
people always said, What a pretty boy you are.

I was coming home from Gymnasium,
I was so sweaty from running,
we all were, we all ran into the sea,
its freshness,
we gargled the...

I. GERYON

Geryon was a monster everything about him was red
Put his snoutsnout This image, suggestive of an animal such as a boar, may allude to Geryon’s father, Chrysaor (Khrysaor), sometimes depicted as a winged boar. Chrysaor is the brother of...

Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence.

                ____

Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches.
They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
Geryon was going into...

Eventually Geryon learned to write.

                ____

His mother's friend Maria gave him a beautiful notebook from Japan
with a fluorescent cover.

On the cover Geryon wrote Autobiography. Inside he set down the facts.
 
    Total Facts Known About Geryon.

    Geryon was a monster everything about him was red....

We have forgotten Paris, and his fate.
We have not much inquired
If Menelaus from the Trojan gate
Returning found the long desired
Immortal beauty by his hearth. Then late,

Late, long past the morning hour,
Could even she recapture from the dawn
The young delightful love?...

When the home is no more


When the mother's negative light goes also


When solitude rips the door from frame


When the transitory moves into the familial


Then: I often think of the drink, the notes, the contented, and badly drawn cartographies


On my bare...

i

If  a Legend from
fell through a Prizm
joyriding Mustangs
Aethon and Phlegon
half of California?
spent in engines
could raise ocean temps
then should we say

Clouds began to smoke
and made therewith so dry
from pastures
Corn combusted
Folk burnt
New deserts arose

ii

Athos, Taurus
Helicon
Haemus
Parnassus, Eryx
Rhodope and its ski trails
Mycale, Cithaeron
the snowcapped...

The hotel showers were splendidly profligate.
The aqueduct that fed the big
fountains down the street probably ran underneath
my bed, giving the water pressure
a nice bump. These were veritable circuses of water:
crowds pleased to see, qua
the wonders of  Roman hydraulic engineering,
water shatter...

One expects a certain raggedness—
cracked and broken, bleeding in bad weather—
but clay has kept them clean, unlined and supple,
brushing the dust from the sheet
on which he makes his petition
begging the goddess relieve him of  her blessing.
Cyprus sweats and sings through...

what would have happened had Achilles stayed
entwined with you, his lover, in your bed, who could feel
a pack of  Trojans through his letterman jacket
but also the well of  the water styx he kept in a flask
as he tried to end...

Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice,
Suffuses the veins of the eyes
Till the retina, mooncoloured,
Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab
Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape
A flat hot boulder it
Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums
Sidles
The lunatic unable...