Arcas
Laurie Rosenblatt
These poems explore the myth of Callisto and Arcus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Prolegomenon
See the ivy cup
Her leaves, trying to hold rain.
I too changed shape
Thinking your passionate words
More substantial than mist.
She said: He said
The late afternoon light fledges the pines.
A small duck moves across the pond leaving
a widening V that touches shore and shore
dwarfing the nest-bound bird. I wait, resting
my back against a willow’s trunk, hidden
within limbs and leaves. He comes
wearing fine promises like the disguise
of a god. I meet the woman behind his eyes
as crickets begin their evensong in the grass
beneath trees where night falls first.
She lies
reading in her silk stockings
and the barrels
of lust’s combination turn,
click, align. So I came
toward my darling on a Tuesday calling Hoo
Hoo then Wheat Wheat. She turned smiling,
Goodbye as the willow rained broken moonlight.
I deceived her for only a moment.
Then, in silence in violence the old one two one two
until she said, Would you please run through that again?1
Arcas: A Collage
A slice of lycanthropic maternity,
he roams the murdersome chorus line of the snow2
and follows a track toward the rock’s face—
his heart without paleness (being entirely grown).3
In the murdersome chorus line of the snow
he hunts with a net, a spear, a bow,
his heart constricted and pale (not entirely grown)
with the easy meanness of a fifteen year old.4
He hunts with a net, a spear, and a bow,
the thoughtless death-dealer of all he finds,
facile with the inner-mystery of a fifteen year old.
O badgers, bats, black rats, wolf pack,5 hind!
Sweet-hungry death-dealer of all he finds,
he has a youthful love of oranges.6
Beware badgers, bats, black rats, wolf pack, hind:
he is the matador of teeth.
He has a youthful love of pears;
and while they wait, the Furies doze.
He is a matador of teeth.
Look there. His bear of a mother.
The Furies wait and rouse one another.
O Hell is willing. Would heaven dare?
She rears, her heart bared, this mother—
O badgers, bats, black rats, wolf pack—bear.
Boy Meets Mother After 15 Years with Cosmic Consequences7
Stony grief speaks in a voice soft- sifted as sand in an hourglass: at the wall, held fast but adrift at center, a whirlpool motion crowded and combed; steady as pond water at the pane, but veined all the way down. And on the flank of the funnel, a pressure; each falling grain marks hours apart.
Then he stands caught in a shaft of light still wearing a child’s warm new leaf scent, now mixed with a darker note, not yet musk. Spruce sap. Amber. His father’s smell. When he moves, a cardinal rises, a red missile in diagonal flight: the fields of sky sown wide with calling Wheat Wheat Wheat: calling the constellations to rain music down-falling along the still pools of air striking rings of sound around the still folded fern.
Epilogue
A constellation burns with such a distant fire
that the blue-white heat of its stars reaches your eye
cold as a diamond held in the palm. I never
asked to be made of stars. Spread across
such distances of void, leaving you safe. You
the setter of fires. Now this conflagration,
this sulfurous stench, my body.
Yet I dream of the white cedar swamp:
light filtering onto still water,
moving in bright spot-light bands across
bare trunks, limbs brushing under
a fingering wind, the constant motion high
above—whispers that cannot reach us. Before
the growing gravity of womb, the teeth of grief;
before love’s bestial transformations.
1. Kenneth Koch, “Pericles,” Sun Out: Selected Poems 1952–1954 (New York: Knopf, 2002) 14.
2. Koch, “Limits,” 34.
3. Koch, “When They Packed Up, They Went,” 19.
4. Koch, “When They Packed Up, They Went,” 19.
5. After Koch, “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” 96.
6. Koch, “Is Nothing Reserved for Next Year, Newlyweds, or Arbor Day?,” 33.
7. After Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutchland,” Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 111.