Jody's Notes
Some poems are like milestones. Subjectively, I mean. I write the poem in a frenzy of inspiration, and then for years and years, nothing I write is as good as, can ever be as good as, that. How it feels. Maybe because I've really topped out a particular approach to writing poems, and I have to develop a new one; maybe because, the way that poem goes together, I have to change drastically how I'm writing poems to get past it. Something like that. Wintertime felt that way. Friends of mine (at the time) said things like: You'll never write a poem as good as Wintertime. Time to do something else. And recently, frightfully recently, a colleague in my department said: Wintertime--that poem is really brilliant. To have written something that long ago (1977, I think), and it gets credited with brillance--it's enough to make some people stop writing forever.
Not me, of course. But nevertheless certain poems that come out every few years feel like amazing milestones being crossed. (I'm assuming here that a milestone is something you cross; I'm assuming that a milestone isn't something that kills you.) Especially when there's nothing stopping the writing of it--when it just comes out smoothly. Suddenly I know: yes, I can transform the birth-of-Athena myth--make it fresh with weird egg imagery (etc.).
Of course, then I can't publish the poem for years and years and years, and finally I just throw it onto a postcard, publish it myself.
And then a friend of mine (the designer of the postcard whose phone number is on the card) gets a call from someone at the United Nations. The English isn't great, but the person on the phone apparently want to order a rather large number of these cards (200,000, I think) for inserts into some brochure to be sent somewhere or other. "Because," the person is explaining to my friend, who is holding the phone away from her head in disbelief, "we take very seriously around here natural childbirth." My friend is stuttering out "Greek myth," and "not particularly poltical," and "probably not what you think it is."
Sometimes poems really do have an impact.
This poem was reprinted in The Lust for Blueprints.
Think of Zeus.
First it starts as a headache,
as if his brain is a fetus trapped in his skull.
Wombs, for the most part, survive birth-trauma.
Eggs do not. The real story (no one told)
climaxes with Athena cooing
among the shards of her father’s skull,
something gray and bloody
leaking through her hands.
You can paste a skull back together again
(if you are gods).
You can stuff anything
(that happens to be lying around)
into the skull cavity
and the result will walk.
But despite the semantics of the word,
there are limits to omnipotence.
The official story is that she didn’t have
a childhood. But in point of fact
the intellect is omnivorous;
and the cynical and uncaring gods laughed
while they watched her cling to his chest
like a leech (cute as a button
with teeth),
the gore dripping onto the thick rug
as he shuffled back and forth.
(He giggled vacantly whenever he touched
something metallic.)
Years later, stories circulate
of a demented rabbit vainly hopping up
under a woman’s dress or a divine idiot
raping a scarecrow. “He moves
in mysterious ways,” peasants chortle.
Meanwhile, gods die
(under peculiar circumstances):
A flayed Pan found hours before
Athena wears her new fur; Poseidon
drowned; Hades buried alive; Aphrodite …
details are sketchy.
Centuries pass and we don’t hear much
except for occasional hints: a god
who sires himself on his virgin mother
(under suspicious circumstances),
a cosmos haunted by a holy ghost
(whose? we wonder).
Meanwhile, desperately secular,
we use lightning to run egg-beaters
and hope for the best.
© 1995, 2001 Jody Azzouni