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 purpose — my double, or whoever— 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.
22
“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 spoke — gray rain on
the palace grounds
pounding on flagstones and walls, filling lakes with
activity, drumming
on the square unmarked tomb of the forgotten king—
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 see — her hair
spun gold—
or more cruelly wronged. When the scissors approached
it, the cloth cried out.
That night there was music in the palace of Kreon—
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 in—
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 desire — no faintest tremor of desire—
but for death.
The man I loved more than earth itself, his leastmost
wish
the wind I ran in, his griefs my winters — my child,
my husband—
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 best — at worst by deeds like mine — we purchase our bodies’ slavery,
the right
to creep, stoop, cajole, flatter, run up and down, labor in the night — and we say thank God for it,
too — better 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 plaything—
ruiner of women, whatever the woman may think
in her hour
of escape. For there is no honor for women in divorce;