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 seer — since she
never learned
these things at home — how 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 storm — the
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 seams — a fat
old farm-wife
with the eyes of a wolf — the 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 married — or so it seemed
to many—
the lord of the Argonauts turned on his children and
wife, his mind
supported by high-sounding reasons and noble
intentions. Near dawn,
when the storm had grown steady, prepared to continue
for days, it seemed,
the lord led his bride to the marriage bed — a cavernous
room
scented like a funeral chamber with flowers and
crammed wall to wall
with the gifts of Kreon, his vassals and allies. Strong
guards, black slaves,
took posts by the door to protect the pair from
impious eyes,
and kings melodious with wine sang the hymeneal.
Then I saw
on the lip of Corinth’s harbor — high and dry on logs and sheltered from the storm by a long dark barn—
the proud-necked Argo,
blacker than midnight, on her bows a virl of
gleaming silver
like the drapery carved on a casket’s sides. It loomed
enormous
in the barn’s thick night, oars stacked and roped on
the rowing benches,
sails rolled below — all waiting like a gun. White
crests of waves,
plangent as the roaring storm, came climbing the
steep rock slope
calling the ship out to sea. I could feel in my bones,
that night,
that the Argo was alive, though sleeping — the whole
black night alive,
like a forest in springtime watching for the first grim
stirring of bears.
Then gray dawn came — the Corinthian women sewed
on in silence,
Medeia like marble, in her thirst for revenge
hydroptic, as if bitten
by the dispas serpent whose fangs leave a thirst not
all the water
in the world can quench. Her heavy old slave
Agapetika prayed
at the shrine in her room, stubbornly, futilely
urging her will
’gainst Fate’s rock wall. The male slave fed the children,
keeping them
far from their mother, his mind abstracted, his stiff,
knobbed fingers
automatic, even his reproaches automatic, holding
those quarrelsome
voices to a whisper — for something of the crepitating
anger in the house
had reached their sleep, had filled them with suspicions
and obscure fears,
so that now, whatever the old man’s labors, there were
sharp cries of “Stop!”
and “Hand it back to me!” If Medeia heard them,
she revealed no sign.
In the palace, though he’d hardly slept, the Argonaut
opened his eyes,
suddenly remembering, and raised up in his bed,
leaning on an elbow,
to gaze through arches eagerly, as he’d gazed in
his youth
to the north and west on some nameless island, hoping
for a break
in the stretch of bad weather that pinned him to land,
the black ship hawsered,
dragged half its length up on shore for protection from
the breakers’ blows.
Rain was still falling, the mountains in the distance
as gray as the sea,
the sky like a corpse, bloodless, praeternaturally hushed.
He must wait
for the king to rise, wait for old Kreon in his own
good time
to relinquish the sceptre. There were things to be done—
mad Idas and his men
wasting in the dungeon — a dangerous mistake indeed,