by the gods, and by me — you who could find it in your
heart to murder
the children you bore yourself, to leave me childless
and broken—
by all the gods in heaven or on earth or under the earth I curse you! May you live forever in the pain you’ve
brought yourself,
and with every passing day may your sorrow triple, and
your mind
grow more unsure, more tortured by doubt of what’s
happened here,
till nothing is certain but hopeless and endless sorrow.”
Even now— the proof of her victory gray and inert beside her — she
turned
her face from the lash of his words; broken as he was,
he knew
her chief point of vincibility: self-doubt, her fear that all she might do on earth was nothing but the
afterburn
of her father’s mindlessly rumbling, teratical blood. She
shouted,
“Curse all you please. You’ve turned too late to religion,
Jason.
Why should the gods pay heed to the curses of an
oath-breaker?”
She laughed, terrible and false, a crash of ice. He
howled,
“Yield me one thing and go then, free of me forever.”
She waited.
“The bodies of my sons,” he said, “to bewail and bury.”
But again
Medeia laughed, monstrous in her spite. “Never, my
husband!
I’ll bear them myself to the shrine of Hera in the high
mountains
and there bury them where none who hate me will climb
to insult them,
scattering their stones. For the land of Sisyphus I’ll
ordain a feast
with solemn rites to atone for the blood I’ve impiously
spilled,
then afterward away to Erekhtheus I’ll go, and live in
protection
of Aigeus, Pandion’s son. And you, vile wretch — this
curse
I place on you, in the hearing of earth and the burning
sun
and the multitudinous gods: May you now grow old
alone,
childless and silent, and die at last a shameful death, crushed by a beam from your own Argo. Then, then or
never,
shall our marriage end.” He listened in silence, his skin
burning
from the heat of the sun-god’s chariot. He wailed:
“Medeia, give back
my sons.” But again her reply was, “Never!” Then,
turning slowly,
she pointed to the palace. “Burials enough you’ll have,
I think,
without these, husband.” He looked. All the palace was
churning fire—
the tapestried walls, the trusses and cantled beams,
the doors,
the vaulting roofs. His muscles knotted more tightly
than before,
and his mind went wild. “Not my work, husband,”
Medeia said.
“The friends you’d have saved, in your own good time,
from Kreon’s dungeon
have fashioned keys of their own. I’ll bury our children,
Jason.
Deal with the dead mad Idas and Lynkeus scatter in
their wake!”
More darkly than ever he’d have cursed her then, but
his tongue was a stone,
his thick neck swollen as an adder’s. With the strength
of fifteen men
he seized the great bronze gate he’d torn from its hinges,
twisted it,
breaking it free of its latch and lock, swung it around
once,
and fired it upward at his wife. The chariot and dragons
vanished,
cunning illusions, and the door went planing through
the night, arching
upward and away six furlongs, gleaming. All the sky
was alight from the fire in the palace; and now there
were more fires burning,
the brothers taking remorseless Argonaut revenge on a
king
now dead. Jason could do nothing, kneeling in the
cobbled street,
bellowing wordless fury, clinging to his skull with both
hands,
for the heat of burning Corinth was nothing to the fire
in his mind.
Kneeling, his muscular thighs bulging, he swayed and
strained
for speech. He’d forgotten the trick of it. And now he
grew silent,
became like the focus of the whole world’s pressure. The
city all around him
roared, full of fire and shouts, alive with people on the
run.
And now, as steady and endless as the rain, gray ashes
fell.
Kneeling, furious, no longer sane, Lord Jason grew
old.
Before my eyes his skin withered and his hair turned
white.
The street became the Argo. I shouted in terror for the
goddess.
Waves crashed over the gunnels; from the sailyard
icicles hung.
And still, like snow, white ashes drifted through the
universe,
and above the sailyard, circling, circling in the darkness,
the ravens.
24
I stood on an island of flaking shale, where snow lay
gray,
in sickly patches; an island barren except for one tree by a miracle not yet dead, but bare and aging, failing, the surrounding air so choked and smoky that, for all I
knew,
I’d stumbled on the kingdom of Death. From every side
I heard,
ringing across what must have been black and sludgy
waters,
cracks and explosions, rumblings, shots; the air was
filled
with the whine of what might have been engines. I could
see, through the snow and smoke,
no smouldering fires, no rocket’s glare, no proof that
the earth
was not, itself, unaided by man, the attacker and
attacked.
Holding my right hand — stiff and useless, violently
throbbing—
in my left, the collar of my old black coat drawn high
to shield me,
I moved with feeble and tottering steps toward the
center of the island.
I began to see now there was more life here than I’d
guessed at first:
insects struggling in the ice, and sluggish serpents,
hissing,
venomous mouths wide open. I kept my distance, and
passed.
In every crevasse of that sickened place, there were
lean, white gannets
crying forlornly in inconstant, snow-filled brume. I found a man with a stick walking slowly in front of the
entrance to a cave,
turning in slow, stiff circles, as if in search of something. His beard came nearly to his knees; his ankles were
knobby and swollen
from some old injury; he had no eyes. He frowned, stern and strangely unbent for a man so old, and a
hermit.
“Who’s there?” he said, and pointed his stick. I struggled
to answer,
but no words came. He reached toward me with his
square, gray hand
to feel out my features and manner of dress, then shook
his head
dully, wearier than ever, and turned his face away, thinking, or listening to something out on the water.
I thought
he’d forgotten my presence; but he said suddenly,
“Whoever sent you,
tell them to take you back. Say to them, ‘Oidipus thanks
you,
but he takes no interest in the future.’ Now go.” He
waved at me gruffly,
not unkindly but impatiently, like a man interrupted. “Are you gone?” he said. I tried to think how to tell him