groves.
A dream, I’m sorry to say. This humble world below demands the return of the seed. Such is our duty to it. The oldest oak on the hillside, even the towering plane
tree,
shatters, sooner or later, hammered by thunderbolts or torn-up roots and all by a wind from Zeus. On the
shore,
we see how the very rocks are honed away, in time. Accept the inevitable, then. Accept your place in the
march
of seasons, blood’s successions. — In the end she’ll find,
I hope,
that marriage too, for all its pangs, has benefits.”
He smiled, turned sadly to his slave. “It’s true, you
know. The song
that moved us, there — bubbled up feelings we’d half
forgotten—
I wouldn’t trade it for a hundred years of childhood play. The gods are kinder than we think!” The servant nodded,
solemn.
Kreon turned away, still sniffling, clearing his throat.
“Carry a message for me, good Ipnolebes. Seek out Jason — somewhere off by himself, if that proves feasible — and ask him, with all your skill and
tact
— with no unwarranted flattery, you understand (he’s nobody’s fool, that Jason) — ask, with my
compliments,
that he dine in the palace tomorrow night. Mention our
friends,
some few of whom he may know from the famous days
when he sailed
the Argo. Tell him—” He paused, reflecting, his
eyebrows raised.
“No, that’s enough. — But this, yes!” His crafty grin came back, a grin like a peddler’s, harmless guile. ‘Tell
him,
as if between you and himself — tell him I seem a trifle ‘miffed’ at his staying away, after all I’ve done for him. Expand on that as you like — his house, et cetera.” The king laughed, delighted by his wit, and added, “Remind him of his promise to tell more
tales sometime.
Mention, between the two of you, that poor old Kreon’s hopelessly, sottishly caught when it comes to adventure
stories—
usual lot of a fellow who’s never been away, worn out his whole long life on record keeping, or sitting in
judgment,
struggling to unsnarl tortuous tangles of law with
further
law.” He chortled, seeing it all in his mind, and beamed, clapping his plump dry hands and laughing in wheezes.
It was
delicious to him that he, great Kreon, could be seen by
men
as a fat old quop, poor drudge, queer childish lunatic. The river shone like a brass mirror. The sky was bright “Go,” said Kreon, and patted his slave’s humped back.
“Be persuasive!
Tomorrow night!”
He turned, still laughing, lifting his foot
to move inside, when out of the corner of his eye the
king
saw — sudden, terrible — a silent shadow, some creature
in the grass,
glide down the lawn and vanish. He clutched at his
chest in alarm
and reached for Ipnolebes. The stones were bare.
“Dear gods,
dear precious holy gods!” he whispered. He frowned,
blinked,
touched his chin with his fingertips. The evening was
clear,
as green as a jewel, in the darkening sky above, no life. “I must sacrifice,” he whispered, “—pray and sacrifice.” He rubbed his hands. “All honor to the blessed gods,”
he said.
His red-webbed eyes rolled up. The sky was hollow,
empty,
deep as the whole world’s grave.
King Kreon frowned, went in,
and stood for a long time lost in thought, blinking,
watching
the frail shadows of trembling leaves. His fingertips
shook.
2
In Corinth, on a winding hillside street, stood an old
house,
its stone blackened by many rains, great hallways dark with restive shadows of vines, alive though withered,
waiting—
listening for wind, a sound from the bottom of the sea—
climbing
crumbling walls, dropping their ancient, silent weight from huge amphoras suspended by chains from the
ceiling beams.
“The house of the witch,” it was called by children of
the neighborhood.
They came no nearer than the outer protective wall of
darkening
brick. They played there, peeking in from the midnight
shade
of olive trees that by half a century out-aged the oldest crone in Corinth. They spied with rounded
eyes
through the leaves, whispering, watching the windows
for strange lights,
alarming themselves to sharp squeals by the flicker of
a bat,
the moan of an owl, the dusty stare of a humpbacked
toad
on the ground near where the vines began.
He saw it, from his room
above, standing as he’d stood all day — or so I guessed by the way he was leaning on the window frame, the
deep-toned back
of his hand touching his jaw. What he thought, if
anything,
was locked in his mirroring eyes. Great Jason, Aison’s
son,
who’d gone to the rim of the world and back on nerve
and luck,
quick wits, a golden tongue — who’d once been crowned
a king,
his mind as ready to rule great towns as once it had been to rule the Argonauts: shrewd hero in a panther-skin, a sleek cape midnight-black. The man who brought
help.” No wonder
some men have had the suspicion he brought it from
the Underworld,
the winecup-crowded grave. His gray eyes stared out now as once they’d stared at the gleaming mirror of the gods,
the frameless
sea. He waited, still as a boulder in the silent house, no riffle of wind in the sky above. He tapped the wall with his fingertips; then stillness again.
Behind the house, in a garden hidden from strangers’
eyes
by hemlocks wedged in thick as the boulders in a wall,
a place
once formal, spare, now overrun — the vines of roses twisting, reaching like lepers’ hands or the dying limbs of oaks — white lilies, lilacs tilting up faceless graves like a dry cough from earth — his wife Medeia sat, her two young sons on the flagstones near her feet.
The span
the garden granted was filled like a bowl with sunlight. Seated by the corner gate, an old man watched, the household slave whose work
was care
of the children. Birds flashed near, quick flame: red
coral, amber,
cobalt, emerald green — bright arrows pursuing the
restless
gnat, overweening fly. But no bird’s wing, no blossom shone like Medeia’s hair. It fell to the glowing green of the grass like a coppery waterfall, as light as air, as charged with delicate hues as swirling fire. Her face was soft, half sleeping, the jawline clean as an Indian’s. Her hands were small and white. The children talked.
She smiled.
Jason — gazing from his room as a restless lion stares from his rocky cave to the sand where his big-pawed
cubs, at play,
snarl at the bones of a goat, and his calm-eyed mate
observes,
still as the desert grass — lifted his eyes from the scene, his chest still vaguely hungry, and searched the wide,
dull sky.
It stared back, quiet as a beggar’s eyes. “How casually you sit this stillness out, time slowed to stone, Medeia! It’s a fine thing to be born a princess, raised up idle, basking in the sunlight, warmed by the smile of