A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                    Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

    She looked over his shoulder
       For vines and olive trees,
    Marble well-governed cities
       And ships upon untamed seas,
    But there on the shining metal
       His hands had put instead
    An artificial wilderness
       And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

    She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
    White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
    But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
    She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

    She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
    Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
    Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
    His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

    The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestos, hobbled away,
    Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
    At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
    Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
       Who would not live long.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

First they called me “it,” and then, ignorant of how my people
use this word, they mashed up the meager nouns
they had for gender and called me “the goy,” and said
to not be one or the other was to be nothing.
It ate the grass it was shoved in, knelt at salt licks.
It took the barbs and kicks and crushed them into
fur and leather. Oiled and burnished, it made those
halves into one galloping body. Horse and rider.
The centaur endured the school-day, cruel gray rag, filth-
stiffened. The boys and girls who fit so easily in their costumes
looked like stick figures, crude and two dimensional.

Dante already knew, it read later. In The Inferno, in the seventh
circle of hell, centaurs guard the river Phlegethon, one of Hades’
five rivers. Phlegethon: river of fire, river of boiling blood,
which boils forever the souls of those who commit violence
against their neighbors. Centaurs guard the edges, shooting
arrows at any of these sinners who try to move to the shallows.

When sometimes I wish I’d had a boyhood, I remember those
days instead, my four muscled legs. I was seven feet tall then,
riding myself, carrying myself. A centaur is never lonely.

^{after Carl Phillips}

The best part,
how we make to
part the beast
from its self. 

Take the bull  
(whose head it’s got. 
Now, conjure you—
the offal, bovine throat,
a veiny tract meant
for an alfalfa pasture,
clover, sundry grasses
soon to cud; or 

a garden got at: trampled 
angel’s breath, marigold, 
            daisy, rose, chomped down,
            also, though, grown, only,
            it seems, to prune to mean 
            a human being 
what humans are—

and there: a tendril 
coils from your skull,
then petals split 
the temple, come 
to bloom. See, how 
now the bull face, 
stricken, blinks), 
finding a way, 
reeling, through new 
bewildering appetites.

Rome rattlejacks in vernacular,
wishing in Latin, marching arm in arm
with ladybug faces and groomed suitcases.

Someone is playing Liszt from an upper floor
as if it’s 1840, when Hungary was a jigsaw of another place
but Liszt, arriving here, said Mendelssohn couldn’t play his rhapsody
competently, and trashed him as propaganda
before composing the loveliest lieder to his enemy.

Water blows over my skin.
Wind has picked up impressions of splashing
from sparkling drinks or the river I’m crossing.

What a ruckus I find on my stone-walking
visit to the marble Athena at the villa.
A sphinx has elicited Medusa
to petrify a centaur, who as usual is causing havoc
and even the Harpies have taken sides now.
They hang from rooftops, flapping with the laundry.
An old man looks up and drags his finger across his throat with a laugh.

Botanical fever sweeps in from the east,
explaining with the scent of pollen and magnolia
where the garden terrace begins.
A cook smoking on the corner invites me in.
He serves me the most delectable veal that falls off the bone
the way we all fall off the bone.
I put my feet in the cascading waterfall at the Spanish embassy
where a party festivalizes with blue drinks.

Last night, in the giant bed at the hotel,
I dreamed of end-times
and wished I were dreaming in the dream.

I hope Athena recognizes me.
We’re been talking on the phone for years.
Maybe she will say truth is in the psalms.
We always talk about the form of epics, their sing-song
revenge, and she likes to rave about Odysseus
who she loved most, and how he got his revenge.
But Dante got the last word, I argue,
by drowning Odysseus for advising his men to sail
beyond the knowable world, knowing they would end.

When we meet, I hope I have the courage to say
epics are the sea voyage of imagination
but all the songs are here.

I meet my Athena from the dawn of the first century.
She is larger than I expect and smaller
than the gold and ivory Athena
made in the fifth century BC for the Parthenon
that she was carved to resemble.

The sea voyage lieder Liszt arranged for Mendelssohn
feels so cleaved open as if it had forgotten
what to make of itself in the middle of composing.

If you close your eyes
and take a deep breath
you can hear the green sage sing

The gray stones beneath you
feel young again
The breeze watches
it all with her Mona Lisa smile

Naatsis’áán takes it all in

The thunder of a hundred hooves,
whoops and hollers of the crowd,
the intensity of the riders
as in the day of wild warriors 
on the warpath.

There are chicken pulls, children’s foot races,
Navajo cake, kneel-down bread, drum songs

K’é shakes the roots of the mountain,
which gives the people her blessing

as does Sun God
with gentle warm breath.

The story I heard
was that the people
returned from Hwéeldi
and found strangers in their home.

Ashiih Litso just a boy, risked everything
on one horse race
and was blessed by the Holy People.

Another story goes that the mountain protected the people,
keeping soldiers away
and they never had to make the Long Walk.

Whichever story you live by,
the mountain remembers.
Eehaniih celebrates her,
head of the earth.

They lashed him halfway up the mast
And he screamed above the silent oarsmen
As they rowed him relentlessly away
From the bone-cluttered island shore of the Sirens
Sitting in the flowers singing unearthly promise.

            They saw the ship go by,
            and the madman raving there.
            One of them stood up,
            still singing, and made gestures
            with her aching body, using
            hands between thighs, showing
            as well as singing.
            The ship went on by wind and oars.
            The voices faded.
            They shrugged, sucked their sharp teeth,
            and went back to their flowers.

His anxious men, blessed with the silence
Of the blind, saw only the soundless agony
As he fought the bonds of the rigid mast
For the vision the Sirens never dreamed
In a word that faded for ever as he moved

Through life after life in the ship at the mast
And his screaming for release, ceased.
They lowered him down among their flesh
And he mastered again his own flesh and his ship
And remembered, once, an impotent whim for mutiny.

’Tis Night; all the Sirens are silent,
   All the Vultures asleep;
And the horns of the Tempest are stirring
   Under the Deep;
’Tis Night; all the snow-burdened
   Mountains Dream of the Sea,
And down in the Wadi the River
   Is calling to me.

’Tis Night; all the Caves of the Spirit
   Shake with desire,
And the Orient Heaven’s essaying
   Its lances of fire;
They hear, in the stillness that covers
   The land and the sea,
The River, in the heart of the Wadi,
   Calling to me.

’Tis night, but a night of great joyance,
   A night of unrest;—
The night of the birth of the spirit
   Of the East and the West;
And the Caves and the Mountains are dancing
   On the Foam of the Sea,
For the River inundant is calling,
   Calling to me.

Most holy Satyr,
like a goat,
with horns and hooves
to match thy coat
of russet brown,
I make leaf-circlets
and a crown of honey-flowers
for thy throat;
where the amber petals
drip to ivory,
I cut and slip
each stiffened petal
in the rift
of carven petal;
honey horn
has wed the bright
virgin petal of the white
flower cluster: lip to lip
let them whisper,
let them lilt, quivering.

Most holy Satyr,
like a goat,
hear this our song,
accept our leaves,
love-offering,
return our hymn,
like echo fling
a sweet song,
answering note for note.