In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is
consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:

we may call this
negative creation.

Persephone's initial
sojourn in hell continues to be
pawed over by scholars who dispute
the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape,
or was she drugged, violated against her will,
as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
"home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion—
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother's
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

First, the beast showed up in the middle  
of the night, entered the gates without 

a sound, sauntering through the field as if 
this was its home, my own home. Then came

the day and refused to absolve me of my girlhood, 
which was also its own. Its lovely face filled 

the streets of my imagination, & though we are  
both exhausted, it is just getting started. It does not

know what it wants with me. Its gaze, other-worldly,  
carrying with itself the portals to my other-selves

who await us patiently, bearers of thorns and honey, 
always speaking without uttering a word, leading me

to my many crucifixions, until I am readied for my own 
wanting. It has been told before, the tale of the beast 

and the man, the beast and man, the beastman. Man  
with too many eyes, limbs far reaching beyond its moat. 

I cannot say I did not see the signs; I cannot say  
I did not sleep with a sharp blade clutched in my fists. 

When, finally, the day of the awakening comes, I rise 
girl no more. Instead, I am another, I am other. 

And the gnawing has just begun. 

What they do not tell you about being a son
is that someday you’ll lift your mother out of necessity

& not know how to answer the deep ache in her

that refuses to leave from the botched surgery
on her four neuromas. They won’t mention the graft

of your skin on her skin you would give if it meant

her nerve cells might repair instead of defeat her
—their synapses flooded by the twice-daily pill

with a lyrical name that has strewn only wreckage

across her psyche for two decades so damaged
Achlys wouldn’t want them. Yes, a body can fade

& fragment in these hills like the green-veined

granite tumoring toward blossom, or a bloody
membrane between weeds & cedars.  Hope was

a scalpel once. I could slide it across anything & be

healed completely  was a dream she told me
repeats in her REM sleep. How do you

give someone who is burning permission

to vanish? Will she reincarnate as a gull
or the gray wave of foam a rogue hurricane

heaves up the local river with a serene quiet

worse than any crashing? How long have I been
still enough to witness it? This is grief. This is

seeing your mother suffer, & a wound made memory.

This is flame transforming: not a prayer but a fire
unquenchable covering our hands, our feet,

the neuromas clinging to our metatarsals

with a persistence so complete we feel no pain
stepping into the mansion in the sky

midnight is preparing. I collect every match

in its kitchen cabinets—scatter them
throughout each inch of this house

& its dry acreage in a dead galaxy

of black hole-filled pastures. I hear
a mockingbird calling her name as I strike

the first one & watch as it consumes the two

closest to it until there is a circuit of fire
connecting my lit skin to hers. Where a son

grieves a mother: a constellation. Where two bodies

meet failure: one crippling brilliance. I brighten 
where she does & darken where she does until

we cool to quartz, feldspar, mica, the bedrock

of this firmament no god could have sculpted
or made more imperfect, which is me holding her.