Voyage to Cythera
My heart is like a bird going on a sea voyage to find utter joy,
the way a well-intentioned yet anemic adolescent
pins a corsage through the paper nipple of his warped drawing
of a young, freckled nude. And just like this,
I, myself, radiate that sun-filled madness.
So I must ask you, Felix, as we approach
the island Cythera together on our funky canoe,
why it is that if I feel so light and airy, Cythera is so dismal?
As we paddle closer to the shore, the salt-
encrusted crows, sonic warnings, caw and caw,
and as I dip my bare feet into the weepy waters,
and pull our boat to shore I hear, from the distant
center of the island, the mud-caked
yodeling of ancient men and women.
Walking toward the center of Cythera,
down its one path, whose dust chokes me,
I see a sad procession of headless lovers,
a few of them beating on tattered tambourines.
As the music grows more intense,
I find a scraggly pine tree to hide behind…and just in time!
For behold these ghosts and their queen, Aphrodite,
that terrible beauty with her obsessed face,
who leads the procession towards the town square.
Behold the ghosts who circle before her.
If you have never seen a procession
of ghosts kneeling before their queen,
then you have lived a life without trouble.
In a sudden state of horror, I turned back
and, Felix, brother, guide, companion, father,
mother, sister, Virgil, everything— you were gone!
Alone here? Could this be true? To suffer
the terror of abandonment? How shall I return
to any green place, lush with tropical plants?
How shall I return to Oberlin, Ohio,
to my basement where I keep the drawings
of Claire Madonna Smith, that innocent high school girl I love?
For this is not an island of dreams
but rather an island of suffocating nectars that
drip from overgrown, deranged flowers.
God, not this island, this weapon of illusions!
Never did I think I could be its singular, living,
object, the center of its circle of nothingness.
I was holding onto a branch of the pine
and it broke and the noise of the crack
caught the queen’s attention. She looked at
me and I could now see that her eyes were
two endless black holes full of other black
holes full of decimals full of numerals
full of crystals full of dominos and land.
She began to walk toward me and the blood
in my body spilled into the holes
that were her eyes and the holes that were
not her eyes and the holes that were society
and the holes that were not society and in that moment
I realized that I was Cythera’s one luscious corpse,
Aphrodite’s vibrant victim hanging
upside down from a half-dead tree.
I couldn’t even taste the vomit in my mouth
as the ghosts surrounded me but Felix,
I forced myself to look
at the dirt of the earth which was now beyond
the sky whose soft scent of carnations and salt
grew tighter around my neck while Aphrodite, like a bird,
whispered into my dead ear, “The only thing
I ever wanted was to share my island with you.”
-- trans. Sandra Simonds
Comments