"Mary McCarthy" [by Mary Maxwell]

To the very end of Cape Cod the refugees have arrived, shipwrecked
heroes out of Homer.  But even Helen was an exile of sorts, pointing out
her noble countrymen to Priam from the stone barricades.  Alternating

with picnics on the beach, flirtation, clam pie and pitchers of martinis,
important work remains to be done. Typing out an English translation
of Weil and Bespaloff’s essays on The Iliad, Dyers Hollow sand gets

into the inky keys just as it does between sun-burnt toes.  Survivors, not
yet human remains dearer to the vultures than to their wives as the Greek
is deftly rendered by Dwight MacDonald, though death, and victory,

feels imminent as a thunder storm.  On an otherwise beautiful August day,
the first bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. A female chorus will continue to
share footnoted recipes while performing witty blue-stockinged dances,

sporting reversible masks of lover and mother. Articulate overprotective
Thetis hovering above the waves. A visit from Hermann Broch. Nicola
Chiaromante in a blue ruffled apron on the threshold where myth steps

nto poetry sweeps sand out of his Truro cottage. Philosophic principles.
Sexual practice. The pursued and the pursuer.  Shoplifted taffy, infidelity
warranting the inflated tragic dramaturgy accorded a child’s scraped knee.

Ed. note: From Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (Longnookbooks, 2012). From a sequence of poems devoted to figures of renown who spent quality days in Cape Cod.

Comments

[MARY MAXWELL]

As a footnote: This poem came out of a conversation I had with Mike MacDonald (son of Dwight), who told me that it was his father who'd translated the Homeric Greek directly in Mary McCarthy's translation of Simone Weil's Iliad essay. I'd noticed how beautifully the translation (NOT one of the standard Homer translations of the time, nor directly from the French) supported Weil's argument. It was Dwight, of course, who first published McCarthy's English version in >politics<, the journal he edited.