For today’s post, I point you in the direction of Chard deNiord’s “Tablet” which explicates/expands upon the surviving tablets of the epic poem Gilgamesh. Using anaphora, permutations of language, and big “what if” questions, Chard brilliantly opens up this epic for yet another generation.
Tablet
All that is left to one who grieves
Is convalescence. No change of heart or spiritual
Conversion, for the heart has changed
And the soul has been converted
To a thing that sees
How much it costs to lose a friend it loved.
—Gilgamesh, translated by Herbert Mason
Had the king of Uruk never wrestled Enkidu,
the wild man of the steppe, and just barely defeated him
on points, he never would have fallen in love with him
with a love that was greater than that for a woman,
nor asked him to go hunting with him in the Sacred Forest
for the monster guardian, Humbaba, the beginning
of history as an ageless story would never have happened.
Had the king never suffered the loss of himself
in another, he never would have known himself
as someone less than himself without his beloved,
nor hurt with a grief that rendered him listless,
although he called his suffering “nothing” with a smile
to the face of the Queen of Heaven, who craved
his devotion but couldn’t have it—his only solace
for being human.
Had he not grieved so deeply,
he never would have grown into the comedian he did,
nor swum to the bottom of the Sacred River to pick
the flower that the shaman said would bless him forever,
nor almost drowned while diving for that blossom
with a godlike breath, nor tasted the salt in the river
that cursed him with a thirst for wine and hatred
of mirrors, nor mastered the art of curling his tongue
around the diphthong in death, nor learned
how to say the single sound of e, a, and u
at the center of beauty, nor loosened his grip
on the thorny flower as he slept on the beach
oblivious of the snake traversing his body,
then hissing to the darkness, “Only I am eternal,”
nor dreamed of grilling a gazelle stewed in garlic,
then eating it with his wife and children
in a joyous reunion at the marble table
in his hyacinth garden.
Had he never slept
so deeply, he would have felt the serpent absconding
with his flower into the forest where she devoured
it whole, then shed her skin, he never would have made
his way back home with his grief for his friend,
nor gained the knowledge of how to read the text
of the clouds as one long sentence that spelled his end,
nor discovered the secret of how to string
the smallest things together as he spent the rest
of his life ruling his kingdom, building a wall around
his city, telling stories to his brilliant children, planting
his garden throughout the morning, happy with his title
Comedian King, lying in his hammock, dreaming
and waking, waking and dreaming.
from Issue #240, Summer 2022, Paris Review.
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