Circe's Lament and other Visitations

I used to write the occasional poem, but that doesn't seem to happen much any more.  Perhaps the Muse of Poetry has flown away, finding me uninteresting.  Fickle creatures, muses.  But here is a poem I wrote years ago inspired by a strange Muse - the Goddess or Enchantress Circe of the fame of the Odyssey.  Ulysses  landed on her island, and among other things, she turned his men into swine.   It was originally inspired by  Margaret Atwood's Circe/Mud Poems.** (see her poem below).  I've loved the collection since the 70's, along with her rendering of yet another Goddess/heroine connected to the Odyssey, her so very witty look at Penelope's point of view in  The Penelopiad .  Penelope, like Circe, has  a somewhat different perspective on the events of mythic history.

In my poems, it would seem that the voice of "Lexus" turned up after writing the first poem, no doubt to protest the indignity of being just an ordinary sailor, with the misfortune to be caught in someone else's epic.

CIRCE'S LAMENT

I cannot recall how it happened.

I was on fire, I do remember that,
my imagination a tropical sunset
inflamed, exultant

and for one shining
Hallelujah of an hour
everything I touched
ignited

You squeal your indignation
through ruddy snouts:

It was a misfire, I swear it.

In the splendor of my exuberance
this was nothing I anticipated.

Tell your handsome Captain
I will petition the Gods this very day.
I have grown old, absent minded

in my solitude
my spells go astray

be patient, dear ones.
Meditate upon this dark, fertile
squalor of sensuous mud
you find yourself
so horizontal in.
This low rooting through an
odoriferous cosmos of fragrant compost.

Are you so undone
by the base pleasure of it all?
This nosing, snorting self-knowing,
the delight of a half fermented carrot?
Never a sow smelt so sweetly fecund before
nor was love so simple.

Surely we have become sleepy,
half-drowned by the lethargy
of our two-legged dignity.

Consider this, if you will,
an interlude of primordial grace.

(2000)

LEXUS LAMENTS HIS FATE

All I wanted
was a touch, a kindly word,
a little ease.

Eight long Gods' forsaken years
on the stinking boat, and before that,
war, war, war, blood
and lamentation.

Who are you,
to name me thus?
Is your worth and wit
so much greater than mine

to dole out shame,
because I dared to love you
in my clumsy way?

Did I not bring you flowers
admire you from afar?

HE is adored by Goddesses,
hears the Sirens sing his wild praises,
returning at last to patient little Penelope,
his pretty kingdom.
Ballads, sung at last
beside his flowery grave.

Me - bale, Lexus, bale!
hoist the mast,
and don’t piss on the foredeck.

Who are you, to unmake me thus?
To twist and shape me
as suits your capricious humor
because my face is unlovely,
my gestures naive?

Who are you to judge my folly?

what magnitudes I glimpsed,
what private splendors
lived once within this breast?

Lauren Raine (2000)

from   CIRCE/ MUD POEMS

There are so many things 
I wanted you to have.
This is mine, this tree,
I give you its name,

here is food, white like roots, red,
growing in the marsh, on the shore,
This is mine, this tree,
I give you its name,

here is food, white like roots, red,  
growing in the marsh, on the shore,
I pronounce these names for you also.

This is mine, this island, 
you can have the rocks,
the plants that spread themselves flat
over the thin soil,
I renounce them.
You can have this water,this flesh, I abdicate,

I watch you, 
you claim without noticing it,
you know how to take. 


Margaret Atwood   (1972)

a "Webbed Vision"

“What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a “webbed vision“?.....The world seen through a web…as delicate as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

Catherine Keller, FROM A BROKEN WEB

As the juices of spring flow (and it's well into high spring here in the desert), and the psychic juices of months of therapy also seem to be flowing in my psyche, I've been noticing a lot of syncronicities lately.

(I have many times noticed that syncronicities follow the threads whorls and weavings of my thoughts and imaginative processes. If one can understand that dreams are a conversation with the inner self by means of symbols that interact, then why can't syncronicities reflect the symbolic conversation World is having with us.......or perhaps we're having with World? )

I've been thinking about PENELOPE - the myth, its origins, and origins of the name itself. I've been reading the 1989 book "From a Broken Web" by theologian Catherine Keller. What struck me particularly are her reflections (as the quote above) on what kind of world we might co-create with if we could truly re-claim or truly internalize a new universal vision of a paradigm of interconnection. If we could see the world, as she put it, with a "Webbed Vision". She derives this concept from her analysis of mythologies about Spiders and Weavers, including Penelope, who wove and unwove a shroud every night as she waited for the return of her husband Odysseus.

The name, "Penelope" actually means, in Greek, something like "with a Web on her face". Here's what I opened to in the Tucson Weekly's Theatre Section this morning, while still bleary-eyed over coffee:

The movie showing in Tucson theatres has nothing to do with the Odyssey, or weaving (it's a charming film about a woman with a pig's snout and a curse she has to resolve) - but following the threads of my thoughts about Penelope, suddenly there she was, with a kind of web over her face, looking up at me from my newspaper. I love it.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Penelope:

In Homer's Odyssey, Penélopê (Πηνελόπη) is the faithful wife of Odysseus, who keeps her suitors at bay in his long absence and is rejoined with him at last. Her name[1] is usually understood to combine the Greek word for web or woof (πηνη / pene) and the word for eye or face (ωψ / ōps), very appropriate for a weaver of cunning whose motivation is hard to decipher.[2] Until recent readings, her name has been associated with faithfulness,[3] but the most recent readings offer a more ambiguous interpretation.

Ambiguous interpretation indeed. It seems fairly clear that here is a much earlier Goddess. The Weaver who "sees through a web". Another variation, for me, on Spider Woman - the Fate, with her 12 maids. The 12 maids are interesting too - perhaps, as I'm sure many have speculated before me, is the magical Goddess number 13 (representing 13 lunations of the year, 13 menstual cycles, the very number that became so "unlucky" in later patriarchal myth spinning). Bythis same re-mything process, Penelope became gradually diminished in the Odyssey, becoming the faithful wife, waiting for her adventuring husband (he was kind of the last word n the "hero's journey") to come home. And when he does, after eliminating the suitors who have been infringing upon his kingdom, he hangs Penelope's 12 maids as well, (for having been seduced or raped by the various suitors).

A much earlier Goddess, an earlier paradigm of the Web and the Sacred Feminine. Perhaps, at last, Penelope, weaving her Spider Web, reveals another transparent thread, an ancient myth that winks at me, at least, from my morning paper.

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, poet, and feminist wit, had a few things to say about the Odyssey recently - from the point of view of Penelope - in her 2005 novel

THE PENELOPAID

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2007.10--margaret-atwood-novel/

I loved the book, would love to have seen it on stage as well - apparently, complete with the 12 hanged maids as Greek Chorus.