Mythologies

Mythologies

Mythologies

In the old days it was easy—
enough to recognize
a god or two benignly
winking above the sill, barely surprised
if a bull you stroked
with blue eyes and a lovecurl
between his horns tried it
on or a swan cam thwacking
your thighs. There were charms
to be laid out in the sun and rhymes
to mutter. Girls had been made
into stars before Hollywood,
and no bobby-soxer
in my day, alone
on Naxos, would have refused
Sinatra. The lives
of the brightest of us fitted
on a Fantales wrapper. Satan
had a black smudge under
his nose, answered to Hitler, and history
happened but we weren’t in it, only kings

And now where are we? Lost
in the Supermarket, hesitating over
Gustav Mahler’s Greatest Hits
and Kitty Kat or Zen, a god-sized phallic
vibrator and deodorants
(vaginal) to suit all tastes from Crêpe au Kummel
to strawberry double-malted. The stars
are gaseous and real. Aerosol
evenings rockets us
skyward — the occasion’s
a forest, Breath o’Pine, and we. Monsieur Rochas and Madam,
recline on a Numdah rug while Ali Akhbar
Khan beats up
a raga. Even the cats
come to us out of Asia
on snowy paws, the small bones of their fathers,
to inhabit a yawn. Rubbing the silence
their fur picks up the static
of distant meteors, their nightlong metal-shrill
lovebouts set our nerves
on edge. But if the gods
still deign, it is surely
in one of these. Green eyes
turned to a stately music, looking past us
and our sad preoccupations,
they glide between our legs
like Zeus; forgotten powers
stir. Only the time is not propitious.
Old charms laid out
in the sun catch nothing
but a headcold or a bad case of sunburn. For both
of which we have remedies:
the right cure for the wrong, the fatal ill.