A Secret Birth

     by Brett Rutherford

     After a Callimachus fragment, Aetia, 48

Three hundred Titan years old Kronos slept
while young Zeus and his enamor’d Hera
coupled without let-up, nights — and days, too!
Nectars narcotic they sent
     to the watchful and jealous father,
by the hands of garlanded Dryads,
and, from the lips of Iris, distracting
rumors of some trifles and petty strifes
whose answered he could delegate, then turn
his pillows over for another nap.

Then from Zeus’s labors
     and Hera’s womb’s machinery,
with clank and clatter,
     there came such a birth,
red-light the sky from pole to pole, a cry
as loud as a factory whistle, a smack
as of the first bright anvil, ever, struck
by the world’s first hammer, forged from ore.

Hera, whom Zeus hung upside down, cut cord
with her own sickle knife and cried the name
of their dear new Olympian:
“Hephaestos, the gods’ armory, be born!”

The Ox of Dryops

     by Brett Rutherford

     After a Fragment from Callimachus, Aetia, 24

Now Heracles, in company
of his young son, was slowed
when a thorn, which pierced
the boy’s tender foot
made him unable to walk.
The way was long, across
the plowed fields of Dryops,
and the solar disk seemed
uncommonly hot upon them.
Hungry and out of sorts,
young Hyllus tore at Heracles’ hair.

Just then came Thiodamus,
spindly on nimble feet,
yet still a mighty man
from the looks of him,
into the might hero’s sight.
Across the deep, dry fallow
the old man goaded on,
a ten-foot snapping pole
in one arm, a lazy brown ox.

Hailing the stranger, Heracles,
the generous donor of so many
deeds and labors, and once
he had praised the land and the fields,
and the beneficent orb
whose heat beat down upon them,
inquired, “I great pray a boon.
This wounded child calls out
for nourishment. If anything
your shoulder-bag can spare,
a mouse-size morsel, bread,
or a mouthful of fruit or nut,
would make our moving on
more swift, and quiet him.
I shall always remember you,
how amid your labors,
you were kind to another.”

The arrogant ox-herd
whipped out the floating pole
from ox-back to the very nose
of Heracles. “You, beggar,
and a fool to boot, know
ye not I am King of these parts?
Only a knave can claim
to hunger here. Pass on,
and may the burning noon
     finish you.” The King spat
and turned his back to them.

So what was a demi-god to do?
He seized the howling ox
and hurled it so far up
it looked no bigger than
a starling in silhouette,
and when it came down, its back
was broken. It bellowed. It died.

As Thiodamus fled
to summon his forces,
or hide beneath his blankets,
father and son devoured
the beast from tongue to tail.

Thus, ever and anon,
the uncharitable must pay.

Envy and Apollo (After Callimachus)

by Brett Rutherford

    After Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo

And Envy whispered
into Apollo’s ear,
“Who cares about the writer
     of mere epigrams?
What matters it that some comedian
     sends jokes into a thousand ears
         and laughter propagates
               like mushrooms gone mad
               in a spring sweat?
What matters is that someone swoons
    while playing a harpsichord
          or that high C’s bounce off
             the opera house balcony?

Give favor instead
     to only the grandest things:
arches imperial and gold pavilions,
fights to the death on an even bet,
treasures piled up beyond account,
and the kind of art that goes along
with a thousand-year reign.
Give favor instead to heroic sagas,
to lines that outlast
the tuning of the lyre,
to epics long-lined
and even longer-winded.
Embrace Hyperbole.
Bless nothing that’s not as big
as the world-girding Ocean.”

Apollo turned, and with one foot,
he stamped on Envy’s pretty neck,
just as he had once crushed
the mighty Python.
“Wide is the torrent wild
of the great Euphrates,”
the god explained
    to Vanity’s idiot daughter,
“Yet half its flow is silt and muck.
And not from any common flow
do priestesses fill Demeter’s bowl.
From one small stream
whose origin is a holy fountain
from there the best of waters come.

“Look here, at the world’s navel,
at the blessed spot of Delphi.
None come in chariots,
     but one by one, on foot,
         each must ascend and wait.
Do horns call out
     if something that calls itself
          a king arrives here? No!
Does some triumphal arch offend
     the sight of sea and cliff and sky?
Again, Envy, no.
That which is least, is best:
Greeks hurl their epigrams
as well as I my arrows.

“Temples may come and go.
No glint of gold spells out
my name upon the pediment.
One Doric column suffices."

Money Was Made

 by Brett Rutherford

      After Callimachus, Aetia

Some kings will do anything, once
tempted by a good prospect.

“Drain not the blessed lake
     of Camarina!”
an oracle proclaimed. What then
some foolish elders did,
to someone’s profit, was just that.

Of course, the city fell.

Fire Is Not Easy

Coustou, statue of Vulcan/Hephaestus (Louvre Museum)

 

by Brett Rutherford

     After Callimachus, Aetia, 48

Why did mankind
in dark and cold endure
so many eons without fire?

Fire is no easy thing.
Rock does not yield it easily,
and zealous Zeus
strikes seldom where a blaze
survives the onslaught
of rain and hail that follow.

There was a time
before bronze, before
the metals coursed
like water in the smithy’s forge.

Once the Olympian father
had the thing in mind,
he had to make a personage
whose job it would be
to lord it over volcanoes,
and be the patron god
of weapons-makers.

Three hundred years it took
on top of Hera, laboring
at the sweaty act of love.
The cosmos shook as though
some vast machinery
of pistons and gears
warred with itself

in gasp and groan,
laughter and love-cry
until we got, full-grown,
and unapologetic for the pain
he caused his mother,
that sour grump god
they call Hephaestus.

 

 

The Argo Got Away

Lorenzo Costa, The Argo

 

 by Brett Rutherford

     After Callimachus, Aetia 7, 19-21

Wronged men always
have gods on their sides.
Invoking ancestral blood
and the cities founded
by men of the same name,
they suppose Apollo,
or Zeus, or quick-to-ire
Poseidon, will aid them.

But the one with the Fleece,
the stolen daughter,
the rifled treasures
is far at sea already.
Do the same gods protect
the absconding lovers?
Do prayers from pretty things
outweigh the laments of princes?

Medea’s father breathes his last,
gasping on unfettered poison.
The Colchian ships sit idle,
limp and windless. The Argo,
rich in treason and betrayal
vanishes over the horizon.

 

 

Birth of a Poem

 by Brett Rutherford

     From a fragment of Callimachus, Aetia 7

There must be someone,
some Eileithyia, midwife
or fairy of the birthing hour
that oversees new poems
kindly, and sends them forth.
Just as in Paros they honor her,
an idol dressed in gilt-edged
robes and daily blessed —

may such a one come to me,
     Ellate nun, elegoisi
         d’enipseisasthe liposas
          cheiras emois
wiping her two anointed hands
not on my head, but on my elegies,
     ina moi poulu
          mensois ’itos,
that they may go on forever,
beyond my span of years,
to live beyond fire,
     and forgetting,
to leap the wormholes
     of tattered papyrus
and come back whole again.

A poem, once begun:
can it ever be finished?