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.
Coustou, statue of Vulcan/Hephaestus (Louvre Museum)
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.
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.
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?
