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?

 

Hesiod's Deam

by Brett Rutherford

     From Callimachus, Aetia, 2.

A Muse in a dream
came to Hesiod, as sheep
also slumbered on Helicon.
The things she said
     regarding Chaos, he
could not recall, her words
reduced to ellipses.
But then another said,
in tones that burned:
“The evil done to another,
fills your own heart with woe.”