the throne of psyche (mercer, 2011)

7/30/2019 The Throne of Psyche (Mercer, 2011)

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Sample poems from

THE THRONE OF PSYCHE

Mercer University Press, 2011

Marly Youmans


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful thanks to the editors who accepted or requested the poems

in this collection for first publication and reprints:

A Child at the Tropic Pavilions:Mythic PassagesA Dutch Burgher: The Raintown Review

A Fire in Ice: The Raintown Review

After Storm:Electric VelocipedeAt Cullowhee: The HyperTexts

At Prentiss Cottage: The Raintown Review

Blurbs of the Poets (1st

section):Mezzo Cammin

Botticelli: qarrtsiluniCelan: Books & Culture

Childbirth, or the Forest of Death: The Eclectic Muse

Children of Paradise: Cold Mountain Review; reprinted inCold Mountain Review 35th

Anniversary Issue

Dream of a Waltz with God: The Deronda Review

Godspell, or December Triptych:Mythic Passages

Gulf:Mythic PassagesHeard in the Dying Year:Mythic Passages

Her Girlhood:Mezzo Cammin

Here We Go Round:Mezzo CamminHyfrydol: The Eclectic Muse

In Extremis:storySouth

Memory of Youth: Electric Velocipede

Mending Nets:Mythic PassagesNear the End of the World: Unsplendid

Nihongan Altar: Books & Culture; reprinted in The HyperTexts

Parable of Dust: The Raintown ReviewPsyche Enthroned:Mezzo Cammin

Psyche in Hell:Mezzo Cammin

Rue for A. E. Housman: Books & CultureSelf-portrait as Dryad, no. 2:Mezzo Cammin

Self-portrait as Dryad, no. 4:Mezzo Cammin

Self-portrait as Dryad, no. 5: qarrtsiluni

Snow White in Wildwood:Mezzo CamminSome Other Things I Hated About the 20

thCentury: Oyster Boy Review

Southern to the Bone:storySouth

Spell for Raine:Mythic Passages

Stones in the Wilderness:Mezzo CamminSyrinx Song:Mezzo Cammin

Continued


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Tears of a Boy, Age 6:Books & Culture

The Angel with the Broken Face: The HyperTexts

The Artist as Hephaestus:Mythic PassagesThe Artist of God:Books & CultureThe Black Flower:storySouth

The Devils Curse on Women: Common Thread / Common Ground:A Collection of Essays on Early Samplers and Historical Needlework,ed. Marsha Van Valin (Sullivan, Wisconsin: The Scarlet Letter,

2001)

The Exiles Track:storySouthThe Fall:Mythic Passages

The Fire Girl:Lady Churchills Rosebud Wristlet

The Ghost Crabs Woman:Electric Velocipede; reprinted in

Off the Coastal Path (U.K.: Stanza Press of P. S. Publishing, 2010)The Gulls:Electric Velocipede

The Kirkyard Deer: The Eclectic Muse

The Library Pictures:Mythic PassagesThe Marriage Bed:Mezzo Cammin

The Moon on the Strand:Electric Velocipede

The Nesting Doll:McSweeneys Internet Tendency

The Sea of Traherne:Books & Culture; reprinted in The HyperTextsThe Sky Door:Electric Velocipede

The Starflower:Mythic Passages

The Tithonus Variations:Mythic PassagesTwo Incidents of Curiosity:Mezzo Cammin

When Demons Ruled: Electric Velocipede

Why the People Disliked Art, Circa 2005:Electric Velocipede

Zephyr:Mezzo Cammin


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CONTENTS Poems marked in red are in this selection


The Throne of Psyche

I. Her GirlhoodII. Zephyr

III. The Marriage BedIV. Two Incidents of Curiosity

V. Syrinx Song

VI. Psyche in Hell

VII. Psyche Enthroned

THE EXILES TRACK

The Exiles Track

Southern to the Bone

When Demons RuledHere We Go Round

The Nesting Doll

The Black FlowerThe Devils Curse on Women

A Fire in Ice

Childbirth, or The Forest of DeathChildren of Paradise

Some Other Things I Hated About the Twentieth Century

The Fall

The Angel with the Broken FaceIn Extremis

Snow White in Wildwood

EARTH-DWELLERS

Rue for A. E. Housman

Celan

The Artist of God

Continued


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Godspell, or December Triptych

Botticelli

The Fire GirlParable of Dust

A Dutch Burgher

The Sea of TraherneSpell for RaineThe Tithonus Variations

Gulf

At Cullowhee

ARCHIPELAGOS

Near the End of the World

The Sky Door

The Ghost Crabs WomanThe Gulls

The Moon on the Strand

Memory of YouthAfter Storm

Self-portrait as Dryad, no. 2

Self-portrait as Dryad, no. 4Self-portrait as Dryad, no. 5

The Artist as Hephaestus

Why the People Disliked Art, circa 2005

THRESHOLDS

Tears of a Boy, Age 6

Blurbs of the Poets

A Child at the Tropic PavilionsDream of a Waltz with God

Heard in the Dying Year

The Library PicturesMending Nets

The Kirkyard Deer

At Prentiss CottageNihongan AltarThe Starflower

Stones in the Wilderness

Hyfrydol


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3 sectionsfrom the 7-part



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A souls mysterious as any treeIt drives a root as deadly low as hell,

It stretches peaceful branches heaven-high,It harvests light with leaves of memory.

I. HER GIRLHOOD

You see the limestone wall that catches light

Those olive trees inside the circuit of stone?

The gardeners said the eldest one had passed

Three thousand years. It looks as gnarled and scarredAs rind from dragons that survived a war,

And underneaths the spot where I was born,

The Queen my mother snatched by sudden painsWhile walking in the garden. I looked up

And saw the sun like showered stars in leaves.

You think I cant remember? Yes, I can;

And I remember breeze and branches tossed,The olive shifting, singing down at me,

Saying I was Psyche, blessed and blessing

I made a cry and Mother laughed in joyAnd drew her knife across the bloody cord.

A Queen is busy like an ant whose nest

Is shattered open by a curious

Small child: the tree became a family,A secret place to go and talk or hide.

I ate her fruit, I drank her bitter teas

When I was ill, and someone carved a dollFleshed in olive wood from wind-thrown branches.

The greenish face with streaks of yellow-brown

Made me daydream strangers from anotherWorld where sky was rose and water purple.

In ours, my sisters married parched old kings

To give my father fine alliances;

I scaled the tree and heard an oracleForetell I would not bear a fate like theirs.

The courtiers made me abashed with praise

That I was fair, the people offered gifts

As though I were a goddess from the sky.I grew afraid and gods grew angry, as

They willyet why, since time is always on

Their side? I clambered up my olive treeAnd harkened to the auguring of leaves:


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Id have a fate calledstrange and wonderful.

But messengers approached my fathers throneTo tell how I must be a sacrifice

To temper Aphrodites jealousy.

A monster tarried on the mountaintop,My promised bridegroomwinged and scaled from soleTo crown, the color of a stormy cloud

But hard as armor from the gods own forge.

I thought of sisters, queens in jeweled crowns,Of truce between security and looks

And guessed perhaps there was more than one way

To be consumed. All gossiped I would be

A morsel for my bridegrooms evening feed;My mother shrieked, my father slashed his robes,

Our people raised a mighty swell of grief.

I tipped the polished bronze from side to side

But could not find why such a fate was mine

A face in metal or in water is

A dim and shining thing. I clambered upAnd listened to more prophecy of leaves,

How I would shiver like an olive branch

Before I tasted fate, how I was meantTo be unlike all others of my world,

How I would grow as radiant as a tree

Below the burning chariot of sun.

So when the peoples loud procession came,I did not cry or flee. I bound my doll

Of greenish olive wood into my sash

And climbed past aloes to the mountaintop,Walking as if between two founts of tears:

My mother and father, for whom I tried

To be a comforter despite my dread,Though all the while I gripped the olive wood

That lived three thousand years, as if the luck

Of living long might sink into my palm

And shin a tree of blood up to my heart.I was sixteen the night I watched the court

And people winding like a starry snake

Down the mountains flank to town or palace,

And wept as one by one the torches died.It seems a thousand years ago to me

And only instants: how my courage flared

Or failed at noises in the wildernessI could not speak for dread of the unknown. Stanza break


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On my last morning of familiar things,

Id flung my arms around the rugged trunk,And leaves had fluttered message in my ear:

Inside you is a beauty left untouched

By thrones or the admiring throngs of men,And seeking at your girlhoods door is love,A glistering monster and a child of light,

A mountain errand dark with mystery,

A loveliness that springs up from a seedThose leaves of fire, that bright enchanted tree.


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III. THE MARRIAGE BED

And if the palace seemed bewitching, how

Much more the bed, a marvel of the gods

Like nothing for an earthly king and queen,A lustrous treasure box packed up in silks,Four-legged, each leg a tree of ebony.

As shadows slid across the windowsills,

Collecting in the corners of the room,The trees began to send out wands and leaves,

Darkening the air with gleaming branches.

Whoever saw such freedom from the laws

Of earth? I stared, forgot to tremble inMy wonder as new tendrils wove a maze

Above a bed that glistened, beetle-black.

Unseen hands drew dusk across the portalAnd windows, carried off the glowing lamp,

And strewed fresh petals on the inlaid floor.

If this was how my promised husbands house

Received his bride, perhaps the feathered snakefor so Apollos oracle foretold

Could be more beautiful than I had dreamed,

If flying terror could be beautiful.Shade took the room until I could not see.

A mimic springtime blossomed on each branch

As tiny stars shone out, began to crawl

And sometimes blink like phosphorescent bugs.

I fell asleep and shinned the olive tree

That waxed inside my mothers garden wallsAnd heard a crinkling of the leaves that spoke

Oracular to me of love and fate,

But where was dream and where the waking worldI hardly knew, and when the feathered snake

Came wooing with eternal promises,

I let him hold me in his arms that seemed

More like a mans than like a serpents grasp.Yet fear is strange: at times he seemed all scales

That snagged against the linen of my gown,

At times he seemed as yielding as a child.

I woke to find that what I dreamed was trueThe rustle of his wings was like the leaves,

The arms that pinned me close were like a mans,

Although no man could emanate such fire,A darkness glowing in the chambers pitch.


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But what did I, long sheltered in my home,

Know of the ways of monsters or of men?

A tree of nerves sprang into trembling lifeInside this body that the world desired

But never knewthe starry insects swarmed

Among the maze of limbs and multipliedUntil the dark was pricked with flecks of lightThat gave no seeing to my open eyes.

The snake kept winding on the tree of me

I flashed with nervous fire from root to leafAnd shivered as my gown was tugged aside.

A rush of wood: new saplings broke the floor

And forested the chamber, wild with growth.

The room dissolved as floor was changed to earthAnd roof transformed to sky and swarming stars.

In midnights wilderness my lover struck

Asunder all my childhoods innocenceThe little stars went shrieking through the wood

As jet-black trees contracted, splintered, fell.

I lay within a nest of shattered twigs.A shape with wings was sobbing on my breast,

Some wall between us battered down to dust.

I touched the face invisible to me.His serpent pinions beat convulsively.


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VI. PSYCHE IN HELL

My former life was but a shade that drankThe blood of memory to speak the past;

Id suffered change to something radiant

And strange even to me. Likewise the worldCame streaming with a light I never knewAnd bent its brute affections to my call

When Aphrodite tortured me with trials,

The glinting ants divided grain by kind,The Syrinx-reeds confessed a secret way

To pluck the golden fleece from animals

That boiling sun transforms to demonkind,

And birds scooped droplets from the mouth of Styx.But I despaired when Aphrodite sent

Me to fetch a store of hellish beauty

I might have ended as my sisters did,Plunging quick from mountain-crest to Hades,

But stones cried out to save me from that fate,

And gravelled voices told the mystery

Of how to forge through death, return to sun.I packed the coins for Charon, honey cakes,

The box that Aphrodite tossed; I braved

The sulphur vents, the noise, volcanic sproutsOf flame that shot from earth like molten trees,

And then I slipped inside the throat of Hell.

They are not wrong who talk of grotesque impsAnd beasts that howl and bristle on the path.

I reached the jet-black artery of flood

And shuddered as old Charon pocketedThe passage-coin: my death seemed near to me,

And so I craved the world of light and trees,

Shrinking from the dead who moan and flutterIn search of something, something they have lost.

I pitched the dog a sop of honey cake

To keep his three heads locked in quarreling

And passed inside the black-thorned palace gates.

As in a bitter glass, Persephone

Seemed meimagine if my love was lord

Of night and fire, volcanic in his moodsAnd half in love with deep oblivion,

Instead of being bright and frolicsome.

She wanted me to stay; she begged me eatAnd offered jewels of pomegranate seeds


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That I refused. A darkness clung to me

On my return, and whisperings of love

Disturbed my thought. I clutched the beauty boxThat now was laden, though it had been light,

Endured the weight of hell like wings of lead

Dragging at my backstumbled on till sunDanced incandescent on my face and skin,And settled like new wings on shoulder blades.


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5 poems

from the section,THE EXILES TRACK


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THE EXILES TRACK

At midnight I went down to the lake, and there

I saw the Northern Lights as seven swords

Of long-dead kings that glimmered in the sky.They were as thin and cold as icicles,Set evenly above a shoal of cloud

The winters glittering eyes drew low to see,

Its glories made into one burning look.

I stepped onto the marble arrowhead

That points the way to North forevermore,

And though I stood below a canopyClose-crowded with the bright burrs of the stars,

And though I held my love, and though our children

Were safe and sleeping at my back, I metAnd knew a loneliness beyond all heal.

A silvery voice arose out of the spires,

Out of the darks offhanded elegance:You gave your heart away, oh, long ago,

So theres no helpnow you must bide in frost,

And when you die, the reapers men will scarThe ground for your grave, or else will burn your limbs

And bury the ash in a wall of stone.


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SOUTHERN TO THE BONE

1.

To explainas if she could!She says: When I was youngAnd passing fair and strong

Like a girl in a fairy tale,

I ran from God and angels.I flew to dark powers

--Though they arent dark but seeming-light,

With glamour on them like the fey

And I frisked with the demons on the hills,

Then curled to sleep against their thighs,A wing along my bow-bent spine.

I woke, dappled with dew.

And found that they had pickedMe clean of clothes and more,

Treasures dear to me.

I was bereft.

I was: weakness.

All-conquering.

The rains

Began.


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2.

She says:

Rain is rain is rain.This was no rain but light,

Or not light but arrowy

Fine peltings of a fireShot slantwise through the skin

Until I could not tell

What was me from rain

Or light, and river wavesNot-rain-or-light-or-fire

Swamped me until I drowned

And washed into the sea,To drift with sailor boys

Past luminous weeds and fish

Unto the roots of the world.

3.

Dont ask her any more

What Southern really means,

Or why we just cant quit

Mulling over a taleOf rum and slaves and gold.

She married powers of dark.She burned in bright rivers.

Thats why.


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WHEN DEMONS RULED

This world became impossibly complex.

The people fattened but were small as toys

Insidelazy and sour, as though a hex

Had taken hold. A womans outer poise

Disguised an inner cowering of nerve,

And often sons remained forever boys.

I watched my daughters flower, only to swerve

Toward superstition, lies, and games of chance

In other days our kind had vied to serve.

The demon brood condemned me for a glance.

A devil locked me in their fortressed towers,But when they saw me try to sing and dance,

Tower changed to thimble, and life to hours,

Song to shriek in the Ministry of Powers.


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THE NESTING DOLL

Once upon a time a little doll

Encountered demons in the woods near home.

One took the guise of well-bred traveler,Smiling and chatting as he touched her hereAnd there, at last worming into her mouth

By cunning sleights so he could taste her soul.

At first the demon could not find the soul,

And he was roiling-wroth against the doll,

Sending her vomit, scalding her small mouth

With curses; Mama turned her out from home,And Papa yodeled, She wont bunk down here

But take her thwacks and be a traveler.

How cruel to make a child a traveler,

A ditch her nest! The black night of her soul

Expelled a single star; the demon could hear

It crackle, plunging like the tears the dollHad shed when she looked back at Home Sweet Home.

Wrinkles were rock around her papas mouth.

The demon snatched the starlight in his mouth

Then grief was in him like the traveler

They call the Wandering Jew, who has no home

And cannot die. The fiery drop of soulExplored his throat and gut; meanwhile the doll

Kept dreaming that some girl would beg, Stop here.

Nobody did. The demon still could hear

Her words; in pools he must have glimpsed her mouth

Bewailing fate, although it seemed the dollWas rubbish to him now, the traveler

Less than the tiny prisoned flame of soul

That made his mazy heart a hearth and home.


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A demons heart is a queer sort of home . . .

Yet the star burned as brightly there as hereOr any place and had not changed from soul.

At times it whisked up to the demons mouth.

Perhaps light sought to reach the travelerAnd knew when demon yielded to the doll.

When home was starlight singing in her mouth,

All powers burned to hear the travelerAnd marveled soul was nested in a doll.


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A FIRE IN ICERiposte to Billy Collins, Taking Off Emily Dickinsons Clothes

Dont think because her words are wild

That Dickinsons a sylphine child

For your undressingsdont rend the haze

Of veils that shields you from her blaze.

Her hands are capable and know

The ways of burninghow sparks blow

When flames are jostled by a boldAdept, her fingers tipped with cold.

And though in after-hours she threadsThe dew she plucks from spiderwebs,

Or answers Who?to midnights owls,

Or strokes the cats, returned from prowls

Or takes to skipping to and fro

With moonlit maidens made of snow,

Shell freeze, inviolate and meek,

If you so much as try to speak.

Shove offavoid those brazen wings:

Shes not for your unbuttonings.

The polished stone above her head

Declares her state among the dead:

Here waits that sphinx whose secret powerIn riddles found her finest flower.

the throne of psyche (mercer, 2011)

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