Invoking Erato
Isle of Promethea
Persephone: All Bound Up
Lady Tiresias: Seven Years a Woman
for Audre Lorde
Won’t you help me?
I’m awash in words, arms tired, sore.
Won’t you help me
Bail the words? Writing is rough sea;
I’m lost, foundering without oars;
Perched on the thwart, I drift offshore.
Won’t you help me?
No wily mind do I possess. For if I had,
would I be chained, thus, to this rock, with lengths
of metal, grey like my mind and just as stolid? These manacles
bruise what joy I might hope to find and the sound of my own
bondage shakes me free of intermittent sleep. Daybreak. Unbidden,
the eagle, as if by prayer, cuts the sky, all beak and talons
focused upon my flesh. I half-smile and nod assent, impart
a blessing for his sake that he even bothers to remember
to visit me each day. A poor host, I can only offer
my liver, white with lust, a sweetbread I can't give away.
So, I am accused of stealing fire. Explain the sense of stealing
what no one wants anyway. Look carefully at me, the way I am,
bound, hardwired to the bifurcated desires this body demands.
The thunder, and the thunder, and the thunder sounds.
Pedestrian, I have never managed to outrun the lightning.
I find solace on this rock, surrounded by a wake of water and sky
abandoned by Zeus without benefit of even a copse of trees
to contemplate in the gloaming. Left alone again, I stir
the embers of what I could never steal, for the fire was always,
and ever will be, mine to do with as I please.
I had been gone days before my mother noticed.
Demeter, so busy with the exigencies of living
had not guessed I'd gone. Gone. No grip,
no valise, just my weakened determination
to find a plausible escape from Zeus, that arse.
For this reason, I do not embellish doors
deadbolted, nor thighs grazing across window sills.
All that pretense, just for show. I merely traipsed after
a thought, for if I could scramble after that thought,
any thought, my mind would not collapse in upon itself.
Begin here: let Hades off the hook. Irons fashioned
into curved points are not conducive to truth-telling.
Isn't every marriage an abduction? (Stop,
insert archaic smile.) No, I let him wear me down,
for there are so few men deserving of women
like me, epic landscapes who consider being anyone's
queen a burden, robe or no robe. Certainly, he knew
I could have survived on tea several months more.
But the world needed a silvered-veined leaf,
a yarn capable of dividing boredom into
recognizable seasons. Alas, poor Hades.
Six pomegranate seeds? Mythology's rube.
Helios swears he surveys all. Okay, he does, but why
did he decide upon such a fanciful lie: abduction? Me,
come now. Tsk, tsk. No one would be so foolish.
He had observed I only brought the most
well-behaved songbirds home, guided them carefully
through the rituals, then wrung each neck. He read
the signs: a mother desires normalcy for her daughter.
Rape, however unimaginable, proved a more suitable lie.
Dead, I watch the cardinal attack its glass image
each morning, then alight upon the day and am always
reduced to tears. This is what I miss most: dawn
in my mother's house. I should have known,
I certainly should have known. Having lain with Zeus
like a statue with dead eyes, Mama would've understood.
Lady Tiresias: Seven Years a Woman
No form will do for this work. Augury is simply a job
to be done. I sit with head lowered, an unthreatening figure
at the well. Though blind, I can read the meaning in all lives
save my own. I know the meaning of the signs: the scorched
ivy climbing the courtyard wall, the rusting hasp
meant to hold the run-down gate, the virgin's furtive glance,
the snakes intertwined. No relief comes
at night. The first time I laid with a man I understood
the importance of whether a woman offers you her mouth or not,
a woman may offer what lies hidden below, but never that
which rises above: her heart, her hands, her lips, her mind.
By day, the crowds wait and wait and wait amid dust and disease.
The lines do not let up. Some dreaming of floods, others dreaming
of easier of work, the laborers patiently cue around, a braid
amid the prostitutes and bankers and fishmongers
for the one truth they already know. For it is always the same
utterance: an empty bed can rule your mind like fire.
I am a foreigner to this body, and no one will break bread
with me because the small-talk never comes easy.
R. Flowers Rivera is a Mississippi native with a Ph.D. in African American literature and creative writing from Binghamton University. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Georgia and holds an M.A. from Hollins University, in addition to an M.S. from Georgia State University. Rivera was awarded the 2009 Leo Love Merit Scholarship in Poetry in association with the Taos Summer Writers Conference. Her short story, "The Iron Bars," won the 1999 Peregrine Prize. She was a 2002 finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Award for Poetry, and she received two nominations for Pushcart XXVII. She was also a 2001 finalist for the May Swenson Award for Poetry and the Journal Award in Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in Mischief, Caprice & Other Poetic Strategies, and her work has been published in journals such as African American Review, Columbia, Evergreen Chronicles, Beloit Poetry Journal, Obsidian, The Southern Review, and Xavier Review. Her poetry manuscript, Troubling Accents, is forthcoming from Xavier Review Press in June 2013.
