Cassandra (2)

Cassandra (2)

Waiting patient
For Agamemnon’s murder,
And the likewise bloody deaths
Of a thousand other smug and violent
Blind mouse kings
Before him, and well, well after him besides…
It all makes no difference,
Not in Cassandra's eyes.

"My sense of time," she tells
The boy who attends her, who listens,
The boy who appears in each generation,
Or at least in those where she cannot manage
To tell her tale herself…

She goes on with him, saying,
"It's not your sense of time
And never will be

Unless you too
Were raped by Apollo?

Do you recall the assault, the intrusion
Of Reason’s hardness, Reason’s lust to control,
Especially Reason’s need to keep Time in line?
Because without Time in line, Reason cannot Be.

If you forget all else I’ll freely tell you,
Knowing you will grow to disbelieve me
In most of it, remember this…
Reason’s prick relies on keeping Time in Line to keep it steady,
Keep it hard, and at the ready… to keep matters as they are
And as Reason will insist matters always, always have been. And we
Know, don’t we now, that just ain’t true?"

The boy Homer stares now, wide-eyed beyond simile’s grasp
Or metaphor’s Achilles grip.
The boy knows he has heard a great mystery, and yet…
Cassandra’s sad eyes look on him,
Knowing he will forget too much
Telling him so, if he would only hear the words clear in her eyes

So:

Before this story becomes the much-loved epic
Of a culture that esteems that ever manly love
And war bonds of every kind and shape:

She knows he will one day feel compelled to mock her,
Not aware that, though she will soon seem to die,
Just after her abductor, Agamemnon,
Lies bloody punctured by jealous hands and agents of
Righteous old mad Clytemnestra.

Still:

Cassandra’s true and real curse
Is to live on and on,
Repeating an almost identical cycle
Of doomed marriage after doomed marriage,
Marriages rarely made with her own consent
Marriages she knows will end in bloodshed
At the very least
Century upon century,
Aeon upon aeon,

In a cycle that appears to her
As the infinite serpent
Coiling and coiling into
A nearly infinite future.

And that she knows
This future is not infinite,
But only very very long,
Is chilling comfort, since she also knows
Does not suspect, does not intuit but she knows
Her own eventual release will come only
At this price: Namely,

On account of the greedy race itself
Which at the tail-end of the tale
Impales itself on its own greed
And on its gnawing
hunger for impossibilities.

4/4/2001 10:09 PM