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RAPUNZEL IN THEBES
On le chasse. On le chasse
avec une extrème douceur.
JEAN COCTEAU, Œdipe.
There are earth-movers at work here, Mother,
their hunched silhouettes simplifying
the horizon you knew. Yet our days
and nights are filled with groaning.
In the new gardens there will still be things—
berries or tubers—that husbands
will steal to satisfy a craving. I scattered
earth for the dead and saw men hurrying
home with vegetables pressed to their
noisy breasts. All offspring belong
to the Old One, Mother, to the midwife crone,
the giver of guilt. The steam-shovels,
bulldozers and back-hoes are readying the desert acres
for quicksilver rivers, they say. That your
grandchildren might smile from their cradle
like the sun and moon, your daughter—
since her hairs began to spurt—has had to build
her nest in a stairless tower in a thicket
of roses and has crooned to a starless sky.
Brothers will always battle for land,
but now the rock is hammered to dust, night
after night that dust is moistened
by the dewy dribbles of my dreaming
of my dead father-brother, his clumsy gentleness,
his brown and blinded hand climbing
the rope-ladder waterfall of my hair. The Old One
has shaved me, Mother. She has made him
lock me in this tomb-tower, buried with a boy of straw.
The night is airless. But the day leaks in
and the rivers will run, I know. My tears
will rinse the dried blood from his empty eyes,
and when I have wrapped him in my new-grown hair
he will see me then as once he looked at you.
   
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