Marriage of ruin foretold The couple on everyone’s lips, Paris and Eleni, a reconstruction based on what someone, who worked in the very cafe, told me they claimed to have heard, and what the talking bird saw from its cage and still playing out in its eye first meeting in the Cafe ‘Sparta’ never a dark warmer a sorrow under your eyes i offer them only a smiling emptiness expect flame upon me. second meeting drinking coffee with you from each other’s cup, the other diners not even in our eye, as if we cared... the sharp taste of your eyes shying away in laughter at my mean grasp. i’ll kill us both this way. third meeting body shapes body i know i believe an inner shape where all your dark rests harder to touch afraid reaching it lest it turn me back meeting outside the closed cafe in the strangeness pleasure climbing like neon or falling like stairs thrown out of light you held to yourself now show me your mirror under the skin risk me punching it through with a silver handled blade its globe in an eagle’s claw myself more violent since you forced me show an empty hand i’d counted my heart. walking the river everything you were born to has waned to a few points in mind compass turns of the heart unresting this city waxes over you overshadows every imagining of any other life but its own. this city rising turns the heart’s sunk light back on itself. your husband’s brother a murderer if ever i saw one would slaughter the doe of his own hearth would burn a city down like a wasps nest coated in pitch leave this poisoned house these walls built with the bones of mountains morning ride in the end it comes down to me all your dark the edge of you are worn away where i consume myself i reach on to you an inkling of you in my direction. eighth meeting i ask you never to let any man tell you how you are he’ll tell you how he hopes you are you’ll belong to him whom you believe last meeting before departure i must give you back into your own life whether i took you somehow or other into mine i don’t know the feeling i need is to give you back. touches words i wished apt as touches weren’t enough to tie us was it the priest of Apollo sun-crazed as an elm in summer who told me there are things given that must not be accepted, even what was won, must be refused abduction to see you laugh like this, worth everything i’m heir to, and they will say how i carried you off when it was you who clung to me in the guise of a beggar, run, run like the hare into my sweet trap you jealous gift the wedding Paris addresses Eleni, now first among Trojan women* * ‘The Trojan women are renowned for their dark hair. Originally it is said they were fair headed, and that the darkness of their hair came from the oils they plied their washed hair with, which turned darkest black as they dried it in the warm shade of their mighty city walls’ From the journals of Stravos of Psemia Eleni to her groom your blood pure from the time of the walls hair pure dark from afternoons your women dried their tangled hair and combed its length afternoons long siestas they spent talking of games of flesh when the wall was footed in night none could claim you, my husband Paris to his bride i believe your heart your hair grown pure from the same dark root a night sky over dry ground as far as the sea that trades winds and empires rain sparking over neon your touch fate surely tripled what i was promised in you, a rainbow’s diadem on storm the city struck in gold tokyo 1993 revised 2020 Copyright ©2020 Peter Le Baige. All Rights Reserved
The music is from a composition, ‘The Sack of Troy’ by Michael Levy, available on Youtube. Michael writes that it was composed for playing on a replica of an ancient Greek ‘kithara’, (the large wooden lyre once played by the professional musicians of ancient Greece) and in the favourite mode of Plato himself, the Dorian. Michael’s intention was to evoke the sort of ancient Greek ‘paean’ style melody (a hymn of thanksgiving) to which the lost epic of ancient Greece, ‘The Sack of Troy’ (Ἰλίου πέρσις, Iliou persis, “Sack of Ilium) could have been recited.
Ruru ki Te Ruru 