Still damp from musical and perfumed fountains.
If I give you my right hand,
Will I be left-handed forever?
If I give you my ear
Will I ever hear music again?
If I give you my eye,
Will I be Cleops until I die?
What do you intend to do with me, anyway?
XIII
Cleopatra
I scatter before you like pollen
Opening like a boulevard of Lebanon cedars,
Leaflets of other loves fluttering in a cyclone of chariots.
My eyes, no longer rimmed with kohl,
Stare blankly into hurricaned space.
The twin asps of desire and despair
Glisten in polished armor at each breast.
You are smeared with my ash,
Your forehead marked
With my sacrificial sign,
Its white imprint rising like hieroglyphics.
Ah, beloved Incense Burner,
Trailing the burnt-out cinders
Of your Exits and Entrances.
XIV
Cleopatra & Antony
Your mouth floats
Before me like a touchstone
I strain to reach with my own.
A whispered word is passed and pressed
Into the fleetness hovering between the image
And my own yearning which becomes
The contours of the sweetness I see.
Your mouth forms my name only once,
Yielding glossy specters of the past
That lap at the corners of Recollection
Like flares burning in the desert,
Residue of remembered breath,
Honeyed and streaked and luminous
With the laurels of our victories.
XV
Antony
I dream in your dust, your imprint still in the pillows,
The phosphorescent shadow of your spine
A glowing agate I hold between my thighs
To warm chilled hips and ease my soldier’s heart.
My hands, lost in the wilderness, worry
Love’s calligraphy, spread out around me
Like the plan of an ancient city under siege.
The column on which it stood rose from your flanks.
The river which divided it flowed from my loins.
There are black pines and grassed mounds in the cite,
Plum trees and lotus thrills in hanging gardens.
How long can this city stand?
One hundred nine thousand and five hundred nights,
To rest in Alexandria.
XVI
Cleopatra
The lover’s total death in your cool limbs
Pale and doomed and it seems without life
Clutching my flanks like a drowned man,
Know that I love you,
That door after door will open for you,
That avenue after avenue will part for you,
That continent after continent will divide for you.
The equitorial heat of Africa is nothing compared to
The heat of my Ptolemaian blood, rich and prancing,
Made for passion’s diadem,
Love’s ardors dried, like a garland round my hips
I dream myself back into the night and pull the hair
Out of your shaggy breast, until you cry out,
Knowing that I love you.
XVII
Cleopatra
The moon rises over your left shoulder
Ah, night beauty, did we love in other lives?
Your hungry face lives
A hundred incarnations under mine,
Hair frayed like a winter chrysanthemum,
Golden eagle! Blue steel under pale lashes,
Antonius! Three centuries since Alexander
Haven’t changed you—I know you!
This is not the first thunder
But a thousand year recognition
I remember you from the young planet
King of Macedon and godson of Caesar.
Like your soldiers, I would as soon die for you
As dine at Amimetobioi.
XVIII
Antony & Cleopatra
Tonight let us lie here love,
For who knows where we shall lie tomorrow.
Tonight let us lie here love,
For God knows where we shall lie tomorrow.
Tonight let us lie here love.
Press my edges with your left hand,
Test my shadow with your right,
Take my right heel in your right hand,
Find your shelter with your left.
Tonight let us at least not lie to each other
That this or anything is no more than life can make it
Or more than we can bear—
For who knows but we will not lie here again,
But you will leave me an empty house.
Plutarch
Nowe Antonius delighting in these fond and childish pastimes, veerie ill newes were brought to him from two places. The first from Rome, that his brother andFulvia his wife, fell out between themselves, and afterwards fell to open war with Caesar.… The second newes that Labienus conquered all Asia. Fulvia, the cause of his warre… in hope thereby to withdraw him from Cleopatra… sickened going to meet Antonius and died. Octavius Caesar, and he were the easier made frendes together, and devided the Empire of Rome between them: it seemed also that Antonius had been a widower ever since the death of his wife Fulvia. For he denied not that he kept Cleopatra, but he did not confesse that he had her as a wife: and so with reason he did not defend the love he bare unto this AEgyptian Cleopatra.… There was Octavia, eldest sister of Caesar… and left widow. Thereupon everie man did set forward this marriage… and so the marriage proceeded accordingly.
The year 40 Bc
XIX
Cleopatra
Whatever violence
I have done thee
You’ve done to me tenfold.
And so we stand quits and quivering,
Two fools,
In love without faith.
For the honest love of one other
Has made every man hate
The dishonest love of another.
For reasons of our own
That tender thread
We’ve lost.
Now I’ll leave
You alone.
XX
Cleopatra
But beware, beloved, Ptolemy women engender violence,
Command money, men, and manumission.
Cleopatra revels in infanticide, regicide, and patricide.
Ptolemy the builder of the museum fathered
Ptolemy II, who exiled his wife to marry his sister.
Ptolemy IV murdered his father, brother, and mother;
Married his sister but murdered her.
Ptolemy V married Cleopatra and fathered
Ptolemy VI, who married his sister Cleopatra,
who Married both her two brothers, of which one brother,
Ptolemy VIII, murdered his child by Cleopatra out of
Vengeance on this wife and sister when she became queen.
He then married his wife Cleopatra’s daughter by her
Second husband, his brother and she, his niece.
XXI
Cleopatra
Ptolemy VII, murdered by his father and uncle, who had
Married his mother, who was also his sister, whom he
Murdered on her wedding night, was also brother to
Ptolemy IX, the other son murdered by his father,
Or his aunt, or his half sister.
Ptolemy X married his sister Cleopatra, but
Ptolemy XI murdered his mother Cleopatra
Ptolemy XII married his cousin Cleopatra but murdered
Her and was himself murdered by the people.
Ptolemy X, a son of Ptolemy XII, fathered a
Cleopatra wh
om he murdered to regain the throne,
Leaving the Cleopatra beside you and her two brothers,
Ptolemy XIV, who drowned fleeing a lost battle, and
Ptolemy XV, whom I, Cleopatra, married and murdered.
XXII
Antony & Cleopatra
“How cruel you are,” you said.
But then you turned your back
When you said it
So as not to see
My face or feel
The flack of price,
Like tendrils of my graying hair
On my stiff neck
To beg …
But even beggars have their bowls
While my royal hand is empty.
Shall I cut it off
As they do in Rome
To make a better beggar?
Plutarch
Antonius also leaving his wife Octavia and little children begotten of her, and his other children which he had by Fulvia: he went directlie into Asia. Then beganne this pestilent plague and mischief of Cleoptraes love (which had slept a longe tyme, and seemed to have bene utterlie forgotten, and that Antonius had geven place to better counsell) againe to kindle, and to be in force, so soone as Antonius came neere unto Syria. And in the ende, the horse of the minde as Plato termeth it that is so hard of rayne (I meane the unreyned lust of concupiscence) did put out of Antonius heade, all honest and commendable thoughtes: for he sent Fonteius Capito to bring Cleopatra into Syria. Unto whome, to welcome her, he gave no trifling things.
The year 36 Bc
XXIII
Cleopatra
My jealousy is a deep Niger-brown, slow-moving silt
Under the surface of life’s dare, unsneaking renegade
At unexpected moments, it uncoils under my left eye,
Against the water and wind that touch your face,
Against the interminable bombardment
Of random words spoken by soldiers and strangers,
Infringing greetings and friendly obligations
Against the Before Me, strewn with wives and children.
Yet I bore you twins, Alexander & Cleopatra
The sun is one, the moon the other, they are the shape of
Our love, double-imaged, unchallengeable as honor:
Which is only a brush with memory, since you married
The first draft of adrenaline leaves me a trembling
Carcass faint with the felony of your unfaithfulness.
XXIV
Antony
Why won’t you sing for me?
Your voice, mute and thick with mysterious coagulants?
Without words, there may be rapture, but not love,
Love needs the venal justification of hearing itself speak.
Silence is the enemy, for silence lets in creaks of doubt
That must be ravished with the turn of a phrase,
A dizzy pirouette of mental telepathy in verse.
Do you love me? Say it. Say it, Damn you.
Silence kills. Death is lack of words.
Your voice should float from lust to light.
The burning brilliance in my head
Is not shuddering of my precious fluids,
But the semen of your sacred testimony
Reaching the holy temple of your mind.
XXV
Antony & Cleopatra
Alexandria sits cross-legged on the beach,
Squatting in whorey indecency,
Facing the sea, the florid odor of bitch heat
Escapes from window-speckled petticoats.
I’ve returned to clutch the suburbs of your skirt,
A refugee washed up in wreck,
Swayed in a silver-chased hammock
Suspended high above the Nile.
I stand watch, a mirror between my thighs
Setting in motion forgotten silk cords tendered
From one century to another,
Unraveling into this shoreless river,
Like the green ribbons in my hair
You used to use, gently, to stay my hands.
XXVI
Cleopatra
Beneath the weight of angry pride
My Pharaohian breasts glisten through Sidonian fabric
Wrought in fine texture by the sley of the Chinese:
My bridal gown warped by Egyptian needles,
Which have separated the warp-web of the legally Wedded,
Touching your map of the world with a peacock feather,
Murmuring quietly this … and this … and this …
Sinai, Arabia, Cyprus, Jericho, Galilee, Lebanon, Crete.
You’re not the only man to pay for my Egyptian Nights.
My Royal Prostitution mortgaged the lives of other men:
Death at dawn was the price of phallic rapture
So don’t wonder that my Tariff is your Territory
Shimmering through Nile-dyed muslin
Murmuring and this … and this … and this …
XXVII
Antony
Our bodies bouquet out
Like fresh-cut flower laid,
A wreath on pale stone.
Torsos making a V for Vincire,
Trunks joined below in joy’s anchor,
Holding fast on many a chartless sea,
Our triangles meet in the dusk
Of the map of the world,
Disappearing into a cumulus of night coils.
A sailor’s knot, salt-drenched and dulcet,
Gleaming like a beacon signaling
Neither rest nor harbor,
But illuminating all the loves that ever were.
Why?
XXVIII
Cleopatra
Deep in the folds of a huge and glistening morning
Penumbric, I lie across you.
The slanting sun probing my back,
A slick dew between the poised weapons of our bodies.
Mine, I know, is weightless upon yours,
No more than a pale color when what I want
Is the weight of Imperial Rome,
Opening you, sliding into soul and substance,
Widening your eyes in astonishment
That refract in the black of my hair:
Extinguished & strangely feminine —
A sudden young girl, lips pursed, sullen and insubordinate.
What did I do, swain? Shatter your solemn and complacent body
With my long-knifed African sun?
XXIX
Antony
Afternoon sleep is so different from night’s.
Its fitful daydreams hang
In the tottering heat and light while
Voices of children rock like a hand on a cradle and
Murmurs of the honest gossip of women
Click like ivory balls and stir the curtains.
The drunken rumors of real life unsettle our bodies,
Wrapping them not in the silence of lunar darkness
But like a running spring, rutting despatches of
Daylight stream in rivulets
Along nerve ends already worn and fatigued
By impending treason,
Washing our deep knotted and tressed flesh
In gentle and vague disillusion.
XXX
Cleopatra
In the time a wave recedes to the applause of
Bleached pebbles, I’ve toured the world in the curve of
Your mouth, dropping kisses like salt-slicked stones,
A slow and passionate lapping that breaks,
Content, onto the tuneless Syrian afternoon.
Not until one disappears do I place another,
Patiently bartering my life for your lips,
I make a curtain of my hair to screen you
From the sun, wind, and all visitors so that
In my shade you endure the usury of
Endless, insatiable infractions.
Stone by stone, kiss by kiss,
Swooned by obdurate prejudice,
In the time of a wave and a wife’s divorce.
Plutarch
Nowe, after Caesar had made sufficient preparation, he proclaymed open warre against Cleopatra, and made the people to abolishe the power and Empire of Antonius, bicause he had before given it uppe unto a woman. Before this warre, as it is reported, many signes and wonders fel out.… Now Antonius was made so subject to a woman’s will that though he was a great deale the stronger by land, yet for Cleopatraes sake, he would neede have this battle tryed by sea. Then Antonius, seeing there was no way more honorable for him to dye, then fighting valiantly: he determined to settle up his rest, both by sea and lande.… There he stoode to behold his gallies which departed from the haven, and rowed against the gallies of his enemies.… When Antonius sawe that his men did forsake him, and yielded unto Caesar, and that his footement were broken and overthrowen: he then fled into the citie, crying out that Cleopatra had betrayed him unto them, with whom he had made warre for her sake.
The year 33 Bc
XXXI
Cleopatra
Actium blows behind my purple-blazoned sails,
Iridescent shrouds caught within Carthaginian winds
And the combustible dome of Africa’s hip.
Far out on the jetting peninsula I desert your fleet—
Mix with the vapor of sand, sea and your curses,
While my forlorn figure leans into the wind in the
Posture soldiers use to survey newly conquered continents.
I turn my back on you and leave you to war alone.
Witness to the final confrontation between reality and desire.
An ocean of pen shells swim in their own glowing feathers.
I scoop the spiny shells in my arms,
Tearing off the tails as the Romans do
To make a silken tassel, gossamer for my prayers—
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Page 5
