Souvenir of the pain of my Slavery.
XXXII
Cleopatra
O what voices touch what flesh tonight, clarion,
Crystalline and bitterly clean.
I’ve shed skin after skin,
Love’s membranes filtering out crime and corruption,
Claiming perfect joy (ours),
Dissolved in a mouthful of gold
Exchanged Liquid and sweet on satin seas,
Lapping the sides of my painted fleet,
Girdled in hieroglyphics (yours),
Reflecting that an arch of cobalt blue (your eyes),
Resting on a cushion of small domestic dreams, turned
On Destiny’s potter’s wheel (your damned soul!)
Into a fireball of love I toss at your high flung head,
O and I live and die your love.
XXXIII
Antony
My strange savages
Wound you
And still all
That delicacy
You disdain
As weakness
But which
Is only
The coloration
Wild beasts
Show their
Enemy
In
Africa.
XXXIV
Antony
Betrayal is a bitter, bright
Field of sassafras spreading onto a future
Locked in the clutches
Of rash expectation;
The heart cavity, suddenly
Devoid of that throbbing instrument,
Is filled instead by eerie quietude
As irrevocable as spring leaves on forest corridors,
Intent on the musing
Of their introspected microworldliness.
The biological unfurling of their new flesh,
Oblivious to all except the cantilevered silence
Of incredulous beginnings
And the low hot blow of fate.
Plutarch
There Antonius shewed plainely, that he had not onely lost the corage and hart of an Emperor, but also of a valliant man, and that he was not his owne man: (proving that truth which an old man spake in myrth, that the soule of a lover lived in another body, and not in his owne) he was so carried away with the vaine love of this woman, as if he had been glued unto her, and that she could not have removed without moving of him also. For when he saw Cleopatraes shippe under saile, he forgot, forsook, and betrayed them that fought for him, and imbarked upon a galley with five banks of rowers, to follow her that had already begon to overthrow him, and would in the end be his utter destruction.
The year 33 bc
XXXV
Cleopatra’s Letter
How can I wash away the wretchedness
Of an illicit beginning? Even if I bring
A burning lamp and ancient ceremonies,
I dare not speak your name or see it traced in flames.
My worry beads are purple with the grief of your
Existence, yet they turn amber with the guilt of my own.
Rocking back and forth on my heels,
I lay out my still-damp winding sheet,
Soothing the last lines of regret.
The ritual gives solace as I wait for Siroccos
To dry drapery and tears and give me ease.
For even now my peace is troubled by
Swarms of royal crickets bringing your message.
Even in solitude you leave no stillness in my life.
XXXVI
Antony’s Reply
Once loved woman, Memory has no shame,
Limbs, sense, scent, and skin have no shame.
Facing one another without a hint of love,
Who can remember that once your glance
Burned through me like Hell’s pinprick?
Who can remember that once
The roll of your hips was a tremendous event?
Thoughts of us assemble above my head
Like a whirling cloud of clinking bones to the
Skeletal thump of a cadaver falling over.
Facing one another without a hint of love,
Have we no shame?
Once loved woman.
I salute you.
XXXVII
Cleopatra’s Reply to Antony
If what was written no longer remains,
What remains is that it was written.
Let’s not be fainthearted about what we were,
Haunted by the dead screech of a lonely sea gull.
You reek of your wives’ children
No husband shall set your bed at a distance from me.
My claims invade even the most remorseless hours.
Indecent and improprietary, they insist
On the rights of butchered love; the past’s bleeding entrails
Smell as sweet as future’s dulcet incense.
My swollen heart, which hangs from
The Creature’s greedy mouth—
Not yet swallowed and evacuated into the sea on which
Nothing is ever written and nothing is ever erased.
XXXVIII
Antony
To waste love is a mortal sin like wasting bread
When every crumb should be scraped from the feast,
Pitiful remnants of our youthful sacraments.
I scrap around on my hands and knees,
Looking for moments swept under the rug.
Why entrust my rites to a single woman?
Hercules left his semen in many places.
I’ve scraped my shin and founded a dynasty
Dropped among the garbage of last night’s supper.
Is the grinding of my teeth against the pain?
Of is it hatred of this miser’s life?
This gnawing starvation of the heart?
A doomed man, I sit on death’s row
And dream of Synapothanoumenoi’s last meal.
Plutarch
Canidius himself came to bring him the newes, that he had lost all his armie at Actium. All this not withstanding did nothing to trouble him, and it seemed that he was contented to forgoe all his hopes, and so be ridde of all his care and troubles… and Cleopatra received him in her royall pallace. Then Antonius sent unto Canidius, to return his armie into Asia, by Macedon. Now for himselfe, he determined to cross over into Africk and take one of his carets or hulks loden with golden and silver, and other rich cariage, and gave it unto his friends: commaunding hem to depart, and to seeke to save themselves.
The year 31 Bc
XXXIX
Cleopatra
I write in tongues,
A serpent whispering in my ear,
As I lie the Goddess of Heresy,
Lips fouled with the saliva of perjury.
Autocrator, beloved warlock,
I’ve made my pact with the infernals,
And the number of kisses it might take
To redeem me now
Is beyond even your powers.
The flower that once has blown forever dies,
My warships flee Actium’s defeat
On oil-sleek waters navigating an ocean of vice,
Like a paper raft on which is written:
MEMENTO MORI
XL
Antony
One who has loved remembers that he has loved.
This is Recollection, invented
By those who know that love is hardest to recall
The morning after or the morning after that,
When we find ourselves curled up in canonized squares
Of cracked light like stunned pink-lit snails,
Remembering only the slap of Eros on mortal flesh,
A blow that leaves us amnesiac and running naked
In the melancholy aftermath of disaster,
A regiment of Love lost, sequestered, or destroyed,
Pursuring Memory into the distraught cosmos,
Leaving only Cleopatra’s drunken fleet
Ransacking
pastel waters, heading for
The marriage feast of Time and her bridegroom, Revenge.
XLI
Antony
Even a heart stop is too far to travel.
This weary body, whose health and youth
Have turned traitor, travels lightly now.
Possession seems to me the luxury
Of another millennium,
An ice age well lived and well left
To those who can afford to accumulate.
Eyes damned with the silt of disappointment
I have forgone life’s trousseau, nude,
I am a man frozen in the mirror of a woman’s will,
A double image, reverberating through nerve ends,
Dragged across the lost and wasted steppes of Ambition.
I have ceased soldiering, Canidius.
Even a blink’s delay is treason.
Plutarch
Furthermore, Cleopatra had long before made sumptuous tombes and monumentes, as well for excellencie of workemanshippe, as for height andgreatnes of building, joyning hard to the temple of Isis. Thither she caused to be brought all the treasure and pretious things she had of the auncient kings her predecessors: as gold, silver, emerods, pearles, ebbanie, ivorie, and sinnamon, and besides all that, a marvelous number of torches, faggots, and flaxe. Then she being affraied of his fury, fled into the tombe… and there locked the dores unto her, and shut all the springs of the lockes with great boltes.
The year 30 Bc
XLII
Cleopatra (To Her Eunuch)
Now is the time to whisper all the curses that you know.
Dark-breathed Castrato, sinister survival-worshipper,
Ready with the sword to smite the suicides.
To bite one’s tongue when beasts are snapping
At your heels, is to race the conversations of dogs—
Empty the mutilated wombs of the miscarried.
My mausoleum is pregnant with Egyptian gold.
I swear on Aphrodite I will burn it rather than render!
Curse him with the lie that I am dead!
Everyone knows that against Evil the female soul
Has only a bitter and unclean tongue to screech
Its insanities and madness and to give love the lie.
For while I lay screaming and blasphemous and bloody,
Someone will accuse me of behavior unbecoming a lady.
XLIII
Cleopatra’s Letter
My last word to you is folded lengthwise and knotted,
Neither scented nor sealed; we are beyond that.
We no longer exchange gifts; our memories are too good,
Our words are no longer the language of love.
We are clear of all courtesy and politeness.
We know only that
Whatever the hour, it is too late,
Whatever the place, it is too far,
Whatever the need, it is not enough,
Whatever the love, it is too great.
For too much love, like too much rain, begets
Large and bloody puddles of discontent.
My Winter is marked in your face.
Whoever told you I was perfection?
XLIV
Antony
If She is dead, Eros, then kill me.
Better to leave by your hand
Than to grapple obscenely with that faceless Stranger
Who enters me a passerby from a whorehouse?
A eunuch, stinking of beer and debauchery,
Humiliating first with pain, then with terror—
That wide-eyed heart’s constriction that screams No!
If She is dead, Eros, then kill me.
Better to slip sweetly by beneath your sword
Still whole and recognizable and, if beauty
You find in me, then yes, still beautiful.
Better the blow of a friend who finds no fault in my flesh.
Who has no fear of kissing cooling lips.
Better to leave even her, by your hand.
XLV
Antony
Breaking out, pierced like the scent of calamus
Skull shattered against Caesar’s will,
Droplets of brain spatter
Against memory’s transparent skin,
And the first lightning
Divides the instant before the raving
Disintegration of a personality.
I hurl away from the origins of pain
Toward new pain as yet undiscovered,
Sucked through a jagged black hole
Into the frozen space of a new galaxy
As slimy, bloody and blind
As my original entrance,
And with as much knowledge.
XLVI
Antony
The amulet you gave me out of love which was
The five shorn tips of the fingers of your left hand
Truncated at the first joint, still bloody—
Not yet curled and ivoried in mummification,
Strung on a pendant of moon-shaped mother-of-pearl
You hung round my neck,
Forehead pressed on mine across an ancestor’s grave,
But I saw only the pulse
Of traumatized flesh left back there,
A melancholy moan from Africa
Black and violet with mutilation,
Which means
I am dead,
Doesn’t it?
XLVII
Cleopatra’s Mausoleum
Our flesh has stayed too long
In this deadly climate Life,
So don’t be afraid to lose what is left of it.
If withered eyelids stutter against this hour of Annex—
That native streak of cold scent
When the old and feeble give up the ghost,
Our bodies, polished and buffed by one another,
Make destruction a coarse and unbecoming lie.
Our sun stirs your shroud
And spins it with incandescent lightning,
A rumbling of air, novice and sweet and fabulous,
Is our own drafts:
Magical and unused energy.
Listen, you will never die.
XLVIII
Antony
If I could love as I had dreamed
In the wastes of my longing before coming here,
I would love as wild fern, funneled and sprung
In emeralds of leaping purity.
Spiced in scent, savage and predatory,
Content only deep in rain forests, where growth
Obscures each football before the echoes, erasing
What went before and leaving no hint of what is to be—
Except the sublunary sprig of mint moss and lianas,
The mottled camouflage of dreams mixed with moon
Unpolluted by sun, shaded with absinthe.
My eyes hover around your early Cleopatran light
Like a frightened insect buzzing the petals
Of a night-blooming flower closing … at dawn.
XLIX
Cleopatra
O friendly enemy, we have loved,
Loin and haunch, limb and flank, truth and lies,
Trussed like a pair of ancient Armenian vines
Grown together root and branch in stunted
Commingling without End or Beginning.
If we part, you will leave with half of me,
Or I with half of you, and nothing will kill
The pain of dismembering.
That ache like some rare jewel
Will hang round our necks to touch,
In tender tremulance, an old wound of amputation
That burns and groans in limbs no longer existent
But splintered and crushed
In some long-forgotten and useless War.
L
Antony
I have only to reach out from this bed,
Suspended on a nape of fear
As thick
and swollen as the Dead Sea,
To touch a typhoon of rushing waves and seaweed—
A deathly wall of brine that rams into my body.
I dig in my heels, burrowing through
A billion years of coral,
A heedless tunnel of gold-rosetted Mummies.
A long and hollow ringing in my ears vibrates.
I am a zebra striped in black and white,
A galley slave struggling with lead and chain,
On a peninsula, a muffled roar of ancient turtles.
Who turn on their backs—while
I leave you, and for the third time.
LI
Cleopatra
Male, I loved more than life,
You leave one image in Amimetobioi:
Feral soldier’s flanks, tender as yellow plums
Attached to a golden back arrogant in down,
Caught in the autumn of fine flesh that shaped
The future of my own body, that heavy-laden
Vessel filled with pearls, amber, and spices
To breed a new race on uncharted continents.
My harbor’s darkness opened to your beating oars,
And I thought I possessed the Africa of my dreams
As I possessed your hot and lustrous body,
Whispering, “No, not yet,” or groping blindly for
A toehold in our incendiary red-rimmed strivings,
The loose change of History strung out all over our bed.
LII
Antony’s Tomb
The daily demons gather round, slave merchants,
Perched vultures waiting for another sack of flesh
Emptied of soul carried forth to the burning pyre.
But my slavery shall insurrect beyond my Snake Pit,
For did not Nature make human meat for His creatures?
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Page 6
