10/30

After a painting of Circe


1.
How they come, to the house in the wood
to be devoured, the green boys
fresh from ships.

They elbow one another

Outside the house, the wolves and lions
roll on their backs for their bellies to be scratched

Hers is the sweet-house, the gingersnap house
Baba Yaga’s cottage on chicken legs
and the boys enter in to be eaten.
so eager to throw their bones amidst her furs

She is Theda Bara. She is Barbara Stanwyck.
She is Rita Hayworth, the tutor of boys.

What does it matter, that she weeps when
the cup falls clattering to the stone
and the boys run off, squealing

There was a man, once
who had snowdrops in his teeth
who drank her wine, and stayed
but he is gone, and the sea is dark

The boys come, one after the other
To become something other than they are

2.
There was a girl once
bound in marriage to the muddy dark
To the gravepits and the furrows
to the shadow's house

How she ate one seed of sweetness at his table
and could not leave,
How they brought her flowers and pigs
to lure her from her dark,
Sent heroes and boys like weasels down after
a rabbit in her hole,
when she wrapped herself in burial cloth
and refused the sun

Still they sing and sing for her
And call her bondage spring

3.
When the broken men became her priests
they cut themselves with the sickle
they bled for the moon,
who comes to the crossroads
three headed and blind,
stands in doorways,
brings a black dog, and a torch with her.
when the moon has turned away her face,
when the moon’s house stand’s outside the child’s window,
It’s door open as a mouth

Here is blood, and honey
Cold mother, be kind