Jason and Medeia (56 page)

more filled with the strange and divine understanding

of the mystery of Love

that Dante spoke of in his
Paradiso,
all the

scattered leaves

of the universe gathered—
legato con amore
—and as

I spoke, I seemed

to rise without effort, like an eagle with his wings

spread wide on an updraft

past Zeus's shins to his bolt-square knees, past his belly

and chest

(still gesturing, lecturing, compressing all life to the

burning globe

of a family knit by unalterable love—my own

humble family,

for where but in a wife, after twenty-one years of

loyalty and faith,

sorrows and shocks that would shake down mountains,

and a joyous holiness

that theory and defense leave empty and foolish as

program notes

or the weight in ounces of a lily at twilight—where

else can a man

learn surely of things inexpressible?), and I rose

to the very

brow of Zeus, high above drifting haze, above life, and stopped mid-sentence. I gazed all around me

in alarm.

   I was standing on a mountain, miles past the timber, a place cased

thickly in ice,

snowdust everywhere like fire in a furnace. My shoes

were frozen,

my fingers were blue. “Goddess!” I howled. The

old fat farm-wife,

whiskered like a goat and as dull of eye as a child

without wits,

came smiling toward me like a ship's prow sliding

out of mist. She stood

and looked at me awhile with her drooling grin,

then turned her back

and squatted, inviting me to ride. I climbed on.

Immediately I seemed

much warmer. As we started down she sang a foolish

sort of song,

its music vaguely like an echo of Apollo's tuning of

his harp:

“On Cold Mountain

The lone round moon

Lights the whole clear cloudless sky.

Honor this priceless natural treasure

Concealed in five shadows,

Sunk deep in the flesh.”

We came down to the clouds, then down to the

timberline;

came to a view of high villages—goatsheds, barns

on stilts.

We came to a river. The foul witch sang:

‘When men see old Lill

They all say she's crazy

And not much to look at
—

Dressed in rags and hides.

They don't get what I say

And I don't talk their language

All I can say to those I meet:

“Try and make it to Cold Mountain.

Hmmmmm.'“

My double appeared at the door of a cowbarn, pulling

at his hatbrim.

“I think your vision has no rules,” he said. “Mere

literary scraps.

The
somnium animale
of a man who reads too much.
I see traces of a fear that literature may be nothing

but a game,

and stark reality the chaos remaining when the

last game's played.”

What could I say to such cynicism? My heart beat wildly and I jumped from the old woman's back to snatch up

a handful of stones.

He saw my purpose—my double, or whoever— and clutching the brim of his hat in one hand he went

limping for the woods.

“Is
nothing serious?”
I yelled, pelting him. He squealed

like a pig.

He was gone. I wrung my fingers, whispering,

Is nothing serious?

The goddess had vanished.
“Sirius! Sirius!”
the dark

trees sang.

22

“Let it be,” the deep-voiced thunder rumbled, beyond

tall pillars,

beyond tall oaks like skeletal hands still snatching

at nothing

in the cockshut sky. They lighted the torches, for

the day had gone dark

prematurely, grown sullen as a nun full of grudges.

King Kreon rose,

stretched out his hands for silence, but the flashing sky

boomed on,

drowning his announcement, drowning the applause of

the assembled sea-kings.

Then Jason rose, smiling, and spoke—gray rain on

the palace grounds

pounding on flagstones and walls, filling lakes with

activity, drumming

on the square unmarked tomb of the forgotten king—

and the crowd applauded,

rising to honor him as he reached for the hand of

the princess. She rose,

radiant with love, as joyful as morning, all linen

and gold,

flashing like fire in the light of the torches,

her glory of victory.

   In the vine-hung house below, the fleece lay singing

in the gleam

of candlelight, and the women gathered as seamstresses

stared

in awe at the cloth they must cut and sew. To some

it seemed

they might sooner cut plackets in the land itself, make

seams in the sky,

for the cloth held forests whose golden leaves flickered,

and extensive valleys,

cities and hamlets, overgrown thorps where peasants

labored,

hunched under lightning, preparing their sheds for

winter. Among

the seamstresses, the daughter of Aietes walked,

cold marble,

explaining her wishes, not weeping now, all carriers

of feeling

closed like doors. It seemed to the women gathered

in the house

no lady on earth was more beautiful to see—her hair

spun gold—

or more cruelly wronged. When the scissors approached

it, the cloth cried out.

   That night there was music in the palace of Kreon—

flourishes and tuckets

of trumpets, bright chatter of drums. In the rafters,

ravens watched;

in the room's dark corners, fat-coiled snakes, heads

shyly lowered,

drawn by prescience of death. Tall priests in white

came in—

white clouds of incense, hymns in modes now fallen

to disuse

mysterious and common as abandoned clothes. In

the lower hall

a young bull white as snow, red-eyed, breathed

heavily, waiting

in the flickering room. His nose was troubled by smells

unfamiliar

and ominous, his heart by loneliness and fear. He

watched

human beings hurrying around him, throwing high

shadows on the walls.

One came toward him with a shape. He bellowed in

terror. A blow,

sharp pain. A dark mist clouded his sight, and

his heavy limbs fell.

   Medeia said now, standing in the room with her

Corinthian women,

no jewel more bright than the fire in her eyes,

no waterfall,

crimsoned by sunrise but shining within, more lovely

than her hair,

her low voice charged with her days and years (no

instrument of wood

or wire or brass could touch that sound, as the

singer proves,

shattering the dome of the orchestra, climbing on

eagle's wings,

measured, alive to old pains, old joys, in a landscape

of stone-

cold hills, bright flame of cloud), “I would not keep

from you,

women of Corinth, more than I need of my purpose

in this.

If my looks seem dark, full of violence, pray do not

fear me or hate me,

remembering rumors. I am, whatever else, a woman, like you, but a woman betrayed and crushed,

fallen on disaster.”

   Silence in the palace. And then the sweet

shrill-singing priest,

his soft left hand on Pyripta's, his right on Jason's.

When he paused,

a flash of lightning shocked the room, and the room's

high pillars

sang out like men, an unearthly choir. Deaf as a stone, the priest held a golden ring to Pyripta, another to Jason.

The towering central door burst open, as if struck

full force

by a battering ram. Slaves rushed to close it. A voice

like the moan

of a mountain exploding said, “No, turn back!”

But the panelled door

was closed. And now the floor spoke out, roaring,

“No! Take care!”

There was not one man in the hall who failed to

hear it. I saw them.

But Jason and the princess kissed; the kings applauded.

His eyes

had Hera in them, and Athena. And old King Kreon

smiled.

   Medeia said: “Now all pleasure in life is exhausted. I have no desire—no faintest tremor of desire—

but for death.

The man I loved more than earth itself, his leastmost

wish

the wind I ran in, his griefs my winters—my child,

my husband—

has proved more worthless than the world by the

darkest of philosophies.

Surely of all things living and feeling, women are

the creatures

unhappiest. By a rich dowery, at best—at worst by deeds like mine—we purchase our bodies' slavery,

the right

to creep, stoop, cajole, flatter, run up and down, labor in the night—and we say thank God for it,

too—better that

than lose the tyrant. You know the saw: “No

wise man rides

a nag to war, or beds a misshapen old woman.' Like

horses

worn out in service, they trade us off. Divorce is

their plaything—

ruiner of women, whatever the woman may think

in her hour

of escape. For there is no honor for women in divorce;

for men

no shame. Who can fathom the subtleties of it? Yet

true it is

that the woman divorced is presumed obscurely

dangerous,

a failure in the mystic groves, unloved by the gods,

while the man

is pitied as a victim, sought out and gently attended to by soft-lipped blissoming maidens. Then this: by

ancient custom,

the bride must abandon all things familiar for the

strange new ways

of her husband's house, divine like a seer—since she

never learned

these things at home—how best to deal with the animal

she's trapped,

slow-witted, moody, his body deadly as a weapon.

If in this

the wife is successful, her life is such joy that the

gods themselves

must envy her: her dear lord lies like a sachet of myrrh between her breasts. In poverty or wealth, her bed is

all green,

and her husband, in her mind, is like a young stag.

When he stands at the gate,

the lord of her heart is more noble than the towering

cedars of the east.

But woeful the life of the woman whose husband

is vexed by the yoke!

He flies to find solace elsewhere; as he pleases

he comes and goes,

while his wife looks to him alone for comfort.

   “How different your life and mine, good women of Corinth! You have friends,

and you live at your ease

in the city of your fathers. But I, forlorn and homeless,

despised

by my once-dear lord, a war-prize captured from

a faraway land,

I have no mother or brother or kinsman to lend me

harbor

in a clattering storm of troubles. I therefore beg of you one favor: If I should find some means, some stratagem to requite my lord for these cruel wrongs, never

betray me!

Though a woman may be in all else fearful, in the hour

when she's wronged

in wedlock there is no spirit on earth more murderous.”

   So she spoke, staring at the outer storm—the

darkening garden,

oaktrees and heavy old olive trees twisting, snapping

like grass,

in the god-filled, blustering wind. The hemlocks by

the wall stood hunched,

crushed under eagres of slashing water. When

lightning flashed,

cinereal, the shattered rosebushes writhing on the stones

in churning

spray formed a ghostly furnace, swirls of heatless fire. No torches burned by the walls of the palace above,

and the glow

leaking from within was gray and unsteady, like

a dragon's eyes

by a new stone bier in a cluttered and cobwebbed vault,

a stone-walled

crowd set deep in the earth. In the roar of the storm,

no sound

came down to the room where Medeia stood with her

seamstresses,

no faintest whisper of a trumpet, but like a vast

sepulchre,

a palace in the ancient kingdom of Mu sunk deep

in the Atlantic,

the great house loomed, the hour of its trouble come

round. The women

gazed in sorrow at Medeia. “We'll not betray you,”

one said.

Some, needles flying on the golden cloth, were afraid

of her,

the room full of shadows not easily explained.

And some shed tears.

   So through the night they sewed, minutely following

the instructions

of Aietes' daughter. And sometimes among the eleven

a twelfth

sat stitching, measuring, easing seams—a fat

old farm-wife

with the eyes of a wolf—the goddess of the witchcraft,

Hekate.

   And so through the night in the palace of Kreon

the revels ran on,

the slave in black, Ipnolebes, watching with eyes

like smoke.

   Thus swiftly, shamefully married—or so it seemed

to many—

the lord of the Argonauts turned on his children and

wife, his mind

supported by high-sounding reasons and noble

intentions. Near dawn,