Caryatid

Caryatid

Voodoo can’t protect the lonely

shrunken head, swinging from

the rearview,

dangling  in my memory.

The downward nightened face

the stitched up eye,

the way your cheeks and lips

have lost your tongue

so you can

no longer equivocate.

Still, back then, you couldn’t speak

without singing; it was just

how to bear the song,

how to take the words,

then take your worst.

It was in the oldtime, schooltime,

walking handfast in the dark by 
the Temple of  Bahá'í; what you called,

Episcopalian dry,

god’s giant Juicer in the sky,

when you told me looking up,

Lilith-lashes over chartreuse eye,

that I was a caryatid.

Then you had to explain

to the beggar’s child,

towering her bones Viking brash
above your fretted
Celtic knots,

exactly what that was.

I wasn’t flattered.

But still, you couldn’t sing

without speaking. You read me

Stevens' rage for order, went to heaven 
in a splitpea shell, sang with blue guitar

in your voice of coffeehouse smoke

to the serpent’s hiss of espresso machines.
Till I woke up with burning eyes  
and began, forever outside,

to balance the tilting building

on my head.

June 2011

 

Posted for   OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry 



Possibly pertinent references, feel free to skip:

Bahai Temple, Wilmette, Illinois

“…For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
that we should ask this often as she sang…

...Oh! Blessed rage for order...
The maker's rage to order words of sea
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”

from The Idea of Order at Key West, Wallace Stevens

"I've got a secret/ that none can tell.

I'm goin to heaven/ in a splitpea shell.

O lordy me, didn't we/ shake Sugaree?

Everything I had/done and gone..."

~Elizabeth Cotton

Images: Right Caryatid Chimney of the Chimney-Piece at Dorchester House, 
by Alfred Stevens,circa 1908, and  
The caryatids of the Erechtheum near dusk; Acropolis, Athens, Greece
by Takeaway both courtesy wikimedia commons.
footer image:

Bahá'í  Temple, Wilmette, Illinois, by lalunablanca on flick'r

lalunablaca's photostream