Myth of Arrival

I am trying out a new experiment. As soon as I write a sonnet I also video tape myself reading it out loud so there is a visual to go along with the poem. The downside of this is that I am not actually familiar enough with the poem to read it right from memory, so I hold the paper it is written on just belong the camera. As a result it looks like I am reading from cue cards, which is exactly what I am doing.

It is another sweltering night. Some
thing is moving on this page. You who can
not be the sun's right hand or the left thumb
of the goat god Pan, the sun's blood goat Pan,
you must then be love. The bad love the stars
give, all glitter eyeliner. What began
as a sort of hunger, like the guitar's
riddle, ended here. A love that is ours
must be a myth. No love is too foreign
to trust. Think of Pan in the woods, singing
the earth alive; and his song is moonlight
and sun. Think of him now, the violent one,
the one you want to be, the one rising
out of this myth to become the hot night.

Pan is, for those who don't remember their Greek mythology, a goat-footed god, one of the lesser gods, who lived in the forests of Arcadia and spent his time fooling around with nymphs and making up songs on his pan-pipes (thus the name). Plutarch is said to have written that those aboard a sailing ship, passing near the islands of Echinades, suddenly heard a mysterious voice calling out from the distant shore. It cried three times, "when you reach Palodes proclaim that the great god Pan is dead."

One epoch after another and we find the ancient gods never die, they simply get footnoted in poetry.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.