Korē
You know a symbol when you see
one: nothing
in the world so blue
as the blue narcissus, the dark
blue narcissus nodding
from the field’s ragged edge.
Behind, the endless orchard, the blood-
hot plums flooding themselves.
In the photograph, her eyes
are shut, her face
a magnesium flame.
Behind, her shadow,
face down in the grass.
In the beginning there had been
no God, or God
was everywhere, she doesn’t know.
~
Her mother will keep the house.
Her father takes the crystal, saying
I intend to do a lot of entertaining.
The fire stumbling in the wind.
The back pond scabbed with early ice.
It’s true the earth
split open like a seed.
~
She sits in her father’s study
rereading the Oedipus Cycle.
The air is calfskin, pumice.
The page is lightly foxed.
He watches her read.
You know a symbol when you κτλ.
Korē, the Virgin,
mistress of the dead
tongues, pulls back her hair,
puts on a turtleneck.
The Oedipus Rex is a veritable
treasure-house of grammatical peculiarities.
~
Back for the summer, she sees her mother
has lost some weight, bought some clothes.
No mother grieves long for a daughter.
Around her, throngs of men,
wallets full of sacrifice.
Her mother buys a pregnancy test.
All things come into being
through strife—cell
divorcing cell, the flesh
dividing against itself.
Who are we now?
Two nights later, she herself
(herself) will lie
in a humid grove, half-drunk,
a slip of a boy mouthing
adjectives at her. She is X, she is Y.
Goddess of corn, Queen of the dead.
~
Fall once more, the cell divides again.
She sits in her father’s study
rereading the Oedipus Cycle.
You know a symbol when you see one.
X, Y, always here, there. 