Persephone of the Levant
I
Accustomed to the mutability of the seasons, the death and un-death of seeds, I can always tell when you’re feeling fragile,
and that it hardly matters, as the voice of spring breaks with the same apathy as the winter rain;
so why even begin laughing when death and boredom are two sides of the same hangman’s coin?
It is a nightly katabasis, knowing how to love and un-love, to be lost and rediscovered in a fatal archaeology.
II
These are the familiar economies of recession, depression and recovery; the facile variations of a sometime daughter,
a sometime sister and sometime lover abandoned to the sewers, contemplating boom and bust in the gutter’s romance.
In the adventure of the cycle or the sterility of the solution, I would lose myself either way, so I sit still
and in the thin lightfall that comes through the grates, I meditate on the doleful glance of the useless moon.
III
How beautiful it is to spend these hours lying in the bower of your sad eyes, Ishtar, he says to me.
How gorgeous your body is, like the scents of roses, and the fine long stretches of the sunlight across our nakedness on Babylonian afternoons.
How I could lie here for eternity, how I do not need the time, how you can forget the shadow cast by the avenues as the sun sets, my love, my lasting love;
well the sun sets, the bell tolls, and the cinnamon year descends into war.
IV
To be raised from Hades by sertraline’s kick, whatever more could you want?
So the god of healing comes, with beta blockers on a tray, and a fine white smile across his apron,
and there are clouds around the edge of the day, dulling the weather, making a grey world for grey gods to feed on,
because Nergal does not share what he has dug up, and hell is wherever I am with his memory.
And I am too young to forget on my own.
V
In the mind, you are always at the moment of stasis; always at the moment before the seed rises,
at the hinge of uncertainty, the death of the determined, and you see into the heart of the world,
only you cannot move, trapped in the grey space with black on one side and green laid out before you, unmoving
but moved, always, by the stronger force of another’s decision. So the mind is useless as I still pick up the fucking phone.
VI
Down here I flick coins against the wall, betting against myself.
I finger that bronze, rubbing the dust off the old monarch’s face, and letting it stay between the lines of my fingerprints,
amounting to nothing more than a guessing game, waiting for what will always repeat itself.
I never ask for the news, having no way to relate to its newness.
VII
They say that the life of cycles is recompense for facile teleology, leaving out the most important detail of the whole shebang:
a life of repetition is only bearable for the beautiful and the stupid, and only in combination,
only beauty is supple enough to bear the weight of stupidity;
only stupidity can ignore the fact that beauty offers diminishing returns.
VIII
It would not be fair to say you put me here, or that I put you there – wherever you are – but when has truth been fair?
I remember the softness of your eyelids, moving slowly, as you closed off into your world, closing me off into mine,
I remember the prayerlike movement of your hands as you spoke to me the last time, imploring a fiction to save you from a fantasy.
There’s no point in a forgiveness that does not redeem, and I’m still sat here.
IX
A slow white framing the change into grey; some light lifts up the colour of the wall,
but it is the shadow light that I love, the greyness aching towards the black;
I am that vagueness and mystery, even to myself, echoing that darkness;
there is a mirror here and I cannot see it; I cannot think of anything more poetic.
X
They say it is best to remember the articles of redemption, even in the dark: words and light,
but words, like the memory of music, need the power of recall and the strength of a great performance,
and light fades faster than sound – and anyway is harder to remember when you cannot tell if your eyes are shut.
No harrowing hand has reached into my blackness; there are no words and no light.
XI
If I sound bitter, then fair enough, I sound bitter; it’s all a matter of taste and judgement,
and you always suspected that, in the end, it’s all about the right way of suffering, bearing the good and the bad;
the creative well-spring of loneliness, and despair, or ecstasy, then happiness, the seasons in their pattern, that up and down we call life;
you call life. I just call it a waste of time.
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Tammuz in Hell
You know, what is deadliest for a relationship is unrequited tiredness,
the failure to respond to the rubbing of eyes on eyes
or to notice that blindness is always mutual
and that tunnels are shared spaces – this is, after all, what you sign up for.
Both refusing to do the hoovering
and refusing to understand why you cannot do it;
a lame sense of duty, perhaps,
or finding yourself in the sort of place where it makes little difference anyway.
There is an enduring greyness.
Past the event horizon of a shadow, no one with the ability to conceive form has ever come back,
so indeterminacy is preferable to a condemned finality
closed off by the wall between where you sleep and I watch television
or vice versa, I forget
and forget, too, whether I was due to do the washing up or the ironing
or if I missed my appointment to be torn limb from limb by Erishkegal — or you yours
and which one of us overslept, forgetting to set the alarm for the morning.
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James Dowthwaite teaches English literature at the University of Jena in Germany, where he’s working on a project on the concept of fate in aestheticist writing. His poetry has appeared, amongst a number of other places, in Acumen, Allegro, The Dawntreader, The French Literary Review, The High Window, Nightingale & Sparrow, The Needle, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is an associate editor of NASJ: A Forum. He lives in Hamburg with his family.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 