Many Jasons
By David Lau
He strolled from the hill sound of sacred scales.
A sheet on his head (arrested for something),
they surrounded him,
Hera speaking through his mouth
kept the lid on his appeal to Caeneus the Lapith,
who had been a woman—
moon spread on the all edge of standing water,
the bleachers where they left the bodies.
That was the sedgy day, invisible contagions
stretching from our roof
on which the fresh trails of spilled pink...
to the aquatic plaza, one sandal at a time
and the bottom of the room beguiled us,
below the carpet covered with sand,
where they used to run
down the slums. Athena's oak prow, oracular,
from the grove at Dodona:
the team started the troika.
Many leave. One went in.
Many Jasons.
At some point Orpheus was on
that upside-down boat beneath the bridge,
but now, through its hull
(some planks missing), the ancestral bricks shimmer.
Rare is their tide.
David Lau, "Many Jasons" from Virgil and the Mountain Cat. Copyright © 2009 by David Lau. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.
Source:
Virgil and the Mountain Cat
(University of California Press, 2009)
