On an Island in the Sea

Circe, though you sit blameless as the snowdrops in your hair,

the libel of these thousand years has carved a pedestal for your visage

beside dancers whirling with holy severed heads

and queens of mightiest rivers.

All can admit the charges true in most regards:

Your face is seen, introductions are made,

and your new acquaintances soon snivel

at the bottom of a molding trough smooth with years.

So many, so many, a thousand pigs

muddying the outskirts of a temple,

and on every pair of torpid lips a guttural

accusation of black magic and malice-

it is said that one mouthful of food

prepared at your table extends this baleful curse.

Others have sworn that the scent of sweat

(spider-caught in your hair), noticed even for a moment,

is sufficient to condemn another to your slavish horde.

Will none tell the truth? Shall these rumors of enchantments

follow in your steps like dust to the chariot? They must remember,

they cannot have forgotten, the day they first pushed the needles

of your eyes into their veins (not knowing your regard

to be more slight than the moon's shaved golden hangnail),

or at least their schoolboy lines as they waited to smelt

their hands to cloven feet.

Surely often on the backs of eyelids they see the mirror's glint

of that day in the past when they notched their own noses

with scissors (the tips bouncing bloody until snapped up

by a prowling lion with a mocking snort). Surely they recall

that they first fell grovelling among the acorns

after being rebuffed in their attempts at your embrace.

They mill about your piquant isle at the base of a flight of stairs.

In the deep night sometimes their fruitless desires

buzz and hum louder than the rubbed wings of insects on oak branches.

How is it that they do not turn to left or right

and notice an image of themselves with every gaze,

the same curl of hair above the brow on every head around

that pooled raindrops show to be their own reflection too?

They seem to have never considered

that you would perhaps have built for them a spacious house

if ever you desired an uncountable herd of swine.