Pygmalion

I. Prologue: Elissa

The goddess came to him and fluently
pressed her hand onto his shoulder.
After he turned, she playfully narrowed her eyes
and said, “Pygmalion, dear, you know my name.
You have raised your arms in the air.
What is it that you would say?
Shall I breathe into this shining light
the vapor that will turn the alabaster sheen
of her eyes to the shade of the crest of a wave?
Shall I press my lips upon her lips,
my gentle son her hand to kiss?
Oh, why would you desire this?”

He found his breath and then replied,
“I simply want to know her voice,
the burning of her tongue in my ear,
that she may hear the terrible fears
which course my veins in endless nights.
Propoetides have sickened me,
each shameless face looking the same,
each different name the same damned name.
I am elementally free from normal ties,
the vipers coiled in my eyes attest to this.

“Bring her to life. I want no other.”
She said, “It shall be as you wish.”

II. Introduction: Pygmalion

A few years after the miracle, Elissa left Pygmalion
for an island far from the shores of Cyprus.
It seemed to him that she’d floated away like the light
reflected by the edge of a knife, and with no candles
he sat on dull starless nights and drank blood-red wine.
He locked his tools into a laurel box and
banished it into the depths of a cupboard.
He would craft nothing more for princes or kings.

Years later, Pygmalion was returning home
with a gallon of wine when a man’s voice rose
over a gathered crowd. “Where are the seeds
of the pomegranate now? This hallowed paradox,
so despised by the Gods for exposing their idle treachery,”
said the man pontificating in the village square,
“uplifts our gaze to plans of building bridges
that will bring our blades closer to Hades’s blackened throat. “
He may have been a madman. On certain days
even the most grievous blasphemy can be forgiven.

The brick and mortar netting of the city’s streets
made a subtle trap for the heat cast by Hyperion.
Pygmalion was passing by the square when a very large block
of material the color of midnight caught his eye in the morning sun.
He walked closely to it so that he could see his reflection and
twisted his head from one side to the other . “I must have it,”
he whispered to the merchant. The man drew back in surprise,
reverently pressed his fingertips together, and said,
“Maestro, it is yours. I will accept no payment.”

Pygmalion nodded curtly and spun himself around the earth until
he found his house. He drank and slept and woke again,
and he began. For months he did little but drink and eat and sleep
and sculpt and drink, until one day he finished and slumped into a chair.
He leaned back for a moment, inhaled sharply, stood,
and made nearly noiseless foot-falls until he was face to face with his creation.
He touched his fingers to the hair behind her neck and whispered,
“Oh, Atropa belladonna, whose petals cut through thread,
I have seen the face of your favorite daughter.”

III. Hubris

The burning candles hissed and he turned in their direction.
“You,” he spat. Behind his words, a crescendo burgeoned.
“You. The most foul thing to find birth in a mutilated man.
You. The final meal before the hemlock cup.”

She laughed with the voice of the bells from a ship adrift
in the fog and deathly afraid of running aground. She sadly said,
“I am the one homegrown sapphire. I crown a diadem
encrusted otherwise with jewels bearing bloody histories
taken in raids of doom and fire from lands past the horizon.
I am Love, the only thing born exclusively from murder.
I must confess myself confused, my most darling, zealous artisan,
for I have come to offer you once again a gift as only I can give.”

He shook in fear and rage and nearly growled, “Say what you mean,
immortal devil, pollution upon our holy loam. Say what you mean.
What is it in her darkling eyes that you envy so intensely?
Does her beauty threaten yours, oh spirit of the deep?
Has the moon led your tortured thoughts to this scourge
of emptiness and loss that you now propose to repeat?

“You rule nothing but misery. Can you not see my beating broken heart,
or that your artifice’s caustic theft of all the tears that I have wept
has been sweeping me into your birth-cursed sea?
How dare you presume to steal my work again,
to ruin the sinew on the legs of men,
to carve deeper scars into ancient calloused skin?
I would be a slave behind a cart, a sacrifice
to your cousin’s rust-red jaws, or a frozen
wrist-slashed marionette before I would let your dulcet tongue
play the fox in my home and rob me of my masterpiece of ebony.

“Was your first great evil not enough? What have I done?
What have I done? For you I slept beneath the stars.
For you I melted golden coins into arabesques
that inspired praise for your visage on countless days.”

She bent at her waist and whispered his name.
“Pygmalion, dear, you seem deranged by promises I never made;
your sorrow has made you invade levels of antipathy
that are mostly the reserves of my enemies. You simple fool,
I love you still for the glory you’ve provided me,
for that perfect woman in a prison of ivory,
and, too, for this new soul with a uniqueness
like that of the shifting silver of Olympian snow.”

She straightened her poise and seemed titanic in height
as she reached out her hand as if to brush the cheeks of his vision.

He shouted, “Touch her not! I forbid it. You may come
without a knock, for I cannot seal my door to such as you,
foul Efreet, with your breath as sweet as the six small seeds
that marked your kind’s most foul deceit of another,
but you shall not condemn me again to the butcher’s blade.
You shall not obliterate this love of mine!” He made as if to seize
his statue’s heart then sunk to his knees in feverish reverie.

She slowly shook her head and stared through him at a serpent.
“Oh, my poor, drink-sodden, maddened Master,
how do you twist towards me such blame?
In your nights that bear no flame, you think
still of her in those foreign valleys, but do recall
that I did not say that she would love you, or any other man,
for all her days, and yet you castigate me as though
I was a murderess. You dumbly sought to find redress
in wineskins but ended with despair penned deeply in your chest.
Have you noticed that in all these years you have not even
spoken a word about her happiness? Are you even curious?”

She sighed. “It is your home, and I shall leave,
but do remember that things can spring to life on their own.”
Like the blinking of eyelids she was gone.

He rolled over and returned to sleep and woke
when the planet’s star began its daily ascent.
He glanced at the web he had built to hold his walls
to the earth below and to the empyrean
expanse above that was the crown on the luxurious villas
that ruled from eroded hilltops. He said goodbye
to his silent love and plodded along the beaten path
toward the vendor that sold the vine’s slowest poison.