120

 To Homer, With Love

When at the focus of the years

the male mind and the feminine soul merge

in the hieros gamos that knows itself divine,

an hypostasizing percipient of its own percipience,

sum and ruler of the sensory world,

there suddenly rise new images, half sensed in antique myth,

playing now known encounters upon a flute

plucked from generative reeds

along time’s widening river.

Then it is there comes to earth again

luminous Apollo,

the mind’s primordial sun knowingly received into our hair.

He flutes, and music rebuilds the broken walls

of fallen Troy to timeless permanence,

peopling its high halls and golden palaces

with gods whose epithets wing our own white feet,

with the creating heroes of the race,

with unpossessable Helen, who can never die.

Rise and dance then,

joining their rising dance

in a sensory extravagance of being that the fleshly nerve

could not grow sensitive enough to foot,

ordering each measure by an inner pulse

inaudible to the flesh-shell ear;

and dancing out those lambent clouds, the palaces

filled with gods and heroes and glorious Helen--

and ceaseless Scamander rippling in the sun—

we have no need for history.

It was not history you sang.