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Poetry
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| Tiresias | |
| By patterjack | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| 17 February 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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Three poems I cannot untangle Tiresias He sat , turning his milk blind eyes from their inward seeking to that which he felt surrounded his ancient body on the shore . The special scents of the fickle winds that blew brought to him the tang of sea salt , sea wrack rotting , and something that he found indefinable . In him then , the future , past and present intermingled : the horror of Thebes with its self -blinded king , the man on the shore , and a goddess from the future swirled like wind blown leaves through his searching mind . He shook himself , because he knew full well that once again the sight was weighing upon him . And he knew that , already knowing what was past He must foretell what yet was to become . Down there , on the beach , a young girl plays apart from her companions , waiting alone for what the Fates would bring to her in the shape of a red haired naked man , exhausted by his struggle against the sea gods . One she knows she can succour . He staggers from the waves ; her young companions scatter fearing the masculine strength still there between his thighs, leaving their half washed garments on the shore . But slowly she approaches, graceful , upright , nubile Bearing a cloak to cover his nakedness. Now freed from the loins of Circe and Calypso he lies at the edge of the surf and for a moment all the fables he has told and knows that he will tell gather and crowd within him . He smiles that still designing smile , one that has seduced a seductress and conquered a witch. The virgin girl , who will have her body offered to this man , (A gift that will be refused , but refused with kindness ,) cloaks him , and alone , supports him to her father's house And the old man on the shore already has foretold that this is the end of one long fate-filled journey , and the beginning of another just as long . He sheds new tears as in him the vision rises again of the naked goddess bathing in the stream ; the alabaster white of breasts and thighs rose tinted nipples and dark curling hair fuelling his manhood with both awe and lust : till , discovered , her bursting outrage thrusts him far from the brilliant coruscating light that gleams from her snow white body out , out and down into his perpetual darkness . Yet still he clings to that accidental vision -- and flinging his mind far forward into time he sees another later and more beautiful goddess rising striding from the surf's white foam ; her browner limbs and golden rounded long columnar thighs not parian white , but bronzed and lithe promising between them a youthful strength of love now far beyond his old man's waning powers . Could but that navigator's wisdom now combine with her youth and strength , and over the ages build a newer epic , that would be fulfilment Of his highest hopes . But he knows that he is lost and lost is that ancient sailor who carried his oar in travel to sacrifice to the god of the sea. New lands , new goddesses fade from his failing mind and he is again a wasted blind old man seated by a lonely windswept shore .
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