The Trident

SEA-TREASURE

Buried under the garden
just outside now darkly dreaming
down your waters is
Your trident, sea-father,
farer of my bluest thundering.
Only a tip of barb breaks the
earth in three places I’d
rather not name, for fear
their terrible thirst awaken
here to nail my ghostly
readers, or the absence of
them where I heave these daily lines.
The tale of its brute fashioning
on the island of Rhodes
in the fog of human time
is one so drowned and rounded
by salt swash that it survives
only by savagery, each curve
of cruel iron like a keel
that sailed impossibly far
to ruin here. When your infant heart
was entrusted to a daughter
of Okeanos to nurse, the
island’s darkest citizens
went to work below
to forge Your claw and sceptre.
In caves where sulphurous
pits spat and stank
with magmatic melt the
Telchines hammered and
killed spits of red hot iron,
shaping a form emblemic
of triple death by water,
the very nature of our tempering.
I imagine the sound
of that infernal craft
like a bass continuo to
Your youth, a low thrum
which as you grew rose
up to pound darkly in
Your loins. You left Your
nurse and walked down
to shore where You saw
the sea-nymph Helias curved
naked by the sea. Thus
You were hooked by
shapes suggesting thrash
and sate, and fell deeply
in love right there, hurling
wave after wave of salt-
hot sperm into her teeming
womb. A wonder for You,
perhaps, but the sons You
sired were rude and mean,
beating down the locals
and refusing harbor to the maid
of love in every stony cove.
No wonder she punished them,
using in an inside way
the same sharp barbs
the land had forged for Your
outer deepest rule;.
Your sons penises all
grew stout and cawed
loudly not for maidenheads
but Your wife, their own
exalted mama. And
exactly when they
fell on her the Giants
roused along the eastern
shore, their hair all matted
with seaweed and shattered
masts, their cliff-high
torsos exactly in the mold
of the Colossus who would
much later rise above the
the seaport built by Greeks
at Rhodes, the shadow of
the old man who is both
watcher and warden
of Your sea. But You first
had work to do, dispatching
sons and giants back into
the brutal earth. I imagine
their howls as the ground
split wide to be that cry
of birth which gluts on
unholy rage and fire. As if
to baptize the myth a second
time, Your wife jumped into
the sea to become the white goddess
whose watery name is pure
death, the eternally just-ravished
moon. She smiled as You
watched in horror at
the mass of bubbles which
swirled then disappeared.
And then the third barb of
this myth sank in as You
felt something tap Your shoulder:
You turned seeing no one there
(not even love)
but a trident laying huge
and cruel upon pale sands,
still wet with Your wife’s
forever ebbing wave.
Of that trident’s long patronage
to here, I’ll only say what
awe and awfulness it bore
in the salt careen of my black-wet years.
No song I’ve crafted yet has well enough
described how hard and rough
You plunged it through my soak,
over and over again so many
nights that only seas are
metaphor enough to reckon
the breadth and depth of blue
that trident murthered me through.
I write at 4 a.m. in the blackest
sounds of night, my wife far
in her waters & the cat curled
on the couch dreaming surely
of treats and prey and long
slow pets wherever she would
lay. Outside the garden is aswoon
in the wilder latitudes of May
which invoke the rainy season,
a coming tide of bolt and rain
which alone can save this land.
Your trident is buried in the
garden’s fragrant loam, above
the sons and devils of every night
I erred heaving Your eternal waves
on beds whose shores no man
was ever meant to fall on.
Oh how gently the butterfly
bushes swirl in the noctilucent
breeze, their tiny pink and
red buds aswoon in that sweetness
which nails their prey clean through,
hauling every delighted soak
all the way back and down to You.
And though this is just
more lines on paper, each one
tines a torn gobbet of that old
dark flavor forged on Rhodes
so long ago, so juicy with
fat and blood I swear I taste my mother
in its barbed and hard-fucked indigoes,
clear and cold and pale as moon
now dreaming in a sea whose
shore I bane and boon.



From Carl Kerenyi’s The Gods of the Greeks:

According to a tale {from Diodorus Siculus}, Rhea carried the newly born Poseidon into safety with {the Telchines, a} people of skilled craftsmen, the Underworldly inhabitants of the island of Rhodes. Kapheira, a daughter of Okeanos, was Poseidon’s nurse. It was the Telchines who forged his trident for him. But it was never suggested that this jealous people could have taught him their crafts.

... When Poseidon had ripened into manhood, so the tale continues, he fell in love with Halia {“the sea-goddess”} and begat by her six sons, also a daughter named Rhodos, from whom the island got its name. This was a time when the Giants had sprung up in the eastern part of the island, and when Zeus had already defeated the Titans. Aphrodite had just been born of the sea, near Cytherea, and was already on her way to Cyprus. The insolent and high-handed sons of Poseidon prevented her from landing on Rhodes. For this the goddess punished them with madness, so that they sought to lie with their own mother. This they did, and they also oppressed the islanders with their own deeds of violence. When Poseidon observed this, he avenged the disgrace that his sons had brought upon their mother by causing them to sink beneath the earth; since then they have been called Gods, or Spirits, of the east. Halia threw herself into the sea, and since then has borne the name Leukothea, “the white goddess,” and is worshipped by the islanders as immortal.