Sirens

“There was, as we have seen when considering the claims of seers and shamans to authenticity, an imponderable element in Greek religion which is resistant to logical analysis. Nevertheless even if we do not fully understand the source or manner of divine inspiration, its results, in the form of prophesies and miracles, are at least open to inspection for what they are worth.

“It is otherwise with the Sirens, the curious human-headed birds which are such a familiar feature of archaic monuments, for literature has precious little to say about them, and their history must be sketched very largely in art. For all that even Sirens have their importance as the monstrous manifestation of religious notions hard to express. (my italics)

***

“The earliest Sirens are, to judge from their beards, preponderantly male, though the earliest of all, from Crete, is beardless and the question of sex is complicated by the fact that women on occasion wear beards, like the priestess of the Pedasians. Some are furnished with musical instruments and arms to hold them, others appear in musical contexts, while the vast majority are seemingly inserted at the caprice of the artist, whether as omens, emissaries, embodiments of power, or purely for decorative purposes. During the sixth century BC both armed and unarmed, but increasingly beardless Sirens become common in both mainland and island art. “

-- John Pollard, Seers, Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century BC




SIRENS

Nov. 7

They were all sirens,
fascinating and fearsome,
appearing inside moonlight
just beyond my house
where I lit up my first
cigarette of the night.
There, in the first flush
of nicotine, possibility
and welcome were like
wings of some vast
plunging desire
that I swear now
a siren was looking down at
me from the branches
of those orange trees.
She had a familiar
girl’s face but the eyes
were like a bird of prey’s,
accounting my new height
and gawky blonde swagger,
reading in my own eyes
something feral enough to count;
then lifted wings and
flew off, ferrying some
secret news to
the girl-woman-priestess
whose house I was walking
toward so she’d be ready when
I knocked on the door. Or
so it seems to me now,
for when I think of how
that door opened and
she appeared in its frame,
she always had that knowing
look that took me in
from some height I could
not reach, much less
understand. A siren’s mask
smiling with those eyes
going deeper than I could
every go, back then, as
ever. We’d sit outside
her bedroom on the grass
out of earshot of her
mother, to smoke and
talk; or rather, to smoke
while she spoke and I
listened to tales of boys
and their ways, their
contempt and
dark pleasure heaving
their boyman bodies
between her knees.
Her tone was yieldingly
aggrieved with a dash
of sour-sweet relish,
as if I were both
victim and student:
while she was both
fury and grace
to my hearing, and all
of it sos fascinating,
gripping me in the fierce
warm knot of heaviness
below, a tension I
was both desperate
to relieve yet happy to
linger, hung on the
honeyed horns of desire.
One night she and Sue
showed me how
boys screwed, getting on
their bellies and lifting
and diving their hips,
clenching buttocks
to imply the dips
and dives of an
offending mentule.
They weren’t quite in
agreement, each had their
own variations acting
out what they thought
a boy was doing to them:
And the irony was that
only I, the virgin, could
fill that half in, and
they, the bruited pair
of so many heaves
could tell me nothing
really of what they
had received, nothing
that I really needed
to know. Paint those
two girls up in the
tree of my own greening,
one dark-haired, big-
titted, the other blonde
& everdarkereyed,
miming in moonlight
the essentially-waylaid
act like billows of
the tree’s own breezy
organum, ghostly music
wafting to me from
that wild place still
outside of town,
songs lighter
than the wash of
faint traffic lumbering
up 441 at this hour,
inside the pale weave
of crickets: A feminine
breath beneath the
weave of moist and
sexual words, silent
of anything useful to
say here, the riddle of
desire without meaning,
world before words perhaps.
A winged presence with
a woman’s face staring
down at my writing chair,
innate as the singing
that is too fateful for the ears
in the ever greening
orchard of my need.