Descartes
His grandmother shuffled omens, studied palms,
birdsong, leaves, the way grass folded in the wind.
Years he sought certainty in theorems, though in dreams
those geometric ladders flashed before him,
dashed with witch’s blood. A terrible sacrifice had been made.
His brittle maxim – I think blah blah –
was an attempt to frame the sky. His grandmother
would call it betrayal. A curse cornered him in a shrinking circle,
that diameter of pagan chants tangling his mind.
Surely math was a metaphor, how he yearned,
if honest, to nail the divine to a posterboard …
One could graph the universe yet have no
sense of direction. He was a blue-sky devotee
who ran for his closet when it thundered.
The terror converged, his knowledge scrambled
on the drawing board, his proofs piss-logged
in a bedpan. He closed his eyes, beheld the long fields,
savage corn, fangs of the sugar beet. His ancestors clutched
their green superstition, moaning in the brazen light.
.
Odysseus
The pastor, therapist, his boss, they all said
he was the one who chose to flee, prodded
by his own greed, not some siren moaning
in the reefs, a deity clamoring in the high hills.
True enough, for years he babbled in leaky boats,
adrift in white powder, sails bulging with backwash.
Meanwhile, Penelope tilled the children, harvested
their genius, Lara leaping the scaffolds of science,
Telie devouring property in Corinth. To them,
he was an incubus who bled their mother’s dreams,
who strummed discords on a toy guitar, trying
to lasso their eyes. & yet the conviction remained.
Had he not clearly discerned the muses murmuring
in the salt caps, their ageless faces glowing
above the tide? Surely these marvels occurred,
even if he no longer gripped that serenade, beheld
the vision. Had he invented a saga, cobbled a
fevered epic to justify his cravings, fantasies,
the seasons of dereliction? He paced his motel room,
tapping messages to a disconnected number,
spattering insistent comments on a dead friend’s
webpage. Was this his fate, bellowing into a void,
surrounded by indifference? Ithica was a cold bardo,
forsaken outpost, an island purgatory overrun
by shattered nomads. No one recalled his name.
.
Helen, the Later Years
After wars, decades of lust & loss, compacts & betrayals,
she & Menelaus hunkered outside Tampa, renting a drafty cabin
by an algae-smothered lake. Silence thrilled & terrified her.
Then Menny was gone, buckshot in his chest, face buried
in a blood puddle. DAs, the IRS, FBI, accounts run through
a legal chinois, months dealing solitaire in a federal compound.
Glory passed. & yet, beneath moonglow, that sleek lioness
still clawed her veins, such hunger, confidence, aplomb.
These days, she was a forgotten symphony, though a lecturer
visiting from Thebes once cocked his ear rudely, thin finger trembling.
Wait, are you—? Yes! she wanted to bellow across the cafeteria,
she was the one for whom those triremes were catapulted into a roiling sea,
fifty thousand soldiers mashed in combat. It was she for whom
the poets etched their shimmering verse, she who welcomed
Paris & Ache & Menny back from their battles, stormy titans
who wept in their sheets, bingeing on pastries behind steel doors.
She beheld such tableaux in detail, yet could barely recall
the castle in Abdera where she hid for two years, the hotel
in Lebena, golden doors, diamond balcony, muses purring
in a wisteria courtyard. She soared into the mirror, marveling
at her hollowed face. The mortal course, its canals & inlets,
was perhaps dredged by men, though what a king flagged
was only worth what a queen would give for it, his authority
fathomed in her eyes. So many lovers, so few memorable,
nights waltzing with cardboard suitors, those pick-up ensembles
banging their tinny drums, strumming plastic strings. Then again,
there had been exquisite moments, flashes of another realm,
implosions of time when she knew that being could never end,
even if flesh, names, tragic loves were devoured by mud & fire.
The ruckus at the door was the blind magician from across the hall,
white cane rapping her threshold. Helen, he purred, a brandy?
No, Ti, she whispered. She sighed as she muttered the words,
scribbled in her diary, nodding to a vision of red stallions
galloping under a charcoal sky. She stared at a figure whose features
she couldn’t make out. When he extended his hand, she took it,
rising toward him, moving slowly, cautiously into the light.
.
Lazarus
Now he could peer the aces through smoke & neon,
point where the bead would land on the mocking wheel.
The future was a van careening toward a child,
the bridge in Wichita surrendering to gravity.
His shoelaces were copperheads, words a severed powerline.
Mid-July, he couldn’t shake the echoes,
a voice that jabbed, prodded. MRIs, x-rays, ECT,
he dry-swallowed Prozac, Buspirone, Prolixin,
shredding his disability check. Grass reminded him
of black thunder, meat hooks, a shotgun barrel.
He could smell the grave on his skin,
ran his fingertips over the carving knives,
eyeing his children as if they were strangers.
“It might’ve been best,” his wife confessed to her mother,
“if they’d let him go.” People stared as she entered,
exited groceries, the pharmacy, the bookstore.
“There she is,” they whispered, as if to behold her
was bad luck. She was the woman tethered to the man
who was neither flesh nor shadow. “Just pray,” his neighbors said,
“maybe he’ll find whatever it was got lost in the dark.”
© John Amen
John Amen is the author of five collections of poetry, including Illusion of an Overwhelm, finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award, and work from which was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. He founded and is managing editor of Pedestal Magazine. His new collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024.
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