WORDWRIGHTS #10 • Spring 1997 • Selections
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SAXOPHONE POEM: TRANSLUCENE
Sax squeals on a chord-slide and skitters on down,
tongue trembling way past tired on the reed,
brake-slam sound that wails on loose; underneath,
a bass; beyond, broken ice and far off chatter.
Down like a memory of stained glass, cathedral cool
damp in stone and country rustle and hum beyond those,
brightness perhaps, and hushed below it a slow
ground vowel of sound back there out past windows.
In the bar the old sax just out again
to not quite over the edge, a car on ice like
a slide that might be a groove of sorts, though
it takes a curvy stutter on a forgotten road:
stairs winding like DNA down to a dungeon
where Christians died so hard. I hated Rome.
Or a skuttle sound, crawfish on pebbles;
current a deep roar above; it seals their little taps,
flecks of gold caught in a ray or two
under whitewater pockets. Translucency is
everywhere, like wearing old contact lenses—
to see a blue sky through a film that floats;
in the bar, smokiness that might be home,
a dart shines, pings into cork just right
and the guy says ‘‘Yes!’’ arm extended
to hold the moment.
SUNIL FREEMAN
from Sophocles’ ELECTRA, 680-763
The Paidagogus, the ‘‘old slave,’’ contrives a fiction of Orestes’ death.
PAIDAGOGUS:
I’ll tell you everything; that is why I came.
Orestes made his way to the Delphic shrine
to enter those games that are the pride of Greece.
The herald first called runners to the footrace,
and he came on the course, his splendid body
admired by everyone. He took the lead
right at the start and held it all the way.
To say it all as quickly as I can,
I do not know a man who has matched him
in triumphant acts of strength and skill,
but this is clear: in all announced results,
his name came first, and people envied him
each time they heard the herald call him Argive,
Orestes by name, and Agamemnon’s son—
son of the man who led that host of Greeks.
So, for a while, things went that way for him.
But human strength is nothing to the gods;
a day came when at sunrise race-horses
were hitched to chariots and took the course;
he was there along with all the others.
One was an Achaean, and one was Spartan;
there were two drivers from Libya, and fifth
came Orestes, driving mares from Thessaly.
Sixth was an Aetolian with chestnut colts;
a Magnesian was the seventh, and the eighth
was an Aenian with white horses. Ninth,
a man from Athens, city of the gods;
the tenth and final driver was Boeotian.
They put their chariots under starter’s orders
and took positions given them by lot.
When the bronze trumpet sounded, they were off.
They shouted at their horses, shook the reins,
and a rumbling dust-cloud lifted from the course
and pulsed with the rattling of the chariots.
A crowded, tight-packed charge of men with whips
trying to break from the tangled hubs and horses.
Behind them and beside their wheels the breath
and lathered foam of horses wheezed and spattered.
Orestes drove to hug the turning-post, almost
grazing it every time with his inside wheel,
checking his inside horse, letting the other run.
So far all chariots were still up and rolling.
But then the Aenian’s hard-mouthed colts,
coming out of the turn into the seventh lap,
got out of his control and crashed head first
into the Libyan—the one from Barca. This
started a pileup, chariots crashing one
after the other, until the whole race-course
of Crisa churned with chariot-wreckage.
The Athenian driver was alert enough
to see all this and make a clever move:
he pulled aside and let the flood go by.
Orestes, too, had stayed just off the pace,
trusting the last lap to bring him home in front.
But when he saw the race was down to him
and the Athenian, he gave a shout that rang
his horses’ ears, and took out after him.
Yoke to yoke they raced, one pulling ahead
for a few strides, then the other. Up to now
Orestes had driven safely through each lap
and kept his chariot’s wheels on the ground.
Then he slipped and let the left rein go slack
halfway through a turn, and hit the pillar,
cracked the axle box in two, and spilled out
over the chariot-rail, tangled in the long reins,
and his horses dragged him all over the course.
The whole crowd screamed, watching this young man
who had won so much and then had such bad luck,
bouncing over the hard ground until charioteers
reined in his charging horses and cut him loose,
so mangled that his friends would not have known him.
They made a pyre and burned him right away,
and Phokian men appointed to the task
now bring this lowly dust, once a mighty man,
in a small bronze urn for burial at home.
That was it—horrible just to hear, but for us
who saw it, the greatest sorrow I have seen.
Translation by HENRY TAYLOR
STUCK
I may as well be mute
for all my reflexive nothings
lack for sweetness
and the mountain of rage
words climb
seems a formidable natural
phenomenon
It is a language of groin kicks or submission
and I, caught between a jock and a hard place,
have been set up to lack,
the patsy in some get-bitchy-quick scheme
that leaves a neon vacancy.
I yield an I for an I that is you.
ELIZABETH ROUSE
