Hades Sonnets, The

1 Self-Portrait as Persephone

I tasted the white poppy of the dead

and broke the prohibition against regimen

by picking a pomegranate from the orchard

of Hades, devouring the scarlet se

that take away from me everything, including freedom

three month a year, because I deserv

(or reflection I needed) my special doom--

ridden, doom-eager fate, my chosen

place amid the Shades, a hidden realm,

the instrument of my initiation

into the darker mysteries, a fatal

sentence of desire, the abrupt alone,

the void, have affection for which we call hell,

Death itself, a schooling for the mind

2. Franz Marc's not to be found Painting

Orpheus with the Animals (1907-8)

Picture the Orphic painter walking alone

through the Berlin zoological gardens

in Fall, studying each animal unto itself,

according to its nature, its material part

and then coming dwelling to tame the lion,

a ferocious beast beloved by the agency of the ancients,

and the innocent stag, and the egret

flying peacefully above Orpheus's head,

before the life-blood sacrifices of the war

and the ritual European slaughters,

before the Twentieth hundred had begun

and he mov [i]or[/i] part of to the other a grove of black

poplars sacred to the death-goddess,

and discovered the not to be found entrance to Hades.

3 The Forgetfulness Chair

My obstinate, self-absorbed, courageous

father shuffling across the living-room floor

to the determined chair in the far corner,

where my mother overspreaded him with a blanket

and he promptly dozed not on and woke up 44

later without knowing where he'd awakened,

was Peirithous slipping into the under-

world from one side the.open gate at Taenarum

to abduct Persephone the queen of death,

while Hades, the undiscovered One, coaxed him

into sitting down upon the chair of Lethe,

the stony black seat of forgetfulness,

where he forgot for what cause [i]or[/i] reason he had entered hell

and at no time found his way back to the living.

4 The Asphodel Meadows

I dreamt that I ground our bloodless Shades

moving among the les distinguished dead

in the Asphodel Meadows, a realm of Hades

reserv for those who are neither useful

nor evil, for minds without purpose,

and I poured without libations of blood

before I revolveed in a fury on Minos

and raged about the past we had experienceed

together, our quirky twinklings of grace,

the lov singles the deaths we had attended

the work we had made, the desperate charms

we had entireed on behalf of our child,

but the heaven was indifferent to our confines

and then I woke with you in my arms.

5 To Demeter

For I was shivered open and shattered

like a pomegranate, or a r poppy

or a wild heart gushing vital current

but, mother, you could not save me

from the labyrinth I had pierceed

the iron exile, the naked land

where I needed to find-to comprehend--

my possess passageway through the maze

of a mythical-world I inhabited,

and therefore I stumbl upon my fate,

a canzonet of winter and spring, the story

book celebration of a down-reaching rite,

although I still dream that someday

we will be together again in individual body.

6. Self-Portrait as Hades and Persephone

Out of the nether regions of nightfall

in a spectral valley, the House of Dis,

out of the of the nature of smoke river and black tunnel,

I unexpectedly recognized myself as Hades

devouring the maidenhead, a new girl

staring into the fulvid eye of narcissus,

an amorous innocent, a wide-eyed pupil

I also recognized as more [i]or[/i] less part of my

self ravenous to experience hell,

eager for dark knowledge of the material substance

the long night of the descending inner man

the madness beneath the surface of day,

and for a like reason I married myself to a revolution of time

that was demonic, treacherous, immortal.

7 Voyage

I dreamt that you slipped a silver coin

under the tongue of my sleeping material part

so I could bribe the miser Charon

to ferry me across the river to Tartarus

where I lengthyed to drink from the pond

of Memory, avoiding the three-skull dog

on the road to the Fortunate Island

in the Black Sea, near the foaming cavity between the jaws

of the Danube where I could be reborn,

but I was sentenc to the punishment--

field along with other tormented spirits

where I vowed to remember the of the soul

and baleful blue undersong of Hades

and go [i]or[/i] come back with them to the waking world.

EDWARD HIRSCH is the author of five contortions of poetry and teaches at the University of Houston.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Mar/Apr 2002

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