At 08:27 AM 4/27/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Prayer
>
>Lord, set me a table in Byzantium:
>not the rose-colored queen of the Bosphorus,
>not the city of jewelled liturgies,
>but the drain where the scourings of empire collect.
It all lives, of course, in Yeats' shadow. I suppose that was intentional:
how do you write a poem mentioning Byzantium without invoking Yeats? Right
off this is a "not" poem--scraping off the Yeatsian associations of golden
birds and immortality to wind up with The City as Drainage Ditch. But even
in a drain one may maintain associations with that Holy City that Byzantium
was. This doesn't have the desperate tone of Berryman's "Eleven Addresses
to the Lord" but it recognizes before one whom stands, and where. Okay, I
am now officially enticed and read on....
>Give me a rough wooden bench
>and a goblet of thick southern wine
>that smacks of honey and dust
>in a tavern on some twisted lane away from the sea,
Everything peaks in the third line--honey and dust. It sounds Biblical,
all right: milk and honey, honey and dust--one of those horrific towns
where you shook the dust from your feet, where you got splinters in your
butt, where "twisted" carries moral implications as well as a picture of a
place where it is shadowy. Honey and dust: sweetness and the world's
natural filth.
And peaks in this....
>where a plump dancing girl of uncertain antecedents
>clicks the reptilian scales of her castanets,
>her gaze weighing my limbs like dubious florins,
>while a one-eyed Cappadocian in the corner
>thoughtfully fingers his knife.
>
>Lord, I don't ask for much,
>only a fate I can handle.
Images of the mercenary and of danger. The speaker has no reaction to the
girl--he just observes and describes not an exotic slinky-chicky but a
chubby girl. I'm not sure what "uncertain antecedents" does here except
perhaps suggest that both the speaker and the girl are from Someplace Else,
parts unknown, that this is a city of strangers. The only judgment seems
to be pointed at the castanets. I'm not sure what "reptilian" does. It
reinforces the aura of sexlessness, of a dis-nature where a presumably
wooden object seems made of scales, perhaps has a malevolent life of its
own. I'm also confused by her gaze weighing this limbs. A human being as
piece of meat? as commodity? Dubious florins, then--everyone is PERHAPS
commodity. Of the three persons in the poem, only the Cappadocian is
identified by nationality or ethnicity--why I do not know--but here lays
the sense of threat. A Cyclopean being handling a knife only
"thoughtfully," with implied rather than actual menace. Yet in the context
of a decayed world "thoughtfully fingers" both is and is not tantamount to
the knife being held to the speaker's throat.
The conclusion, the prayer itself, seems to flow logically. "Why this is
Hell nor am I out of it. If it be thy will, get me out of it or let me
deal with it. Grant me the serenity, etc." The poem reminds me of the
little I've read of Cavafy's Alexandria poems--but there is nothing sexual
about it, just the loneliness of the gazer who does not even seem to feel
threatened, much less aroused.
Ken
-----------------------------
Kenneth Wolman http://www.kenwolman.com http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
Lord, steel us against the expectation of disappointment and our belief in
the certainty of heartbreak....
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