My body is all the cardboard bodies of women and I arrive at the edge
of an empty parking lot; and I arrive at the edge of myths. I wear my
cherry-colored veil and on top a deer hide. I wear loose curls and a
crown of ivy, snakes and white tassels, a thyrsus in my right hand and
a Phrygian drum in my left. And I bow to the fir trees and the oaks.
I point my white foot for the night-long dance and I descend from the
stage into the forest. I gather dry branches for a fire. I hit the
stone with my thyrsus and sugar pours forth. I scratch the earth with
my fingertips and flour pours forth. The stream drips butter. My
body, a pair of scales, containing all the cardboard bodies of women.
In one of my palms the sugar, in the other the flour. My body in its
best dress weighs, in its cherry-colored veil and the deer hide
gigantic, immobile it weighs with the sensitive palm the right amount
of flour, of sugar, and of butter. Then I toss the dough into the
buttered pan in order to make a Phrygian cake with tiny cherries. The
cake is inside the Phrygian baking pan and I am inside my kitchen, I
walk around carrying the lion head in my hands. A lion head in my
belly. That round, bodiless head that will try my sweet. The lion
head that will vomit my sweet. I will give birth to it and keep
killing it. The hunter's lion head. And I will drop twelve cherry
questions in a circle around the top. To look like a speedometer. The
indicator on a motorboat and I will escape in that motorboat taking a
violent turn and going the other way, after I bow to myself and bid
farewell to the oaks and the firs, the wooden chairs with the
grown-ups and the children; leaving the boat tied to a stake in the
lake, the lake drawn on paper and the paper a page of language that
closed like a lake. I will moor in a hot green country with yellow
sands and fruit-laden trees and exotic birds. And I will put on the
maenad's clothes near a spring and the spring drawn on paper and the
paper a page of language that wells up. And next to this I will lie
down, calm and naked, and give birth.
--
from "The cake" by Rhea Galanaki
Translated by Karen van Dyck (in A Century of Greek Poetry, Cosmos
Pub. 2004)
--
===================================
Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
===================================
|