A Brief History of Anachronism

In Defense of Jocasta: A Testimony

 

The drape is cool and silken wrapping my neck

Dark purple regal against this dusky throat

This fabric the last embrace for a mortal wretch

A drop before I’m eternally afloat

 

(He loved this neck all his life

As a babe, how he clung, searching for protection

As a man, speckling abrasions of lust

This appendage, keeping head and heart attached

And unifying the woman that bore him first and again)

 

I could not slaughter the babe of our loins

I cast him out, refuse, to Cithaeron’s peak

The errand of a servant, for silver coins

Nailed to a mountain, desolate and bleak

 

(Did the oracles tell you Laius’ age?

Older than my father, than autumnal decay

Do the oracles know I was twelve and bleeding

And thought that he killed me with his little death that day?

Did the plebeians mention Laius fucked boys?

Saving for me only drunk, violent rage

Man-children knew those unmentionable joys

19 years of staring at ceilings)

 

The Boy-Man arrived in the haze of midday

Pectorals and youth and hubris and glow

Fresh from the lion’s enigma, from the slay

To claim unwittingly mother, widow.

 

(Did his mouth feel too familiar on my breast?

Did our skin, entwined, match too well in tone and texture?

Did my womb remember the flesh that it had expelled?

You ask, “Did I know?”

I must have known

In the mist of maternal memory’s recesses, I must have sensed.

I must have acknowledged, I must have felt

I must have…

“What woman would not give everything for her son?” I retort)

 

A boy, a girl, male, female birthed

All hearty, healthy, heirs to a new Thebes

Were not the sins of Laius then unearthed

Squalor, anguish that wisdom always weaves

What is known cannot now be forgotten

What has passed, now tainted with shame and scorn

Babes of my babe, grossly begotten

“Virtuous”, “Wholesome”, public ideals shorn

 

This wearied vessel now freezes en relevé

Prolonging the plunge, release from this world

A moment to think, scream, fixate, wield, pray

Drapery prepares to be furrowed, furled

 

(Sophocles, don’t let it read, “she screams and kills herself”

Dear Gods, Sophocles, give me something

Keep me off insanity’s verge

Tell them my story, tell them my love

Sophocles, don’t end me a licentious criminal

Alone and draped in regal defeat.

Anything, Sophocles, one semicolon more

Tell them my story, tell them my lore)