Taurus
Whoever will win the prize
Gathered about the low slow dark form
Must draw the most blood.
Must succumb to the roar of the crowd.
In flashes of fire, red and gold.
Hemingway knew the way to greatness.
Following the close dirt roads through Spain.
The stone rising on each side.
Words slain, wrestled screaming to the ground.
But watch, in fields along the river mouth
Undone in hyacinths and violets,
yellow crocuses and wild roses.
The maidens line up, one by one,
to ride the chestnut bull of watery dreams
ungored by the horns of an angry art.
This one is maybe more about Hemingway and male approaches to creativity, but I do remember distinctly having Europa in mind at the end. The new project is a modern retelling with a gothic/horror vibe, mostly told from Ariadne's p-o-v, but more about her brother and mother. I'm mostly thinking today about how much has changed in my work and how much probably has not. Granted I am hopefully much batter at turning an image, but probably the same threads and themes and images are still in there from that very rough, raw material or consciousness. And maybe this is always the case.
If I think about my current Ariadne, she is definitely the same Ariadne of that earlier poem. Probably very similar to the women who inhabit the fever almanac, even though I didn't include that poem in the book.(I probably though the Cassandra poem was stronger and didn't want too much mythology.) I think it may have come after the first chap, but by then I was working on the poems that would become Bloody Mary which had different thematic concerns, so never made it into any thing outside of the web publication. I might even have forgotten it existed if I hadn't stumbled upon it looking to share old stuff on social media a couple months back. That combined with binge-watching Troy: Fall of a City on Netflix, set me back to reading myths and dreaming of a project incorporating the mythic.
In the fever almanac, there is also a poem "Beneath" with the line:
" The maiden
with her thread, The laurel tree, Death
in every doorway, peril beneath every bush."
And though I'm channeling Gretel in another poem, "Sweet" (interesting given how I also came back to that character with my recent H&G project, plump.) I was no doubt thinking Ariadne here too:
"Like Gretel she learns where
the sugar lies in the dark,
dark center of the myth."
It's interesting to see where this will go..it is by no means finished, I have about half of the poems I want to write and am working on the remainder as I share on online, so you get to see it develop in real time. I'm doing a bit more research on the actual myth and spinning it into a contemporary story. It seems fitting somehow that I've come back to this place in my work given it's very much where i started in some ways.
note:
*if you'd like a little sneak peak at the inspo board behind the project as a whole, check out my pinterest board...
