Explore Poems: Greek & Roman Mythology

I haven’t killed a single thing in
Months and hand on heart
It’s getting tiresome.
I take soft steps in…

When I was thirteen and dumb as bark and
married to a king and looked into mirrors
my mouth unwatchable…

I created more loss where I meant to make less.
Created more debt where I meant to make depth.
Created…

When Ovid drives the Buick, it is from one sharp end
          of Boston to the Cape—as if he must escape the …

laurel tree, limbs bent and twined into crown           heifer          bank of marsh reeds,
handful lashed into pipes, …

Blood-gushered mountainside a brass parapegma of noon
glares behind: gore of hides. Beasts all slain. Shadeless midday. Specterless
differentiation. Glad day zodiacs augur. Awl of insight; hunters'
blades. Actaeon: and the spirits of motion. Actaeon
uttering:...

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you
do not break with…

there is no room left for disbelief, we have unsang
the songs. have stripped stones of magic. we gave…

was, according to Virgil, always a fickle, unstable thing. Woman. Wyf. Merger of wife and man. To indicate: not-girl. Not-yet-claimed, not-yet weeping. And aren’t they often weeping? The mother, tearing her hair out, running toward the battle lines, filling heaven...

Over and back,
the long waves crawl
and track the sand with foam;
night darkens and the sea
takes on that desperate tone
of dark that wives put on
when all their love is done.

Over and back,
the tangled thread falls slack,
over and up and on;
over and...

Over Skype, I try to document my mother’s
bald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,
and science has proven what it had to prove:
every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother’s first.
Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood’s crypt,
where prayer...

He and I sought together,
over the spattered table,
rhymes and flowers,
gifts for a name.

He said, among others,
I will bring
(and the phrase was just and good,
but not as good as mine,)
"the narcissus that loves the rain."

We strove for a name,
while the light of...

                                                            Hunger like her mama
                                                            Most strong in White gaze as in
                                                            a Cowbird’s flirtation
                                                            Sprouted in eyes to tongues
                                                            to bellies pregnant with stolen milk
                                                            to restless hands
                                                            These fingernails filled with Black body,

Some are transformed just once
And live their whole lives after in that shape.
Others have a facility
For changing themselves as they please.

Days of rain. The drey outside my window would keel
and the wind would plunder. My heart was valent
with possibility: I could be anyone now, half woman,
half asterism. Fragmental as a new year. Patron saint
of the rutilant and cindering. I could...

i.
 
Dog. The time you take home, the time you take away from home.
The insistence, the instance worried at with your thick tongue.
 
Stink. Because of what you found on the ground and put in your gut.
Harry. As in beset, or beast....

A dolphin fell in love with me.
Probably because of my looks—
people always said, What a pretty boy you are.

I was coming home from Gymnasium,
I was so sweaty from running,
we all were, we all ran into the sea,
its freshness,
we gargled the...

Someone tells me the earth and everything in it
will belong to me if I catch the horizon before sundown.
I sprint, kicking up dust all the while.
It seems I run with everyone in the world
standing on my kidneys, eating my head.
What’s...

I. GERYON

Geryon was a monster everything about him was red
Put his snoutsnout This image, suggestive of an animal such as a boar, may allude to Geryon’s father, Chrysaor (Khrysaor), sometimes depicted as a winged boar. Chrysaor is the brother of...

Somehow Geryon made it to adolescence.

                ____

Then he met Herakles and the kingdoms of his life all shifted down a few notches.
They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.
Geryon was going into...