This is Sophie.
There are missing
strings on her guitar.
She says she doesn’t
need them.
She sings
“If I Needed You”
But no one listens
But me and Ber,
Who takes this picture.
Where is she now?
I do not know
But every day
She’s on my mind.
Townes Van Zandt, "If I Needed you"
for Suni
She has no home but this day and night
Some day she'll come with the rising sun
and sing for you who are alone
there are no strings on her guitar
her voice alone the light of love
Saw a documentary long ago
it haunts me still
Picture this
He's playing at some bar
Maybe two or three hear him sing
Weak applause
Yet he goes on
I can relate to that
Were I there
I'd ask to sing with him
Documentary: Be Here To Love Me
However deep a fathom is
five fathoms is not deep enough
to bury me or my grief
for a father lost
though not at sea.
The sea is but a metaphor
for all we do not know.
Is it the drowning
we’re living for?
I search for others
whose fathers taught them
how to ride out any storm
though, in the end,
the driving wind and rain
would take their fathers
far away from them.
Lke me, they grieve
and will not be consoled.
We ride a wave of tears
in search for where
our fathers lie.
Soon enough
we'll be with them.
Shakespeare's “Full Fathom Five”
from The Tempest lives
In the hearts and minds
Of those most earnest
To live a life worth dying for.
Each finds in the song
something different.
Jackson changes
nails and coins
into something
rich and strange.
Sylvia learns to die.
She tells us
what the ding-dongs
mean to her:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.
When I could hold
my sons in my arms,
I sang this lullaby to them.
I sang it badly.
Not a word did they understand.
Yet it cast a charm upon their sleep.
(Rubens, Peter Paul, Sir, 1577-1640: Venus Lamenting over Adonis)
Did Adonis die
to give us flowers
Or did he die
because to such beauty
we turn an evil eye?
What chance has he
to simply live and die
as all mortals hope to do
in such beauty
as age allows?
In school, students learn that Adonis was an exceptionally attractive young man whom both Aphrodite and Persephone loved. A boar, sent by Ares, who was a jealous lover of Aphrodite, gored Adonis. The boy soon died. From drops of his blood came the flower we call anemone. It is a tragic story, but the further details of that story are more difficult to process and are usually omitted. Here is the rest of the story for those who want to know.
Adonis’ mother was a princess named Smyrna. Her father, Cinyras, proudly claimed Smyrna was more beautiful than Aphrodite. Aphrodite took this as an insult and punished Cinyras by making his daughter fall in love with him. (Aphrodite has a genius for such things.) Smyrna, eros-bitten, then sleeps with her father on a night when he is too drunk to know what he is doing. As Smyrna’s pregnancy comes into view, Cinyras suddenly realizes what has happened and, in a rage, grabs a sword and takes out after his fleeing daughter, but as the sword is about to fall, Aphrodite changes the girl into a myrrh tree. The sword cleaves the tree in twain and Adonis falls out on the ground. Aphrodite whisks Adonis away and hides him in a box and asks Persephone, Queen of the Dark, to keep the box out of sight. (Some accounts tell of Cinyras taking his own life for all he had done wrong.) Of Persephone, of course, looks inside the box and finds the lovely child. As Adonis grows into a man, he becomes ever more beautiful, so much so that both Aphrodite and Persephone become rivals for his time. You know the rest of the story. Enters Ares, who wanted Aphrodite for himself alone, jealous of the attention Adonis, a mere mortal, was getting from two goddesses. The cowardly god of war sends a boar that gores poor Adonis while the lad is out hunting despite Aphrodite's warnings. Adonis dies, but from drops of his blood spring up anemone. Adonis’ story is a dark one of incest, of a son who is also the grandson of his father, rival lovers, fatal jealousy, metamorphosis, and rebirth. What started it all was a father’s excessive pride in his daughter’s beauty. All the subsequent craziness comes from that, though the different elements of that craziness have their own independent logic. As I said before, it is a story hard to process but also is promising material for artists and writers who seek to expose us to ourselves.
Today, we use Adonis or adonis to refer to a youth whose beauty turns all eyes. The name often has a pejorative connotation as if beauty and character or beauty and intelligence do not go together. I would urge caution before calling a handsome youth an Adonis. It could be understood by those who know the story as casting on him the evil eye. As spring grows wild with wind and rain, I’ll change this story of Adonis into a poem. For now, see the little one above.
for the Rudy Boy Experiment
If you run out of time,
O if you run out of time,
Your shoes will be there
Where once you stood
All who were there that night
when you sang
what was in your heart
know you wore those shoes
and sang the truth
as you know it
O my sisters
and O my brothers,
they'll be waitin' there
so we may too
lift the voice
that lives alone
in each one of us.
(Photograph by Ber Himwich)
It was in the bawdy, riotous
play of the Lupercalia
where young men,
dressed down to nothing
but grease and skin,
would strike with goat-hide thongs
the bare backs of women
who wished to conceive
in the coming year
That Mark Anthony,
the leader of the Luperci,
thrice offered Caesar a kingly crown
that Anthony in his eulogy
tells us Caesar thrice refused,
thus denying the claim of his assassins
that Caesar was ambitious.
The tale may be true.
Beyond Shakespeare,
there are accounts by others
who saw all this live.
‘February’ comes from februa,
Latin for the goat-hide straps
the greased down ‘wolves’, the Luperci,
used to drive young women mad
and into spring.
