Dodona: Asked of the Oracle

The female body, its creases and declivities
leading to the sacred opening, the hollow
whose precincts, here, neither seduce nor threaten:
bee-hum, birdsong, side-oats’ leaning awns,
the blowing grasses (one vivid
lizard flickers on gray stone,
is gone); the drifting
down of poplars; harebells,
convolvulus. The triumph-song,
far off, of strutting cocks
no threat, merely ridiculous. Olympus
a mountain range away: huge valleys
charged with gargantuan
foreshadowings, new-minted
laser glints of force.
What lustral commerce
might cleanse the consciousness, hallow the body,
and renew a broken trust? Before Dione,
the dim earlier consort, gave place
to nagging, bitchy Hera (who for her nagging
had, of course, good reason)
would there have been a time
the rustle of earth-nurtured
oaks had meaning-when doves in flight,
as yet unhackneyed by utopian
demagogueries old as Noah,
might prove oracular?
Or was there,
in the safety even of this
place, this hollow, the quaver
of that hovering melisma (heard now
from the taxicab cassette, or filtered
through the debate above the tric-trac),
the voice of a despair that finds no solace
in warfare or politics? Does the unease
lie deeper, even, than the
archetypal cleft of sex?