… do not mourn in vain your fortune failing you now, your works that have failed, the plans of your life that have turned out to be illusions. – Cavafy, THE GOD FORSAKES ANTONY
I. A SPEECH FOR CLEOPATRA
As if the blood of the whole country flowed
My veins’ bright river, and its map my face,
As if at every turning of the road
I met myself, crowned in the country’s grace,
And being rivered by its fertile blood
Grew rich in love, as several channels join
To the full stream, and was its plenitude
Of beauty minted to a single coin.
Was I to be past expectation, then,
I with the river sliding in my blood,
Slipping through love as through an arch of men,
Their bodies urgent with their single flood,
Who, single, arched in their full force behind
The tissued curtains of my copious bed,
Then found themselves alone with the night wind,
And I beyond them, on another road?
Letting the river bear me where we knew
There was some moral, I approached the sea-
My mouth a fragment of the kissing dew,
My golden eyes deep Africa’s treasury.
And by the final jetty, when I felt
All richness caught in me as in a cup
That brims in the hour before its wealth is spilt,
He rose, a sun, to drink my rivers up.
Who in his arch from the horizon’s foot
Stood to the stars, a populated land
Of loving cities paying their gold tribute
To the blond short hair gleaming on his brown hand,
Coursing their love in his prolific veins,
Those cords that held the world in constancy
Deep in the season of the inland rains
I felt new wealth engendering in me.
And tented in the shadows of his eyes,
While on my willing flesh his fingers played,
In beds that stretched the limits of the skies,
Great in each other, in pure sun arrayed,
Flashing all colors that the world define,
Even past color, to the inner house of light,
To chambers of force where the elements refine,
We pierced, in our profusions of delight.
The river is shallow now, the flood being past,
Keeps only a sleepy flowing in my breast.
And I will sleep, and the great land will sleep,
That in me longs for its deservéd rest.
I was its crown, its golden treasury,
And as I turn to sleep, it lies content
With the magnificence it bought with me.
Wisely, and finally, the coin is spent.
II. A SPEECH FOR THE ASP
O it was much for a mere noxious snake
Such as I, a thing unnamed in a wicker basket,
Creation of mud, very slime personified,
The shadow under the leafage, it was much
(I did not presume, and neither did I ask it)
To be to that world-notorious supple breast,
That breast like music from a curved flute shapen,
Applied, asked, demanded to draw the poison out,
The overlong milk, the blood grown desultory,
(Nothing of offense was given, nothing taken)
To be surgeon to that intolerant malady,
Love, late love, to be cauterist of pride
That had enlarged to the size of a river flood,
That filled the whole breast with its indignant cancer.
(I bit in cleanly, and the woman died.)
Still it was much. I left the proper traces.
They would be able to say: an aspic’s venom
Decrepited this, that was queen of the entire Nile:
Thus Fortuna: thus disasters to the exceptional.
(Why say she died of being over-human?).
But to have been rocked to the soft susurrus
Of the woman’s words, been cradled like a baby
Before it has life independent of its mother,
Been only the instrument of that ripe breast
(I had not even the feeling of being deadly.)
I had the feeling of being once necessary
In the most intimate sense, like a pleasurable bridegroom,
Like everything fondly male to the most open woman
It was much, much. I could have argued against it …
(But she had reasons, and I did not presume.)
III. A SPEECH FOR ANTONY
First the astonishment of battle, the pure noise.
After that, the astonishments of love are minimal.
Man, finding himself naked, armored in nothing
But the narrow shield of body, takes to his bed.
Love, I have been your tangle of arms and legs,
And say only this: the bare stone will outlast you.
You bring only the lesser distortions of the person;
The greater, that govern, are the property of death.
I was the man filed to perpetual sharpness
At a naked grave. Thereafter, the appearances
Of my body, the suave husk flavored with olive,
Had force only in another’s imagination,
And from that imagination took their names:
The altruistic snake, the sought-after fever,
The sense of flux that rises from troubled water
And closes in, like thin fog, after nightfall.
Things being so, it is not with astonishment
The sword chooses my navel, but as its place to be
Comfortably at home. That union disinfects
My establishment of the many small cries of women.
For when, in the sensual thrust, a pattern forms,
Its one choice bloody iron, its other choice
The exigent blunt flesh, I am converted
Always to believe in the colder necessity.
It is in the moment when the central fact
Peels back the names that have disguised its name
That the true skull stutters and hesitates into speech.
There are then no flaming suns, no elaborate river,
But the name, Egypt, becomes the name of death.
As one, entering a living room, peels back the gloves
That have altered his hands, made them understandable
In easy terms of reference, I, dying, peel
The skin of love from my experienced hands and eyes,
To become the rigid, the nameless Antony,
The hard stone hidden under the succulent fable.
What if, on the river of Cydnus, a storm spoke?
I answer it now, with no astonishment.
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