Medusa

The tentacles, the brazen phiz whose glare
stands every fibril of the mind on end–
lust looked at backward as it were,
an antique scare tactic, either self-protection
or a libel on the sex whose periodic
blossom hangs its ungathered garland
from the horned clockwork of the moon:
as cause or consequence, or both, hysteric
symptoms no doubt figure her. She’d been
a beauty till Poseidon, in a flagrant
trespass, closed with her on Athena’s temple floor.

The tide-rip torrents in the blood, the dark
gods not to be denied–or a mere indiscretion?
Athena had no time at all for talk like this.
The sea-god might be her old rival, but the woman
he’d gone to bed with was the one who paid.
A virginal revenge at one remove–there’s none more
sordid or more apt to ramify, as this one did:
the fulgent tresses roiled to water-snake-
like writhe, and for long lashes’
come-hither flutterings, the stare
that hardens the psyche’s soft parts to rock.

The female ogre, for the Puritan
revisionists who took her over, had a new
and siren sliminess. John Milton
put her at the gate of hell, a woman to
the waist, and fair; but ended foul, in
many a scaly fold, voluminous and vast–
whose name indeed was Sin. And in the den
of doctrine run amok, the armored glister
of a plodding Holiness revealed her
as likewise divided but, all told, most
loathsome, filthy, foul, and full of vile disdain.

The Gorgon, though, is no such Manichean tease,
no mantrap caterer of forbidden dishes,
whose lewd stews keep transgression warm.
The stinging jellyfish, the tubeworm,
the tunicate, the sea anemone’s
whorled comb are privier to her mysteries:
her salts are cold, her home-
land Hyperborean (the realm that gave us
the Snow Queen and the English gentleman),
her mask the ravening aspect of the moon,
her theater a threshing floor that terror froze.

Terror of origins: the sea’s heave, the cold mother
of us all; disdain of the allure that draws us in,
that stifles as it nurtures, that feeds on
what it feeds, on what it comforts, whether male
or female: ay, in the very tissue of desire
lodge viscid barbs that turn the blood to coral,
the heartbeat to a bed of silicates. What surgeon
can unthread those multiplicities of cause
of hurt from its effect; dislodge, spicule by spicule,
the fearful armories within; unclench the airless
petrifaction toward the core, the geode’s rigor?