[Here, finally, is the final Epilogue section of 64. The first part returns briefly and somewhat comically to the wedding reception. The second is a Song of the Fates, echoing Catullus’s original poem, which I have already posted as a free-standing poem entitled The Rope on this blog. The third, perhaps most difficult part of the poem, is a dour prophecy (still in the voices of the Fates) regarding the future of Peleus’s son (Achilles in the original and the murder of the Trojan princess Polyxena). The fourth part flashes forward to the ultimate fate of Peleus and Thetis and they disappear. In the fifth part, as in the Catullan original, the tone changes completely, introducing a pastoral flavor, albeit interspersed with dark themes from the preceding sections. The last part constitutes an ‘epilogue within an epilogue’ and attempts to present the moral of the tale.

I have mixed feelings about this poem that I have spent a good 20 years or more of my life working on but is very different from most of my other work. I feel an odd mixture of pride and shame: proud that I have finally finished the damned thing, but also somewhat ashamed that the unrelenting nastiness of it reflects negatively, but somehow necessarily, on myself and on the times in which I have lived. Catullus, coming out of a long period of brutal civil war into a new supposedly more stable order based on tyranny must have felt much the same.]

 

                                        EPILOGUE

                                               (30)

                                      HANGOVER

The wedding-guests wake with horrible hangovers,

slumped over sofas and armchairs or bunched up

more closely together than usual in sleeping bags

on the living room floor. The pools of puke

in the deep-pile carpet will take some cleaning out

and various domestic ornaments that may have held

some sentimental value lie shattered. Someone cries “Fuck!”

as they cut their foot on a shard rushing for the loo.

The best man is still comatose in the bathroom, people banging angrily on the door.

Some have done vaguely remembered things they vaguely regret.

Lawsuits, family feuds and courses of antibiotics for STDs

may well ensue. The Fates, like family-court judges, oversee

the proceedings with looks of unsurprised disdain.

 

(31)

The Rope

Clotho binds the thread; Lachesis pays it out;

Atropos sells it on to the handyman, builder, soldier,

cowboy, sailor, slaver, torturer, executioner

with her winning sales exec smiles and seductive ways…

 

& the various types of fella are roped in

and pegged out like dirty laundry

hung out to dry on a washing line:

joker, wheeler-dealer, ladies’ man, the silent type; Jack the ripper

Jack the lad, diamond geezer, Johnny lunch bucket, family man;

incorrigible bachelor, perfect gent; head-butting nutter, upper class twit;

harmless drunk, helpless nerd, boy band reject, dumb jock, seven-stone-weakling, nervous wreck

salt of the earth; wife batterer, drug addled waif; self-lover, self-loather alike,

every neighbor who mows his lawn in shirt sleeves every sunny Sunday afternoon….

Give ‘em all enough rope

& sure as eggs is eggs

Sure as night follows day

Sure as hell, in the end,

the scissors or the dump or the drying out clinic

will find them out and reel them back in again.

 

The Fates have a single eye between them

that you can borrow when you watch TV

through which you see their work in rosy light

and feel assured that all is right.

 

(32)

The Fates poke about Peleus like urologists,

boney fingers fingering his prostate and prick

& predict a son…

 

“A nasty foul-tempered piece of work,

with a weakness for war for pay and young girls,

Sonny-boy will set her hair alight

and laugh as his boys rape the princess,

and by way of a grand finale,

conclude the proceedings

with a sharp knife-stroke across the throat,

mercy of sorts,

and will toss her atop the bonfire

of other burning bodies

in the charred vanquished village,

an Elvis-style snarl on his lips,

and will wipe the blood from his medals

and move on his troops.

*

‘What did Daddy do in the war, Grandpa?’

a wide-eyed granddaughter will one day inquire….”

 

(33)

Death plants her scythe on the stone floor,

scraping the rusty blade back and forth across the flagstones

& tapping a single impatient foot,

scissors snipping like gypsy castanets,

waiting for them to heed her Siren call…

Peleus won’t go…

Long since lost to a stroke,

Thetis dribbles

and wets her wheel-chair.

No longer with us anyway, poor dear.

 

(34)

Back in the good old days, when hearty fun

could be had by cowherds splashing water on giggling smocked girls

from the water trough or the bucket drawn from the well,

and dirty children’s feet dangled in clear streams

as summer sun cast a golden hue over the growing corn,

all was well. Till the wars came

and the boys came back in pine-boxes

or with condoms and nylons and sticks of gum in their pockets,

PTSDs and a thing about guns,

whistling at the legs of passing Penelopes

put to work in the munitions factories, GI brides

too impatient to wait for their heroes to come home.

Any passing yank will do.

And then the Bomb with its grim exclamation point of a cloud

saying “What the fuck!” “Everybody’s going to die.”

“Best drop out, get stoned and laid.”

And the workers turned out of factories and pits

by robots, outsourced child labor, global warming,

hopped up on prescription drugs to ease their pain,

riot now and then and are beaten down by police.

Things go from worse to worse, No bottom lies in sight.

Only ourselves to blame. We do nothing to avert the decline.

 

(35)

No wonder then the gods

don’t drop in on our wedding feasts

that often these days, don’t much fancy

being seen hanging out

with the likes of us,

bar the occasional dream.