REMEMBERING MEDEA

This is Jason, not some ragged castaway.
By the wreck of the bold Argo, prow
shattered, Athene from mast absconded,
the bearded sailor sits on a rock.
The breakers tug at the rotting wood,
and though his blue eyes are deeper than sky,
his hair's a sooty snarl of salt and bile.

He is condemned to this harbor watch,
scorned by the citizens of Corinth,
comes from his peasant bed like a crustacean,
taking the scraps that the ocean leaves.
In the scant shade of his ship,
more like a picked-clean skeleton of whale,
he whittles goddesses from galley oars,
mends his tunic with rags of sail.

The past is gone. The dangerous bride,
Medea, a motor of will, an engine
of blood and passion, dead.  Their marriage
a ride on a horse that could never be tamed.

He always feared her,
though she never refused his mounting urge.
Yet loving her was thrusting manhood
into a cache of spiders, her womb
not silk but the clinging of arachnid webs,
holding him in until his terrified seed
exploded.  She laughed, releasing him.
She shaved her pubic hair and burned it -
for power, she said. He saw the cask
of purple ointments beside her bed,
knew that the slaves of Corinthian wives
paid gold and precious stones for a daub
of them, knew how she used them 
to turn his would-be sons and heirs
into those shrivelled horrors she'd bury
in the garden at Hecate's hour.

Even the sons she gave him,
	she did so grudgingly,
tallying the hours of labor against him,
witholding her love and then inverting it,
slaying them to spite him,
snuffing them out like a casual abortion.

		- Brett Rutherford 

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Read more by Brett Rutherford at The Poet's Press

Poem used by permission of The Poet's Press

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