Crane (after Euripides’ Helen 1495-1511)
by Nicolette D'Angelo
Come, this is the news you will deliver: a boy
and a girl named ruin
are un-stained now covered now
feather upon feather
don’t mind me, would that
I could
your alphabet soup of a neck that Zeus spells his name with
goes to bed with racing clouds (cloud
being one translation for Helen of Troy’s phantom
stunt double ghost but no yes no she did not go to Troy)
one can do many things with a neck
like yours: see around corners, devise a way out
get to the bottom of something, except
this
don’t mind me, my collective daydream
on Helen and another winging longneck
animal Yeats wrote I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
and now my heart is sore
and of Leda’s rape: her nape caught in his—
don’t mind me
broken and filthy
today I found the stilts of your legs
sticking out like knitting needles
from the green yarns of riverbank
the s of you turned outside itself
the beetle-colored leg bands glinting
on your wire hanger corpse
announcing nothing
but how in a past life you’d been raptured
it changes you to be touched like that
it breaks you
in
still the bands rattle through the air
telling the world you’re home
like tin cans on the getaway car
of your body
oh don’t mind
Nicolette D'Angelo is a poet and researcher located in Oxford. She also co-convenes a project called ‘The Queer and the Classical’.
Image:
Hilma af Klint
The Swan, No. 05, Group IX/SUW
1914-1915