Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

for men of second sight, and for the godly Kyretes, the circle dancers who could claim the ear of Zeus. They came, they danced, they beat their swords on their shields.

There is a cow among your herds, they said, that changes color twice a day, every fourth hour. The morning finds it white, noon red, evening black. Who knows that cow can bring your son to life when he is found.

That cow, the seer Polyidos said to Minos, is like a mulberry, which is first white, then red, then black.

So hasten, said Minos, who knew by the look in his eye that Polyidos could find his son.

And find Glaukos he did. He knew the jar as soon as he saw it. And none too soon, for a snake had found it just before and was coiled around the jar, sliding upward, as if it were an arm of the octopus painted there in blue.

Polyidos killed the snake with a stone. It came loose from the jar like a knot untied and lay limp in the dust. But before Polyidos could draw near, a second snake rode forward. It smelled its fellow with its tongue, slid away as quickly as a fish through water, and came back with the leaf of an herb in its mouth before Polyidos could take two steps toward the jar. It stuffed the leaf in the dead snake’s mouth, and waited. Before long, the dead snake raised its head, shivered down its length, and drew itself together to move.

And with that same herb, said one Consiliarius, Polyidos revived the drowned Glaukos and returned him to his father.

You are like the child Glaukos, said the other, drowned in the honey of time. We think a snake will come to be your dream. Our sources are confused. We are only messengers.

RISE UP, dead man, help me drive my row! Grieve, Rufus, I nagged myself with my philosophy, for the poverty of the rich, the impotence of the powerful. The discontinuous ownership of what cannot be kept has smashed us all to shards, the love of what cannot be loved has changed our minds until the business of mind is a ewe in the thicket. Man will die weary of what he was never intended to do.

The ecliptic had left the Ram, where every dawn from Theseus to Tiberius the sun rose red, bringing rain and heron on the one equinox, silencing cricket and scythe on the other, the time of the bloody Persephone and the sleep of snakes, but the world itself was mad.

The Fish were as they have been through eternity, swimming in their forked river and with their field of starry wheat between them, but the world was mad.

Men with ulcers for eyes carry baskets of rock up the face of the excavation. They are chained, they will not go astray. Hernias bound up with rags brown with urine, piles, teeth rotting with the ache of death itself, boils, welts splitting green, jaundice, fever, hair alive with lice: they ought to bring the Roman crowd here to see us.

They could build a grandstand and bring the spectators here in excursion boats. The slaves at the oars would serve for the praeludium. No doubt they would find it boring. They have become bored with the chariot races, and they have long since ceased to see horses, at whose deaths they begin to flutter their fans and gossip.

Your Roman has in fact never quite seen anything but the surface, the outside of anything. He would die of shame to be a slave because he would be seen as a slave. You might know that Roman sovereignty would be inherent in a color. And no Roman would be seen watching the butcher work in the Circus except in the whitest of togas.

God bless the flies! Their maggots are our only doctors.

The spectators would much rather have seen us on the island, the waterless island.

— Nonnunquam pluit, nonne?

— Never. It has not rained in these islands since the dawn of the world.

Were it to rain, we considered, we could let it drench our clothes and wring them over our mouths. Was there dew? Could we dig a well? And with what?

Thirst is a deprivation that drives you mad before it kills you. I knew that much.

There is a man here in the gangs at Corinth whom madness has touched to the marrow. We go stupid as we are worked to death, drained of the last of our mother wit, humanity out, dullness in. Madness, though, is a kind of conflagration of the intellect, a man locked in a room beating on all the doors and walls just in case something might give. It is childish, madness, the irrational frenzy of wanting. Yet to a dullard who has long since absorbed his childhood with greed, the bondage of easily gratified desires, the return of a smidgin of innocence shocks him into madness. A man rots when the child in him dies.

The genius philosophers urge us to heed is but a grasp of one’s childhood, any moment of which unrelinquished to the demons of time is sufficient to keep the god Apollo near enough, near enough. One touch of virginity can sweeten the sourest vinegar of a ravaged soul, one touch of liberty still green, one unforgotten chill at looking at a moth on the back of the hand. Savage folly in a turm of white butterflies, a quitch shot with crickets, hide and seek in the barley awns!

THISTLE, GOLDFINCH, STAR. A star in its eye, the goldfinch pecks a blue thistle with pert bill. Cricket chitter charms the air. Anna Perenna! sings the finch. Anna Perenna!

I am, or think I am. I know I was. I and the bee, we were. I and the bee and the flower. And now we all three are, somewhere. Of the jug I do not know the tenses. It was once on a potter’s wheel and in a kiln, and before that it