9.Map of Storms - Duncan McGibbon (13 inch ebook reader txt) 📗

/> Acheaens


The Death Of Helen


Thick flutes moaning low, slouch their way to Therapne,
The Royal Bell hums with accomplices
through the weight of air.
Dinner at shabby Mycenai
was always half an hour late,
allowing for tardy Aerope.
The sundials and clocks conformed.
Wellington's spoils from Knossos
or Talavera were becalmed
in a seedy, salt dog routine.
An empire spread by piracy
from a rocky mound on the
Argive plain. Its brine-scum spat
curses on Cretan armadas,
misted up in the fires
of sneak raids on Pylos.
To placate oil-painted Gods,
libations were poured
from porcelain Coronation bowls.
Palace protocol celebrated
horses trained at Lambourne,
wheel-thrown pottery,
shaft-grave devotions,
the Book of Common Prayer
and the protection
of water supplies.
Risen from Cycladic piety
and Helladic rationalism,
their choirs chanted hearthstone awe
to divert from Minoan
popery, Egyptian saints
and Hittitie faschism.
Yet, Hanoverians, they kept quarters
in Hohenzollern Troas
with the Saxe-Coburgs
and holidayed in Ugarit with
the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes.

A thin frame figure in Balmain black, impeccably
fragile, inspects the hollow inside the hive-shaped vault.

Atreus, close-cropped and
bearded, paraded his cowed family
on the blue-bowed
Dreadnoughts at Spithead.
The children of warriors wore
stockings tight over knees,
Eton collars, starched and
clean shoes unmuddied nad
the chlamys pockets sown.
Paris always grasped his
right wrist in his left hand.
While flag-waving Dorians
were kept out of earshot
of Aerope's heavy accents.
Atreus perferred all things
Trojan, his Berlin cousins,
Hindenberg rather than Nestor,
traditional cooking, domestic
time-tables and languid children
who feared him as he had feared
Grandma Thetis and Aunt Eris
with her old fashioned pendants
so rashly thrown to new-born Paris.
Yet he kept their amphoras now as they
had stood there then for Duke Perseus.

The tholos, facing East, at Frogmore lies under glistening rain.
Dense bells toll softly, sunk in low nimbostratus.

Paris had grown beyond Atreus' wrathful hand.
His nurse, a licensed helot, twisted
and pinched the hero's arm
that the sobbing child
could be dismissed back
into her jealous care.
The 'sardine' at Osborne
had his head held by midshipmen,
under a sash-window,soaked in red ink.
"Just to remember the martyred Cadmus."
Later, at Delphi, every stater
had to be accounted for,
despite his tutor's pleas.
While on the front line
at Thebes, Sir Frederick Maude
thanked Father Zeus for his going.
At Castle Belvedere, the switchboard
vitoed calls from Athena Dudley Ward
and Hera, Lady Thelma Furness.
The golden apple cart upset
the water clocks. Half an hour late,
Atreus' catafalque was interred
under the eyes of the new mulitiude.
Beaverbrook's ideal monarchy
invented an Ionic print
for the suburban literate.
An Homeric, oral King halts
by pattern-book shanty towns
crowding the perimeter of
the citadel. He transacts with
bronze-smiths, hoers, bath pourers
and craftsmen in depressed Boeotia.

Two rolls on a snaredrum then the silence of a taut minute.
Her already mythic face appears behind the palace window.

In Philistine Baltimore
old-line, Southern Titans
tutted at Leda's nuptials
to Teakle Thestius Warfield,
a sickly scion of new
Olympian millionaires.
They bought a stolen ring
from a pawnshop full of clocks
"What a lot of time
has passsed by here,"
quipped Alice Montague. On Blue-Ridge summit
the gold-beaked Episcopalian
saw his downy, white child born.
Then time sold out
for the auctioneer King.
Leda consorted with Tyndareus,
the son of Levantine
war-looters and squatters.
In a boarding house
in respectable Biddle St.
she kept her daughter
impeccable in a home-made
trousseau while she coldly
played with clay dolls,
Astor and Vanderbilt.
Names unheard of among
the smug, moneyed orders
of Chesapeake Bay.
At the Thesmophoria,
her unpretty charm brought
Lieutenant Winfield Theseus
Spencer Jnr. The magnet
of his gold stripes
lured her to Attic Pensacola
Bondswife to his bottle,
she took the trade route
to Syria, lived as a card-sharp
and cast horoscopes
in the trading stations,
for Jew-hating, Missouri sailors.
Menelaus took her back to Athens.
Aunt Bessie Aethra in attendance
I,Earnest Simpson, stalwart of ships,
who, felt for you more deeply
than anyone, am I not unknown?

Helen emerges into stark sunlight and the mourners move
onwards through stone precincts to the Lion Gate.

On grave-hoard vases and glossy
magazines, their story grows frequent
while Agamemnon checks his chariot-
tablets in the archives, flash-bulbs
pop their sonorous glamour of
stiquette, house-parties on
borrowed yachts, dinners and
night-club gatherings.
Paris steals a bride from
Spartan Baltimore. Words
begin their augury. Marlowe's
tough-guy immortality for
bible-belt consumption
in Vogue, of McCall's and
shifted to a new distribution
in Lacedaemon by Hearst's rising
Euipideans of the New York
Journal. A Spartan queen,
an averagely sensual divinity
for Doric readers to blend
with theogonic fantasies
screened in Ur and Hollywood.
Expelled to Europe
"Upon a single thought...."
consummated in sad Tiryns,
they lost the Mycenaean houses
by entail, became house guests
of the Rothschild's in dank Enzesfeld

She stoops to read an inscription "I, Menelaus, who lit the fire...."
while the carriers of an empty bier pretend exertions the weight of hair

Stony Troy was their love-place.
They climbed Berchtesgarten
after an hour's wait
for Paris to plot statecraft
with Sarpedon over the common
Hittite threat. Outside, she could not hear
their talk and was told
no more, except that Paris
should rule Mycenae in revenge
for Ribbenthrop's disgrace. Queen Aerope,
Agamemnon, Calchas, Odysseus,
he hated them all and agreed a code
should Troy triumph. Then they were
escorted by dual destroyers
from Priam's Vichy and Dolon's Spain
to cut an arcing wake through
the night Atlantic. She watched
him sworn in as Governor of Leuche,
wearing the fatigues of Achilles.
Under the satrapy of Dorians
he was made to muster troops
at Valley Forge, the Duchess
whispering the names of the
raw-throated G.I.s ached to speak
inside the wooden alliance.
Elsewhere it was a dream
romance,in Ilium, in Egypt,
while Menelaus or Paris,
bought the drinks, Deiphobus
bought it himself; always
that punctual nemesis, the oblique thud
of suicidal departure in
the billiard room or
the spreadeagled gawguff
of barbiturate overdose,
unsolved murder, fires
and unrest among
hitherto placed inhabitants.

Tired flute girls resume their threnody. Tested for
a route by one who would never know if they kept it.

They reign elsewhere in popular habit.
while excavators uncover thicknesses of
military ash at Troy 7a in defence of
Achilles' 'New Deal' and the Athenian Welfare State.
Yet Schliemann's Goethean labourers
unearth the hard treasures of this dream.
out of the dry gravel came Vuitton chests
the property of travellers and Suzy tholia,
the headwear of exiles. Then under rusting broaches,
the eponymous body, bound in fascia bands,
under deep-gathered shirt-belts chistles
a statue of shadows and light.
The smile beginning to play friendship
wide jaws, blue eyes a prominent nose
but her hands were large and acquisitive,
her collar bones obtrusive. Her hair
was first a construct of Minoan curls,
in twelve-year old flowing ribbons,
then a short, Achaean, Cleo de Merode cut
changed again to a later Vernon Castle
style and eagle brows, kept in place
always by Alexandre. That phenotypic
figure with an emotional precision
ochred under varnished black on vases.
in a Mainbocher peplos with
pouching wool and belt or
in her Foric chiton,
bodice pins hemming the overlap.
Hers was the age of visible dress
expensive meals, lustrations
to human gods, in Spry wall paintings
piano music by Noel Coward
the Argive chariot and Beaton's
geometric ware and the Queen Mother's
gift of old Bronze-age jewellery,
a costly time by-passed.

She sleeps, now and the mourners have been paid off
until they should needed to keen a forgotten ruler.

It was for that cloud the cordite reeked,
the steel ships burnt. The cities inflamed
to the core. It was for the odour of Givenchy
and dry sables that the young men screamed
in their cockpits under summer skies of
immaculate blue. It was for golden masks,
Cartier pendants, daggers, carved gravestones
amber from Egypt and luxuries from Palm Beach.
that landing craft struck the shores
and scholars were silenced
and painters hands fell still.
Tanks blazed in the desert
for a Doric chiton billowing,
empty, in the scorching breeze;
for nothing more than the white steam rising
through the fingers of a dead man's hand
on a jeep's twisted radiator
sculpted as Callas might bow
or Pavlova dance and Dietrich pose.
While genocide proved unpreventable
and of those who died
few had cared to cast a ballot sheet.
In distant Pylos, a nurse
swings the consort of monarchs
into her chair as light tightens her hair
on a scalp as emaciated
as her childhood dolls of clay.

At Royal Windsor mausoleum
the mantled mourners will pass
the bier in single file, each with
a right arm threaded
in her partner's left.
Hands clasped, they will listen
for the toll's obsession

and will chant the office of hirelings for the dead.


Iphigenia

I am stone-heart,
great, great, great grand-daughter
of William. Was it William? Yes.
Colonel of the Hampshire Militia,
who taught his fellow officer
and divulger of secrets, Edward Gibbon
to drill, drink and philander in defense
of staunch Sussex against France
and Romish superstition. I...
I am Iphigenia. Yes, Unity...
great, great,great grand-daughter of ...
William fellow of Gibbon, whose
ivory-bound history inspired Carlyle
who, by him, slew Myrtilus Grote
and Thirlwall in revenge for Hypatia.
From William. No... William... begat
Henry, drowned with all hands on H.M.S. York,
his ship, in the Dogger fog. I am Bobo,
that same great, great, grand-daughter
of Henry Reveley, cuckold,
attaché to the British legations
in Florence and later Frankfurt
curse of Rome and Manning.
I am Boud, great grand-daughter of
Henry, friend of Swinburne,
grand-daughter to Bertram,
loather of Jews, teller of Japanses tales,
creator of the London parks,
whose eddying swirl
of Rhododendrums and polygonum
still resist the rationing Royal shears
at Sandringham.
He was a gossip of Whistler's
spoiler of country houses,
who won Clementine Ogilvie,
Lord Airlie's daughter as his bride.
From her, he, Atreus, begot my father,
Baron Agamemnon... Sorry... Yes,
David, estate seller, fighter of Boers.
My mother, Clytemnestra...,
Sydney Bowles was daughter of Thomas,
master mariner of Aldbrough, M.P.
and member of the Committee of Public accounts.

Yes, I am that same Bobo,
who stood beside the darkening
storm where restless winds
stirred the Burgenland orchards.
My father sacrificed me
for the sake of Troy or was it... Troy?
- or so they thought - to fate
in the land-locked English Park in Munich.
Churchill, my mother's cousin,
had assembled his fleets in the Channel,
seeking to crown the Achaeans
in triumph over Sarpedon, Hirohito's Troy.
proud Sarpedon's just concerns
for Austria nad Czechoslovakia
penned his fleets in port and drove
him to inquire by telegram of me.
Julius Streicher pronounced;
"Churchill, ruler of Westminster tea-rooms,
you shall see no more till fate
receive your daughter
Valkyrie's blood in sacrifice.
Once long ago you swore to fate,
bringer of light, the loveliest creature
born within twelve months,
your own wife, Sydney had a child
born in Swastica, Scythia's log cabin
where, frustrated with the dearth of gold,
this gift of loveliness came instead."

Yet they sacrificed on a false pretext.
They stole me from my mother,
claiming I was to find
a husband, Janos... Yes... Sarpedon himself.
I witnessed this curse as I watched
Bournhill cottage blaze, yellow, from the garden
as servants blundered to and fro.
I saw Atreus die, a thin bright, saffron face,
I am Boud, his great grand-daughter
A shock of white hair