Issue 1: February 2006.
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Home > Issue 1: February 2006 > Poetry
First Labor
by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
—after Alexander Calder's Hercules and the Lion, exhibited at the Art Gallery
of the Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas, 2001.
So far as I know that master, Alexander Calder,
had never been to Argos no less Vegas,
in 1929 when he sculpted us.
Even so he must have known my brother
was Cerberus. So who could guess a wire twister
like him would dare to bend up such
a joke on me and Hercules, would catch us
in a lark before the big guy used his club, his useless
arrows, on my iron skin. And FYI, he didn't finish me
with a garrote but strangled me with his bare hands.
Only a demi-god could bring the monster home
slung like a dead cat, coat-hanger ordinary,
then show up at some casino to be crowned
like Hercules, a man fated to throw them bones.
Third Labor
by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Mammals are hard-wired for arousal,
and as the fallow buck works
his gold horn against a blasted tree trunk,
he bellows to emphasize this point to his does
and the African goats that shelter with them.
The deer are elusive, although they can't
change the direction of a bullet
shot by humans whose skilled killings
go on everywhere but who still manage
to make myths of sacred animals. The deer
next door mean hard cash to our neighbor, his spoils
if he keeps them alive. In his pasture, they vanish
into the brush and scrub, show up seldom, mysterious,
dangerous, with us, not with us at all.
Small Gratitudes
by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
The flicker's black and white back, French verbs
are reason enough for small gratitudes
when life is the way it is, filled with this
thin light, telephones, someone's narrow, retreating smile,
the ice sheet over the Amundsen Sea sector softens.
Le glacier se ramoullet. Glacier melt will raise the sea
a foot and more by twenty-one-o-one.
Will we all be wet Antarctic orphans then?
The morning sun troubles the back fence,
translates leaves to parchment on the hill. Winter
facts are black and white.
Our own gratitudes must include the glaciers,
although they are thinning like a smile.
It could be worse, I'm grateful for the way it is—
a freeze first then, at last, a thaw.
Notes
"First Labor":
The Labors of Hercules were undertaken at the request of his cousin, Eurystheus. In The Odyssey, Hercules describes Eurystheus as "… a rough master."
The first labor was to kill the Nemean lion, the half-sister of Cerberus, the watchdog of the gates of the Underworld.
"Third Labor":
The third labor was capturing the Keryneian hind. Hercules was ordered to bring back the gold-horned deer, sacred to Artemis, alive.
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