(Mytho)Poetics
Jacqueline Winter Thomas
“Come back! Even as a shadow. Even as a dream.”
—Euripides
1
Once I had a dream of death—
firewood, pennyroyal,
the leaves Ophelia carried,
buildings tall as rivers, swept
to disarticulated skeletons.
The dream said words
could sink, said we
could float—told us,
great women must recant
the water, tie the knot.
Tonight we all will
know the world, tonight
we will be carried.
2
Too rooted to philosophy—
your hands, the metaphysics,
your silver ring, the slender
limbs of stoicism.
Too long I received forms
and never the names for things,
but behind the eyelids
when we sleep, we dream
of speaking cities, lost since childhood
and call this hypnagogia.
3
I’m in hell,
and you live in New York
which is its own mythology—
the buildings hatching
insects we go on
to kill.
We fear what we have
power over, the face
reminds us of our violence.
And if we vow
to only speak
in echoes,
our very language
will reflect our lack.
And if we vow
to only speak
in fire,
our words will turn
to stone in our mouths.
4
Do not, after waking,
look out the window
if you wish to remember your dream.
A window is one
world, the dream another.
5
It’s very cold here and snows every night.
Even across Lethe your letters know
the time, the weather
and for many years I lived in that cold too.
Now, you say, I must relearn the world
warm, the world, brown.
6
So many names, we wake with
and the windows steal what we remember,
translate every sky to scraper.
7
If I loved
you, I would walk
out of here.
If I loved you, even the fire
would not keep me,
even the leaves
would absolve me.
8
Even here, in flame, your image
even here, your voice reaches
even here, we have a tenderness
the streets you walk have long forgotten.
9
Why do we dream
in the old myths?,
you ask me.
I know we need a poetics of steel
instead of flowers—
know, full well, these acts
are the reliving of
every time Eurydice dies,
but I am still
weaving my hair,
and I am still
pressing weeds,
saying your name
at the window
as if it could,
from the fringe of the earth,
call you back.
Contributing editor Jacqueline Winter Thomas is an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at UNC Wilmington where she teaches courses in creative writing. Her poems and papers have appeared or are forthcoming in NAR, Barrelhouse, DIAGRAM, Tinderbox, Open House and TAB, among others. She is interested in the convergence of poststructural poetics and semiotics. She writes at heteroglossia.tumblr.com.
