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Michael Shayer

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10/9/92 - near top of Sierra Nevada

Fire is fire

and not a cosy
             bottle to warm
                         your bed

so say the Flamenco ladies
in their bearing
and break out from bearing
in shakes that seem
to come unstoppably
          - while the men
gravely attentive
Olay encouragement

almost as eunuchs
until they too
break out in
impassioned muezzin tenor

[I am not sure of the ladies, I think they may
go home to the usual domestic anxieties]

the bullfighter too
plays with fire
but the horn that
          worries the worn-out horses
is not far from the same
thigh that delights the ladies

I think the fire is a little more
          real there

          but Euripides warns us,
after the women have torn
animals to pieces in their frenzies
and Agave tore out her
own son Pantheus’ arm from
its pit before ‘they played
ball with scraps of his body’,
that

          ‘whatever the god may be
welcome him to Thebes. For he is great
in many other ways as well. It was he,
or so they say, who gave to mortal men
the gift of lovely wine by which our suffering
is stopped. And if there is no god of wine
there is no love, no Aphrodite either,
nor other pleasure left to men.’

 

Page(s) 35-36

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