THE MENELAUS
Robert Kelly
Be sure to hold the least of it in your cool arms
how do they stay so in this intolerable climate
as if the fever-snake had bitten the whole earth
& the river bleeds.
I have come for you at last.
You are my possession: or for the sense of you
as my possession it has been fought. Whatever was
now has been burnt down, died down. I came here
in my own shape but lost it on the way.
Your name
is what I chiefly remembered. Sometimes the spread
of your legs as you leaned back to receive me.
But mostly an image, if an image, of you coming
up out of a sun-infested pool. I dreamed it once,
never saw it so, for all the pools of our kinder
kingdom. Queendom It was not a place without you.
from Gods and Mortals, ed. Nina Kossman