Katie Hartsock
The Gall
Don’t do it, a voice goads
in the tragedies,
but they do.
It could have been as simple
as not walking on a carpet,
not putting on a coat.
Agamemnon crushes purple raiments,
dyed with spiny murex from the sea,
a path of splendor Clytemnestra
lays before his feet,
saying don’t overthink it,
my lord. My homecoming king.
Deianeira sees the girl
her husband has brought home
and anoints Hercules’ robe
with long-dried clots of blood and black gall
a blue-balled centaur gave her
as he died from the hero’s arrow.
A love-charm, he’d said,
for him. Just in case,
pretty face. She sends the garment off, posthaste,
then sees the tuft of wool from a rich-fleeced sheep
she’d wiped it down with
crumble into wine-red foam, seething.
Theseus is all man
the way he thinks a man should be,
but the mysteries
reverse him, dressed in a dress
and rouge and a wig, swinging his hips
to decapitation. Buyer be wearing
a god’s revenge, big as teased hair.
And the princess,
the princess of Corinth,
she wants Jason’s ex and kids kicked out.
Medea sends the children
with a gift, a finely woven robe
and diadem of beaten gold,
all darkened by the arts
of her old world.
Before the princess puts them on,
before she admires herself thus attired and the dear
loveliness of her legs
in the mirror, before the flames invade
her flesh falling
off like pitch from a pine torch,
before she begs her sceptered father to do something
and her fire sticks to him
like horror’s own glue,
before they die together
like ivy suckered to a log
and the messenger observes
that the rich
might be lucky but guess what
they’re never blessed,
before all that,
she accepts the offered present
from the cake stand of the children’s hands.
She smiles, pleased as Medea
said she would be, and releases both boys
from that morning’s decree, sentencing them to exile.
They can stay.
Jason hugs all three. Go say goodbye forever
to your mother, now. She’s packing to leave.
Note:
I wrote this poem after Melania Trump visited children separated from their parents at the border in June 2018; as she boarded the plane, the back of her coat read, “I REALLY DON’T CARE. DO U?” It got me thinking about instances in Greek tragedy when someone wore something they definitely shouldn’t have.
Katie Hartsock is the author of the poetry collection Bed of Impatiens (Able Muse Press, 2016). Her work has most recently appeared in Ecotone, Exchanges: A Journal of Literary Translation, and the Wallace Stevens Journal. She is an assistant professor of English at Oakland University, and lives in Ferndale, Michigan, with her husband, toddler son, and a new baby forthcoming this fall.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.