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From "Late Settings", Atheneum Publishers, 1985
1 / Casual Wear Your average tourist: Fifty. 2.3 Times married. Dressed, this year, in Ferdi Plinthbower Originals. Odds 1 to 9 Against her strolling past the Embassy Today at noon. Your average terrorist: Twenty-five. Celibate. No use for trends, At least in clothing. Mark, though, where it ends. People have come forth made of colored mist Unsmiling on one hundred million screens To tell of his prompt phone call to the station, "Claiming responsibility" - devastation Signed with a flourish, like the dead wife´s jeans. 2 / Popular Demand These few deep strongholds. Each with generator, Provisions, dossiers. It would seem the worst Has happened, who knows how--essential data Lost in the bright, chromosome-garbling burst. You, Comrade, will indefinitely be resident Of this one, with your disciplined women and staff; You and yours of this one, Mr. President. Grim huddles. Then a first, uncertain laugh --Spirits reviving, as life's bound to do? Not from dead land, waste water, sulphur sky. Nowhere is anything both alive and blue Except, inside your block heads, the mind's eye Marveling up out of our common grave: You never thought... Sincerely didn't think... Who gave it clearance? It ransacks the cave For you with cordial venom. Damn you, drink! 3 / Caesarion A glow of cells in the warm Sea, Some vaguest green or violet soup Took a few billion days to loop The loops we called Eternity. Before the splendor bit its tail Blake rendered it in aquatint And Eddington pursued a glint-- Recoil, explosion--scale on scale. What stellar hopefuls, plumed like Mars, Sank to a provincial rant and strut, Lines blown, within the occiput? Considering the fate of stars, I think that man died happiest Who never saw his Mother clasp Fusion, the tiny naked asp, By force of habit to her breast.
Snake iconography
Posted by
guccipiggy
at
2005-02-21 07:15 PM
The "tiny naked asp" of fusion echoes the image of the serpent Ouroboros, whose "splendor bit its tail" in the first and second stanzas. At the same time Merrill superimposes the image of Cleopatra taking a snake to her bosom onto that of the Earth-Mother (and possibly that of necessity nursing a fatal invention - note the capitalization of Mother).
More mothers and serpents
Posted by
guccipiggy
at
2005-03-05 04:33 PM
Greek Mythology: THEOGONY & THE PROTOGENOI First Born Gods ( aka Protogenos Protogonos Protogonoi )
"ANANKE The Protogonos of Inevitability, Compulsion and Necessity. She was the mate of Khronos (Time) and like him was an incorporeal, serpentine being who encircled the entire universe.
KHRONOS The Protogonos of Time who was the very first being to emerge self-formed. He was a three-headed, incorporeal being with serpentine tail who circled the entire breadth of the universe.
"
http://www.theoi.com/Khaos/Protogonoi.html
["Necessity" (Ananke) the mother of invention?]
"ANANKE The Protogonos of Inevitability, Compulsion and Necessity. She was the mate of Khronos (Time) and like him was an incorporeal, serpentine being who encircled the entire universe.
KHRONOS The Protogonos of Time who was the very first being to emerge self-formed. He was a three-headed, incorporeal being with serpentine tail who circled the entire breadth of the universe.
"
http://www.theoi.com/Khaos/Protogonoi.html
["Necessity" (Ananke) the mother of invention?]
