John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

the assembled sea-kings.

Then Jason rose, smiling, and spoke — gray rain on

the palace grounds

pounding on flagstones and walls, filling lakes with

activity, drumming

on the square unmarked tomb of the forgotten king—

and the crowd applauded,

rising to honor him as he reached for the hand of

the princess. She rose,

radiant with love, as joyful as morning, all linen

and gold,

flashing like fire in the light of the torches,

her glory of victory.

In the vine-hung house below, the fleece lay singing

in the gleam

of candlelight, and the women gathered as seamstresses

stared

in awe at the cloth they must cut and sew. To some

it seemed

they might sooner cut plackets in the land itself, make

seams in the sky,

for the cloth held forests whose golden leaves flickered,

and extensive valleys,

cities and hamlets, overgrown thorps where peasants

labored,

hunched under lightning, preparing their sheds for

winter. Among

the seamstresses, the daughter of Aietes walked,

cold marble,

explaining her wishes, not weeping now, all carriers

of feeling

closed like doors. It seemed to the women gathered

in the house

no lady on earth was more beautiful to see — her hair

spun gold—

or more cruelly wronged. When the scissors approached

it, the cloth cried out.

That night there was music in the palace of Kreon—

flourishes and tuckets

of trumpets, bright chatter of drums. In the rafters,

ravens watched;

in the room’s dark corners, fat-coiled snakes, heads

shyly lowered,

drawn by prescience of death. Tall priests in white

came in—

white clouds of incense, hymns in modes now fallen

to disuse

mysterious and common as abandoned clothes. In

the lower hall

a young bull white as snow, red-eyed, breathed

heavily, waiting

in the flickering room. His nose was troubled by smells

unfamiliar

and ominous, his heart by loneliness and fear. He

watched

human beings hurrying around him, throwing high

shadows on the walls.

One came toward him with a shape. He bellowed in

terror. A blow,

sharp pain. A dark mist clouded his sight, and

his heavy limbs fell.

Medeia said now, standing in the room with her

Corinthian women,

no jewel more bright than the fire in her eyes,

no waterfall,

crimsoned by sunrise but shining within, more lovely

than her hair,

her low voice charged with her days and years (no

instrument of wood

or wire or brass could touch that sound, as the

singer proves,

shattering the dome of the orchestra, climbing on

eagle’s wings,

measured, alive to old pains, old joys, in a landscape

of stone-

cold hills, bright flame of cloud), “I would not keep

from you,

women of Corinth, more than I need of my purpose

in this.

If my looks seem dark, full of violence, pray do not

fear me or hate me,

remembering rumors. I am, whatever else, a woman, like you, but a woman betrayed and crushed,

fallen on disaster.”

Silence in the palace. And then the sweet

shrill-singing priest,

his soft left hand on Pyripta’s, his right on Jason’s.

When he paused,

a flash of lightning shocked the room, and the room’s

high pillars

sang out like men, an unearthly choir. Deaf as a stone, the priest held a golden ring to Pyripta, another to Jason.

The towering central door burst open, as if struck

full force

by a battering ram. Slaves rushed to close it. A voice

like the moan

of a mountain exploding said, “No, turn back!”

But the panelled door

was closed. And now the floor spoke out, roaring,

“No! Take care!”

There was not one man in the hall who failed to

hear it. I saw them.

But Jason and the princess kissed; the kings applauded.

His eyes

had Hera in them, and Athena. And old King Kreon

smiled.

Medeia said: “Now all pleasure in life is exhausted. I have no desire — no faintest tremor of desire—

but for death.

The man I loved more than earth itself, his leastmost

wish

the wind I ran in, his griefs my winters — my child,

my husband—

has proved more worthless than the world by the

darkest of philosophies.

Surely of all things living and feeling, women are

the creatures

unhappiest. By a rich dowery, at best — at worst by deeds like mine — we purchase our bodies’ slavery,

the right

to creep, stoop, cajole, flatter, run up and down, labor in the night — and we say thank God for it,

too — better that

than lose the tyrant. You know the saw: “No

wise man rides

a nag to war, or beds a misshapen old woman.’ Like

horses

worn out in service, they trade us off. Divorce is

their plaything—

ruiner of women, whatever the woman may think

in her hour

of escape. For there is no honor for women in divorce;

for men

no shame. Who can fathom the subtleties of it? Yet

true it is

that the woman divorced is presumed obscurely

dangerous,

a failure in the mystic groves, unloved by the gods,

while the man

is pitied as a victim, sought out and gently attended to by soft-lipped blissoming maidens. Then this: by

ancient custom,

the bride must abandon all things familiar for the

strange new ways

of her husband’s house, divine like a seer — since she

never learned

these things at home — how best to deal with the animal

she’s trapped,

slow-witted, moody, his body deadly as a weapon.

If in this

the wife is successful, her life is such joy that the

gods themselves

must envy her: her dear lord lies like a sachet of myrrh between her breasts. In poverty or wealth, her bed is

all green,

and her husband, in her mind, is like a young stag.

When he stands at the gate,

the lord of her heart is more noble than the towering

cedars of the east.

But woeful the life of the woman whose husband

is vexed by the yoke!

He flies to find solace elsewhere; as he pleases

he comes and goes,

while his wife looks to him alone for comfort.

“How different your life and mine, good women of Corinth! You have friends,

and you live at your ease

in the city of your fathers. But I, forlorn and homeless,

despised

by my once-dear lord, a war-prize captured from

a faraway land,

I have no mother or brother or kinsman to lend me

harbor

in a clattering storm of troubles. I therefore beg of you one favor: If I should find some means, some stratagem to requite my lord for these cruel wrongs, never

betray me!

Though a woman may be in all else fearful, in the hour

when she’s wronged

in wedlock there is no spirit on earth more murderous.”

So she spoke, staring at the outer storm — the

darkening garden,

oaktrees and heavy old olive trees twisting, snapping

like grass,

in the god-filled, blustering wind. The hemlocks by

the wall stood hunched,

crushed under eagres of slashing water. When

lightning flashed,

cinereal, the shattered rosebushes writhing on the stones

in churning

spray formed a ghostly furnace, swirls of heatless fire. No torches burned by the walls of the palace above,

and the glow

leaking from within was gray and unsteady, like

a dragon’s eyes

by a new stone bier in a cluttered and cobwebbed vault,

a stone-walled

crowd set deep in the earth. In the roar of the storm,