John Gardner: Jason and Medeia

John Gardner wrote Jason and Medeia as a book-length poem, complete with line breaks and indents that do not usually occur in works of prose.

This poem was made possible by financial gifts from my friends Marilyn Burns, Ruby Cohn, and Duncan M. Luke and by grants from Southern Illinois University and the National Endowment for the Arts. I thank William H. Gass for permission to borrow and twist passages from his Fiction and the Figures of Life, and Gary Snyder for permission to borrow and twist two of his translations from the Cold Mountain series. Parts of this poem freely translate sections of Apollonios Rhodios’ Argonautica and Euripides’ Medeia, among other things.

I dreamed I awakened in a valley where no life stirred,

no cry

of a fox sparked up out of stillness; a night of ashes.

I was sitting

in a room that seemed a familiar defense against

darkness, but decayed,

the heavy old book I’d been reading still open on my

knees. The lamp

had burned out long ago; at the socket of the bulb,

thick rust.

All around me like weather lay the smell of the

abandoned house,

dampness in every timber, the wallpaper blistered,

dark-seamed,

at the window, the curtains mindlessly groping inward,

and beyond,

gray mist, wet limbs of trees. I seemed to be waiting

for someone.

And then (my eyes had been tricked) I saw her—

a slight, pale figure

standing at the center of the room, present from

the first, forlorn,

around her an earth-smell, silence, the memory of a

death. In fear

I clutched the arms of my chair. I whispered:

“Dream visitor

in a dreaming house, tell me what message you bring

from the grave,

or bring from my childhood, whatever unknown or

forgotten land

you haunt!” So I spoke, bolt-upright, trembling; but the ghost-shape, moonlit figure in mourning, was silent, as if she could neither see nor hear. She

had once

been beautiful, I saw: red hair that streamed like fire, charged like a storm with life. Alive no longer.

She began

to fade, dissolve like a mist. There was only the

moonlight.

Then came

from the night what I thought was the face of a man

familiar with books,

old wines, and royalty — dark head slightly lowered, eyes amused, neither cynical nor fully trusting: cool eyes set for anything — a man who could spin a yarn and if occasion forced him, fight.

Then I saw another shade,

a poet, I thought, his hair like a willow in a light wind, in his arms a golden lyre. He changed the room to sky by the touch of a single string — or the dream-change

rang in the lyre:

no watchfulness could tell which sea-dark power

moved first.

If I closed my eyes, it seemed the song of the man’s harp was the world singing, and the sound that came from

his lips the song

of hills and trees. A man could revive the dead

with a harp

like that, I thought; and the dead would glance back

in anguish at the grave,

torn between beauty’s pain and death’s flat certainties.

(This was a vision stranger than any a man ever saw. I rose and stepped in close. There came a whistling

wind.

My heart quaked. I’d come, God knew, beyond my

depth.

I found a huge old tree, vast oak, and clung to it,

waiting.)

And now still another ghost rose up, pale silent mist: the mightiest mortal who’d ever reached that thestral

shore,

his eyes like a child’s. They seemed remote from me

as stars

on a hushed December night. His whitened lips moved, and I strained forward; but then some wider vision

stirred,

blurring my sight: the swaying shadow of a huge snake, a ship reeling, a room in a palace awash in blood, a woman screaming, afire …

The sea went dark. Then all

grew still. I bided my time, the will of the moon-goddess.

A king stood scowling out over blue-green valleys.

He seemed

half giant, but enfeebled by age, his sinews slackening

to fat.

In the vast white house behind him, chamber rising

out of

chamber, nothing moved. There was no wind, no breeze. In the southwest, great dark towers of cloud were

piled high,

like summercastles thrown up in haste to shield ballistas, archers of ichor and air, antique, ignivomous engines, tottering in for siege, their black escarpments charged like thunderheads in a dream. Light bloomed, inside

the nearest—

there was no sound — and then, at the king’s left side

appeared

a stooped old man in black. He came from nowhere—

leering

sycophant wringing his crooked-knuckled hands, the

skin

as white as his beard, as white as the sun through

whitecaps riding

storm-churned seas. The king stood looking down at

him, casual,

believing he knew him well. “My lord!” the old man said, “good Kreon, noblest of men and most unfortunate!” He snatched at the hem of the king’s robe and kissed it,

smiling.

I saw that the old man’s eyes and mouth were pits. I

tried

to shout, struggle toward them. I could neither move

nor speak.

Kreon, distressed, reached down with his spotted,

dimpled hands

to the man he took for his servant, oft-times proven

friend,

and urged him up to his feet. “Come, come,” the king

said, half-

embarrassed, half-alarmed. “Do I look like a priest?”

He laughed,

his heart shaken by the sudden worship of a household

familiar.

He quickly put it out of mind. “But yes; yes it’s true,

we’ve seen

some times, true enough! Disaster after disaster!”

He laughed

more firmly, calming. His bleared eyes took in the river winding below, as smooth and clean as new-cut brass, past dark trees, shaded rocks, bright wheat. In the

soft light

of late afternoon it seemed a place the gods had

blessed,

had set aside for the comfort of his old age. Dark walls, vine-locked, hinted some older city’s fall.

He tipped

his head, considered the sky, put on a crafty look. They say, ‘Count no man happy until he’s dead, beyond all change of Fortune.’” He smiled again, like a

merchant closing

his money box. “Quite so, quite so! But the axiom has its converse: ‘Set down no man’s life as tragedy till the day he’s howled his way to his bitter grave.’ ”

He chuckled,

a sound automatic as an old-man actor’s laugh, or

a raven’s.

He’d ruled long, presiding, persuading. Each blink,

each nod

was politics, the role and the man grown together

like two old trees.

Then, solemn, he squeezed one eye tight shut, his head drawn back. He scowled like a jeweller of thirty

centuries hence

studying the delicate springs and coils of a strange

timepiece,

one he intended to master. He touched the old slave’s

arm.

“The gods may test their creatures to the rim of