Hold Your Own (2 page)

Maybe an answer.

She packs some things and leaves at dawn, alone.

And heads out North. For home.

By dusk she’s walking the woods of her youth,

Smelling the air.

Is this where I’m from?

Who was I when I was here last?

If this isn’t home

Then where has home gone?

She sees a small clearing between the trees.

She’s rocks in a river.

She’s leaves in a breeze.

There is a shopping trolley

There are some keys

There is a hawthorn

There’s a horse chestnut

There’s a used condom

There’s an old desk lamp

There’s a nice conker . . .

Is that blood or ketchup?

Birds in the branches

Light in the darkness

Like sand in the toes of the bushes.

There!

Right there.

There in the path. In the leaves and the bracken

Two black backs untangle, dragons.

Coupling, shuffling, grappling.

She is staggering.

Can’t stop looking. Strange unravelling.

Something from before, something forgotten.

Someone she used to be.

Some rotten something in her darkest somewhere,

Scale and danger.

Nature, sunglare.

Faint, she takes a branch and holds it

Steadies herself. Stills her shoulders.

Snakes and sex and innocence

And nothing really makes much sense.

Who was I then?

She watches awed.

And grips the branch like it’s a sword.

Believing.

Believing.

I should be leaving.

She breaks the branch with sudden force.

She swings the branch, and knows its course:

The snakes, no chance, are soon divorced.

A sudden dark and squelching tension.

She panics, sweats, can’t breathe. Head pounds.

Her body writhes and juts.

No sounds.

The image of her lover’s face

Begins to shake and wilt and fade,

She loses him, there, in the shade.

It hurts. She’s felt this once before.

She knows this pain, this change, this awe.

She feels herself retract and harden.

Feels her bones enlarging,

Moving, arching.

Something charging,

She’s old milk bursting from its carton.

Shaken, floored, a body heaving

Writhing, smiling, something’s pleasing,

Finding her throat open, screaming,

Hoarse and full of light

Her body stops. She feels his might.

His veins thicken in intense delight.

A man again.

He stands, confused.

And walks away.

Too much to lose.

This poor once-boy, sudden-woman,

Who’d lived so long and done so well

And kept so much so deeply hidden,

Now found himself before the bell

Of some new door in some new town.

The pain of new beginnings.

Everything that went before

Gushed in him.

Water overfilling.

Smash the cup and let it happen.

Tiresias.

A full grown human.

Moves on from what he cannot fathom.

He swears his past will not consume him.

And so the man with many pasts

Matures into his present,

But he feels his waters move

In the last arc of the crescent,

And as the moon expands to full

He feels his blood respond,

But as all humans know to do,

He holds it in

And soldiers on.

Imagine how it feels

To walk so far away from life and love,

To know that all you’ve known

Is now

No longer enough.

All the blood they’d bled,

All the children they had borne,

All the mouths their mouths had met,

Behind them now.

Forlorn,

He staggers knee-deep through his pity

Sadness grabs his shins.

A stranger in a strangers’ city,

Where new strangeness begins.

In distant god terrain,

Mount Olympus, pink and milky,

Zeus and Hera fight again,

Raw and honest, foul and filthy,

Hera with her eyes screwed up

I swear you’re out to kill me.

She weeps and screams and he enjoys

The feeling of his power.

He froths and paces, thunders, pleads;

Tempers frayed, their bodies need

A break from fighting –

But none comes.

Not after this – another tongue

Roasted in his total blaze.

Surprise surprise, old Zeus has strayed.

The fighting carries on for days.

Down on Earth the weather’s mental.

Hurricanes and ancient heat.

Sudden freezes ice the deserts.

Rain leaves craters in concrete.

Hera’s ripping up her dresses.

– Am I not enough for you?

Zeus is melted, stares intently

– Sister, you are all I love.

– Then why?

– Because these others tempt me.

And unlike you, I lack the guts

To turn away and know my path.

Hera swigs straight from the cask,

The nectar’s strong and soothes her heart.

She sighs in disbelief,
don’t start.

Zeus, bored of being wrong and sorry,

Puffs his chest up, shows his might.

Hera knows his godly body

Well enough to not take fright.

I don’t know what the fuss is for

Zeus begins, playing wounded.

Women like it more than Men.

I don’t even want to do it.

What you get from me is more

Than what I get from you.

Red rag to a Minotaur.

What?
says Zeus.
It’s true.

They row like it’s a holy war,

The Earth suffers their anger.

Finally, when neither has

The strength to raise the anchor

And the ship of their relations

Is broken-keeled and sinking,

And they’re fighting over what the other

Might have just been thinking,

They stop for ragged breaths.

The sky is bruised and black.

Hera won’t be pacified

Until he takes it back.

Tiresias, at peace at last,

Is older now than ever,

He’s found a lovely partner

And they’ve made a life together.

He won’t walk the woods alone;

He’ll only walk the heath.

He blanks out all the lives he’s known,

But they survive beneath.

He’s started doing pottery.

He’s joined the local choir.

If he thinks about his history

His heart is set on fire.

There’s no way back,

There is no track

That leads to his past lives.

He sets himself on forwards.

And he loves.

And he survives.

His lover is a gentle man,

Together they are free.

They enjoy each other

I love him. And he loves me.

But on dark days he likes to walk

Beside the heartsick sea.

And as the waves begin to howl

He drops down to his knees,

And cries for all he’s lost

And for all he used to be.

Zeus – in final stage of fury –

Beats his massive fists

Against the stormy clouds

And says –
there’s only one who can fix this.

Tiresias is home alone,

His partner’s out all day;

He teaches in the local school

Good students but shit pay.

The weather’s turning nasty

The house rattles and moans.

The door’s ripped from its hinges

And Tiresias is thrown.

The house is filled with stormclouds

Rain smashes at his cheeks

He is too shocked to recognise

That this is how god speaks.

Suddenly the storm abates

The house is filled with sun

Zeus, in his human form,

Sticks up a golden thumb,

Hey.

Tiresias is terrified.

He can barely speak.

Zeus nods in recognition.

Swans in, takes a seat.

Look, me and Hera

Are having this domestic,

Pathetic – I know.

But that’s what’s to be expected

From an eternity of marriage.

Anyway

You’re my only hope.

And Zeus takes him by the hand

–
might as well have been the throat
–

And ascends the mount Olympus

And dumps him before the queen.

Here’s the guy to settle it.

Tiresias has been

Man and woman both.

So ask
him
– who enjoys it more?

A woman or a man?

Tiresias is stunned

But wants to help them if he can.

His mind begins to shudder,

Every kiss comes back to bite him.

His body buckles under

The old echoes of excitement.

He sees every time his open mouth has yelled,

All tongue and teeth,

He sees the necks and backs and legs,

His rising chest, his blushing cheeks.

He remembers after sex,

The woman he once was,

Lying in her happiness

Like nothing had been lost.

He thinks of how he finds it now,

Spent and drained and breathing deep.

The agony that follows.

The desperate need for sleep.

He feels it moving like a hand

Across his shaking thighs.

He takes his time and works it out,

And slowly he describes:

If you could split sexual

Pleasure into tenths,

Women would get nine.

That leaves just one

For men.

Zeus grins,

Smug,

In that way he does.

And Hera feels the boiling of her blood.

She, in rage and consternation,

Screams towards Tiresias

Takes the eyes out from his head

And leaves him blind and sore and red.

And gore is pouring forth before them all.

His arms are spread.

He wishes with his broken heart

He could be someone else instead.

Zeus is shocked, appalled, impressed.

Mate
he says
Ah mate.

Tiresias knows better

Than to howl and remonstrate

But his swollen eyeballs roll in grief;

His face is aged with pain.

Zeus, still reeling from his victory,

Accepts it is a shame.

What one god has done,

No other god can undo.

I can’t give you back your eyes

But I can give you something new.

Zeus lays a mighty palm

Against the bloody sockets

And floods the body’s blindness

With the inner sight of prophets.

Tiresias was melted,

But inside the vision grew.

A weakness in his legs,

A sobbing emptiness, shot through

With some new tenderness,

Some blue

And calm uncurling in his guts.

He staggered like a child pretending blindness,

Hands out in the dark.

But couldn’t close his eyes to what exploded in his heart.

He could see the truth of things

He couldn’t look away.

Nothing left but to accept,

He had been born to live this day.

And so, with face streaked warpaint red,

And every sense burnt white with pain,

He was given seven lifetimes

And dropped back down to Earth again.

A whole life lived

At the mercy of the fates.

Here he comes again,

The old seer with the shakes.

Wheeled on to mutter prophecy,

Chased off by angry kings.

Tiresias, you lived for more

Than what the legend sings.

Tiresias – you’ve lost

Everyone you ever loved.

But you stand beneath