"The hermaphrodite, lying like a dead man among the shadows, needs Fire."

-- Scrutinium chymicum, epigram 33, Michele Maier

 

 

Death be quick

and celebrity eradicate the stain of age

not that love of boys with certain areté

was worth more than battle

or that his bosom lady friends

with whom he was inseparable in Thrace

became an affront to his manhood,

or that his beauty belied his strength.

 

He knew the Sign was upon him

even as he rode to Siwa oasis,

the oracle of Amun, the Hidden One, told him

he would die as Pharaoh of Egypt

and return wrapped in unguents and linen to the Black Land,

to His City.

 

But now he would ride to the East until the purge of his passion

attained its teleios

he would orchestrate the syzgaic couplings

of a New Order:

he with his Persian princess

Hoplite and Bactrian bride

Athenian courtier and dark-eyed lovely from Indus

Macedonian cavalryman and priestess of Isis.

He could afford to delight in Life.

 

And Death:  sheathed in finest form-filtering silk, cool

the fluttering breezes of twilight Persepolis

his earrings of sapphire and silver

eyes of ardent topaz, lips of cruellest carmine

he ascends before his innermost circle

a figure of resplendent ambiguity

to decapitate the recalcitrant foe

to feel his own lifeblood spurt forth

like a frenetic force into the supine desert wastes

the Word, spilling like this blood and seed

fecundating the perdurable Orient

the shimmering lures of Samarkand and Tashkent

obsessions of spirited and beautiful androgynes

their radiant lives of extravagant ardour

drawn to certain, and preferred, youthful death.

 

DRMcB