I Tiresias

“And I Tiresias have foresuffered all…”

—T. S. Eliot

                              I prophesy
reluctantly. Oedipus claimed I had no foresight. It was he 
                              who could not see.

I told him the dark, stark truth. He removed Jocasta’s bronze brooch 
                              from her hanged body.
With its sharpened end, he gouged out the two suns that blazed

                              blindly across the wide sky
of his unknowing forehead. When I was a boy, Athena struck me blind 
                              for beholding

while she bathed her nakedness. My mother, Athena’s nymph, 
                              implored the goddess
to revoke her curse. She could not but inserted her two

                              little fingers dipped
in olive oil into my ears. She cleaned them so I can understand 
                              the language

of birds and translate what they sing into a human song.
                              Always it is
why do we live and die. Why do the dead outnumber the living

                              fifteen to one?
Old, I am tired of my own words. What good have they done?
                              They bring sorrow upon

whoever hears them. I prophesy my own death, the death of everyone.
                              I need some
alchemy to change death’s lead. Let the poem become

                              my crucible.
Kore, queen of all things underground, of magma at the earth’s core, 
                              teach me how many

thousand pounds of pressure per square inch, what heat it takes 
                              to make from what
once was living and now is dead, from what darkness, diamonds.

Read more from Issue 21.1.