Apollo came to my bower, offered me
a bellyful of wine and prophecies
like caged birds groaning in
his lily throat.
I said: “Yes, of course, as long
as it is free.”
“It may hurt, Princess,” Apollo
hummed, for his voice
is always
a song.
But the rows
of ribs Apollo cracked
against my lungs were
their own
kind of
music –
after I said:
“No. It’s too much.”
“Only a fool rejects a god’s gift, Cassandra.
Grip my robe and scream, this shall be over
forthwith.”
A moment’s apace back, gentle reader:
May I set the scene? –
In fair Troy, where a
gold-locked princess
worshipped her god
in the best way she knew,
in a glade of does and brook
babble, Apollo, oh Apollo!
my arms weak,
his tongue on mine,
honey divine.
As we kissed under
laurel and olive, a
columbine Apollo placed
‘tween my breast and robe.
Thus he spake:
“Give unto me, my beauteous
Cassandra, sweet honey-woman,
shining arm’d, and your gifts shall
be as spangled as Ariadne’s
crown’d Coronis midst
the noon-day
stars.”
But Apollo became excited, forceful, taking
my alveoli and crush-crush-squeezing
my aortic matter.
My bones bled gold, gore gripped
my coughs, and out came plague
and boiled lotus root from my
once-virginal tongue.
His manhood Apollo held, expectant.
I was shivering as the bile of truth
crashed
round me, and I saw the
end of all beginnings,
like Epimetheus
damned by Pandora,
that wife-box of misfortune.
Apollo witnessed the blinding flecks of his stardust
in my shivering, crying eyes.
Phobos gritted his teeth:
“Thou art unhappy, Cassandra. Why?”
I coughed, rolling in grass, his hands covered
in my ichor, like my god had reached a
wingspan underneath my back-skin with
knives of fingernails, then cut cut my
heart and had molded me into
the perfect
diviner.
“You have damned me, my God,
my Sweet Phobos?
No more of me shall I yield to you.”
His anger flared, his sex swelling with ire.
I flinched, never knowing man, but not
willing to discover that curse
of birth to a god-ling
now.
With a stroke on his knuckle, Apollo spake:
“And unto damnation Troy comes,
and you speak of a curse, Cass,
but I only gave love. Don’t you know
that the caterpillar dismembers herself
to become butterfly?”
His face was fever’d as his hand did
more pleasure than any Daphne
or Hyacinthus. I was too weak
to look away or stand, grub-
handing dirt, his moans
like a curse.
Apollo pronounced:
“Oh, bless’t Cassandra, now you are all
moth trapped in cocoon, bile and stasis.
Thou art damned for rejecting the Golden Son
and Archer of Plagues, Princess. Each
night forthwith, dreams of me strangling
the divinations and sortilege from thoust
legs as I lap at thy sex, tear thy hair,
bed thee wildly like Zeus his Europa,
shall you have, every time those pretty
eyes cry closed, sleep.”
I screamed, clawing at his ankles:
“No! Take it back, Apollo, I plead!”
I said, too ashamed to stand. The
afterbirth of prophecy a vomit of
sour wine on my meat-tender lips.
But Apollo’s solar chariot carried him aloft
into the stars. I stumbled back to my
bedroom, and Hector’s son falling
by fatal winds of war, my enslavement,
rape, torture, the fall of Troy! –
The future none of my family believed
rang in my head like a
taunt.
Priestess Girl, Priestess Girl.
No one believes you
anymore.
And now I wander Troy, waiting on golden
ships, beach sand in my hair, wailing, and no
one believes
me.
A golden apple, golden Achilles hair, golden Apollo
lyre mocks me.
And I sleep cursed
and my dreams are
the worst.
And rhymes apace
displace my sanity,
the calamity of war
is no different than
a sore-pustule I am
on Apollo’s feet.
Neat and tender,
his nighttime
torture of tongue
like a blunt weapon
between my thighs.
The softness of his touch
belies how Apollo tortures
me night upon night,
bed-caller, storm-wailer,
grave-bringer, freeze-cold.
I pray my visions are untrue,
but as blue as the sky, and red
as the Argos in wives’ blood,
Medea got no happy ending,
and into the pot her children
go. Troy is my child,
beguiled as pawn
by gods who
know not
what it
is to
be
Mortal.
Pawns, a Trojan Horse, a White Flag.
Fire on Hecuba’s interior palace, woman
to Hekate’s hellhound, Paris dangling Helen
like an apple from yellow flesh and stem:
Bite deep, little Paris.
For this joy was not
meant
to
Last.
And I, Cassandra, am now a shade in Hell.
And I, Cassandra, play craps with Tiresias.
And even in the Styx, Apollo still visits. I
have grown wily in my own way, and
frustrate the Hyperborean Swan,
Leto’s son wants much, but
knows little of I after
all these years.
Epochs of fungal cold, it has been
two-thousand five-hundred years.
Cities rise, empires fall. And a foreign
faith holds both Laocoon and Apollo
beside Nero’s bathtub and Christ
in the Vatican, gods dead, gods
gone,
gods
mad.
But I, Cassandra,
live on.
And I may be a moth finally, adapted
to darkness, for to soil we all go,
even grain of Demeter, even gods.
And Apollo visits the surface less,
wasting away in my bed in the
Eleusinian Fields.
His lovers visit my abode,
but he drinks wine and
stares, wondering at
The Glory of Troy.
Asking how Achilles
could fall, and
what started
it all.
But I see it.
I see it
all.
And if the heat death of the Universe:
Big Crunch or String Theory, collapse
of stars is our destiny, what matter is it
to Hades, to be swallowed up by Uranus?
The Olympians are tired.
We are old and cold.
And Death is only Absolution.
So, the girls come to my witching well in Türkiye,
cast coins into my ruins, and I utter
half-truths and lies. Better to predict
a happy ending they will never get
then relay the tragedy of their
sorry lives to them.
Apollo wakes less and less, like his
father and brothers, gods gray and ill.
I wipe sweat from his brow, but cannot
force myself to remove him from my
room, wash him, speak curses to his
ear.
And one moonlit Saturnalia night, he wakes with
a golden thunder in his eye, all divinity, and Apollo says:
“You were always my favorite, Cassandra.
I like to play with my lovers, cat and mouse.
And now it seems, we are playing house.
Kiss me, Cassandra, oh girl-child
of my golden youth...”
I do, and the frogs and slugs from my stomach
spill across Apollo’s tongue.
He chews them, remarking at the aged meat
and tender quality of the bile of a prophet.
“What we have made is good, Cass.”
And like that, he falls asleep, and I face
eternity a shade, less plaything now,
more than woman or god.
Just Cassandra,
false soothsayer:
Trapper of Phobos,
and I drain the ambrosia
from his veins with an
IV and needle, drink the
golden fluid, and my eyes
are copper, and my hair
is electrum, and I am
becoming Apollo
in time.
Prey to Hunter, Woman to Wine.
I am more a vintage of wrath, hellcat
like Hekate’s polecat, and I walk
long by the dusky shore of Hades with
Hekate, more wrath than woman I am.
Hekate understands, Aphrodite is at biker
bars in a cat suit, Diana fox hunts and heals
at midwife hospitals. Goddesses are –
women are – better at surviving, at relevance.
But now, in the New Age, the sleeping gods like
Apollo, Zeus, Hermes, Hepheastus, Ares
awake.
Athena took over ferrying souls when Hermes
slipped into the god-sleep, and she takes me to
the surface and wreckage of Troy, an archaeological
site now. Hermes is half-settled into his old duties.
I appreciate the gift of time with Wisdom Gray-Eyed.
Athena lets me wander the ruins and walks of Old Troy,
tearing at my hair like a Gorgon and wailing
my feminist fury –
At a life stolen by the gold in my bed, the gold
in my head, my hair still shining yellow
after all these years.
There was no old age for me.
No survival for Pompeii
Carthage Delenda Est,
Hannibal fought til
last breath, salt
on the fields
of Tunis.
I can see the warp, weft, and loom of the Fates.
Arachne works with them, and I spin yarn for
them in my own time, we have a Fiber Bitch
and Witch Support Group, and Hades even
comes, never resting, for how could divine
exhaustion affect the King of the Dead?
He is the only one ever kind to his wife.
And I come back with
blue lotus tea for Apollo,
to soften the harshness
of his nightmares, and
to forget the vigor
and evils against the
Delphic Oracle and
Hypatia.
“Thank you, Princess,”
Apollo says feebly, as he
sinks into the reverie,
the tea as blue as
butterfly pea.
I tuck the blankets strangle-tight
around my lover, my gifter, my god,
and a wind wails outside on our
usually sunny isle.
And Apollo sleeps and sleeps
murmuring the names of nymphs
and princes and kings. A moan,
a sigh, belies how weak he has
become.
And I sit by my loom, a gift from Penelope,
and as Arachne and the fates have shown
me, I weave a future bright for woman-kind.
Apollo is beginning to wake more and more, and
I must get used to his talks, his wisecracks,
his yearning.
Now, my prophecies are true, with the patriarchy
toppled. A man’s world cursed me, one of rape
and war. A woman’s liberation unbound me, so now
I, Cassandra, will leave you with this, daughter
of Troy and a thousand goddess gifts:
What first seems like odds against you
can be the beginnings of greatness,
so use your charms and wit,
never stray from your
youthful dreams.
I walk on. I, Cassandra?
I dream
on.
And girl-child or woman, the greatest
blessing is self-confidence, self-love.
I hated myself for far too long, but once
my prophecies rang like a clarion bell
when I was in Hell, I found the most
unexpected of Paradises six feet down.
Coins on my eyes,
bindery on my feet.
Journey to the heart of Python’s burrow,
to the Omphalos, and sit atop the
navel of the world.
From there, count your wishes
and cast them into the Oracle’s
well. The fumes will rise
with your enemy’s demise
and you shall fly to the sky
like a bird of augury, on
Daedalus wings that
won’t fail, atop the
wind you shall
ride, and go
to the free
places you
seek.
I’ll have a basket of spanakopita, dolma, and lasagna for you when you
return, a bottle of red wine laced with ambrosia, summer pastries,
cake and almonds baked in spices and olive oil.
We shall talk, and you shall gather the strength of the Feminine Divine.
We will rewrite the rapes of the gods, the patriarchal destinies of
Atlanta and Andromeda, Psyche and Danae.
Gorgon-masked, Maenad-clad, we will follow Cybele-Rhea
deep into the Mother Caves, guided by Galli. Dance in
rain, liberate our daughters, and Apollo will sigh
as I dole out the gift of feminine intuition
and seeing through men’s lies.
The ways of the flesh are tender, ‘tis true.
But the ways of our minds are Athena’s spear.
Sharp and cutting. Both go into our making,
two genetic ‘Xs’ in our cells, able to birth
and kill like no man can.
And I will whisper every victory of woman
to the sleeping kings in Tartarus.
We will collect blessings from the
half-awake gods. Tis a woman’s
world, now, and in it
a phoenix of Aeternitas
shall rise from the ashes
of our sorrow.
And Apollo gave me at least
that much of a gift, to see
my daughter’s daughters
liberated, on par with
any Hippocrates
or Catullus.
Sappho-bound, us poet-singers
and star-watchers, soothsayers
and peacemakers raise our boys
and girls with gentle, strong
hearts, and mothers turn
to child to bride to mother
again, grown from girl-hood
to elder to immortal shade.
And Diana will walk you into
the heart of the forest, and
Athena shall guide you from
library to school, and Hera
will sweeten love on your
tongue, and Aphrodite
will teach you to adore
your reflection.
And the Vestal Flame still burns
as Hestia, most-faithful goddess
of all tends the Olympian pot
of pottage and stock.
Vesta shall feed you the foodstuff
of immortality, and to the Eleusis fields in
a gentle boat over clear crystal waters shall
Charon carry you in, Persephone waiting
with cake for you at the gate.
And maybe you shall see Apollo and I at a café,
writing poems mocking each other, for, there
is always another side to the tale, one in which
I am the villain, and to damn my muse is the
worst trait of any writer, right? Pure light
casts a shadow, and that shadow is the
death of his sunlit gold arrow, that
I stabbed my own self with
in my breast, stealing
the golden god’s
gift.
What does Apollo write of I, Cassandra?:
“She shone with a light tantamount to my heart.
A golden dove on the tomb of a king, crying
shrilly for knowledge, a Hesperides apple
on my tongue, sweet Cassandra stole
my kisses, I wanted her as mistress,
but she cut a foul deal, so I curse her,
salivating over her sex, perplexed
at rejection. Daphne had made sense,
but I, Phobos Apollo, favored Troy,
so why then had their princess
bound me to her bed and had
her way with my magick?
All it could be was the
bad side
of love.”
I look over Apollo’s typewriter-dreamed prose:
“Love?”
“It was always love with us. Love is tantamount to betrayal, the heart a cruel organ.”
“Obsession, you mean.”
“Co-dependence, what is a God without His Tender Prophetess?”
And with that, I have no notes. We drink matcha lattes at Psyche’s café, then go for a stroll in the sunlit rain.
“In the garden where we had our trysts, an old olive tree
still grows,” I say to Apollo offhandedly.
His grip on my hand tightens, a sly smile in his blue eye and cherub lips.
“I know, I water it twice weekly with ambrosia and wine, Cassie.”
We are two sides of the coin, life and death, fate and prophecy, defiance and obedience, order and chaos, Python and Dove.
Woman is snake of his caves and swan of his Hyperborea.
And though the gods may have Dominion of Land, Sea, and Underground,
the women know all matters of culture and Earth.
“After all these years, I love you, my Apollo.”
It is the first time I have ever voiced it. He stops dead in his tracks.
“Cass, you speak true?”
“I will never say it again, Golden Boy.”
He presses a kiss to my cheek, then summons a laurel wreath for me, lacing it against my olive skin and wind-rustled flaxen hair, tucking fronds behind my tanned ear.
“That is enough. You have always been
enough for me,
my Cassie.”
And maybe it is enough, I suppose.
Love changes you, hate murders your
soul, hope strings your heart along
amidst the lonely pine barrens.
And to love an angel of the gods, morning and sun god
is to reach for the poison of the pen, and write
until nubby fingers bleed on laptop keys
and Apollo, you betrayed me, but
Apollo, you always stayed,
and savaged by the day
I came to bed with my
wounds, you lick and
massage them, and
that is as close
to love
as
I
Know.
postscript:
And they’ll call me false prophet
and say I deserved it, the knife
at the tooth, carving my face
grin ear-to-ear, Omphalos prison.
And they’ll say all I do is lie.
But I saw love and hate in my god’s
eye.
And they’ll say all we do is riddle
Whited Sepulchers from Sages
Plague Arrows and Poison Kisses
So I call Light a Lie, the Sun and
Icarus Girl, and I saw Fear
In his eyes.
