If that were true, then Guido Reni’s famous painting --
“La sua bella Elena rapita,” Bellori called it --
Might compare to the other Helen: the Helen
Zeuxis imagined; the Helen he may have loved.
But what are those images, beside the young
Woman desired by Paris? Isn’t the only vine
This trembling of real hands under fever’s lips?
Why else would the child demand these grapes
So greedily? Why else would he make haste
To gulp the cluster down, to drink the light
Before the flood of time unfurls?
No, not at all,
A commentator wrote,
Anxious to explain away
Ten years of war in The Iliad.
The truth is, Helen was never kidnapped;
She wasn’t dragged, screaming, from boat to ship,
And chained to roughed-up beds.
An image was all the ravisher carried off,
A statue wrought by some magician’s art
From the calm breezes of a summer eve --
So she would radiate their warmth,
And breathe with them like flesh;
So her eyes would reflect desire.
Helen’s effigy
Wanders dreaming through the low arches
Of the fleeing ship. She seems to hear
The purling of another sea
In her blue veins;
She seems content.
Other scholiasts have even thought
She was a sculpture made of stone.
In the cabin, jostled by squalls
Day after day, Helen’s figure
Lies half risen from her sheets,
Or from her dreams — and smiling,
Almost. She folds an arm
Gracefully against her breast.
The rising sun, the setting sun
Meander on her nakedness,
Then fade away. Later, on the high
Terrace of Troy, she keeps that smile.
But who — besides Paris, perhaps --
Will ever see it? All the bearers knew
Was a huge reddish stone,
Cracked and rugged. Cursing, drenched in sweat,
They had to haul it to the ramparts
In front of night.
A crumbling rock,
The sand of origin:
Is this Helen, then? These clouds, these ruddy gleams:
Are they in the soul, or the sky?
Even Stesichorus won’t come clean
About the truth; but maybe it was this:
Helen’s semblance was just a fire,
Built against the wind on a beach --
A skein of gray branches and smoke
From sputtering flames. At the dew-point
Of dawn, Paris heaped the sodden bonfire
On a boat, ravaged by waves and ringed
By screeching seabirds.
He kindled it again on his native shores,
Where breakers slashed and pierced
The blaze anew. Above, against the sky,
He’d raised the bed of stone.
The day Troy fell, a fire would remain
To shout of beauty — the only protest
Of the spirit against death.
Clouds…
One seizes another, which can’t resist.
And between these bodies in love,
From its glittering cup,
A thunderbolt spills out.
The sky
Lingers for a while
On the bed of earth. The man, the woman:
They seem like a mountain, like water becalmed.
Between them
The cup is already empty, and still full.
II
But this woman Paris embraced, this fire,
Her branches reddened by flames,
Her hollow sockets bitter with smoke,
Who can say? Was she the dream itself?
The work that slakes the artist’s thirst --
Or simply a dream of that dream?
Helen’s smile: just a fold in the cloth of night,
Slipping to reveal how light still sleeps
Beneath the sky… only as long
As a lightning flash.
Helen melts away
Every time a poem,
A statue, even a painted image
Tries to be a figure, detached
From the fits and starts of the gleaming cloud.
She was merely an intuition Homer sought,
Plumbing the notes below his deepest strings
On the awkward lyre of earthly words.
But at the dawn of meaning --
When the stone is still obscure, when color
Is still mud in the headlong brush --
Paris truly does carry Helen off;
And though she struggles and cries out,
She accepts. The waves lap unruffled
Against the prow, like daybreak
Shining across the sea.
Drink, says Paris,
When he wakes, stretching out his arm,
As the cabin’s narrow darkness
Rocks in a gentle swell.
Drink --
Then raise the cup to my lips
So I can drink from it, too.
I will, she answers; I’ll bend and drink.
(Does she exist, or only as a dream?)
I have no name, no more than a cloud;
I’ll sheer like a cloud into purest light.
And once I’ve given you joy, I’ll never thirst
To drink that light again.
From the wide beach, the day Troy burned,
A naked child
Was the last to see her: Helen,
A tree of flames on the upper wall.
He dawdled, he sang.
He cupped a little water in his hands
Where the fire could come to drink.
But water seeps from the haphazard cup:
The dream is ruined by time;
By time redeemed.
III
These pages are translations. From a tongue
That haunts the memory I’ve become.
Its phrases falter, like what we recollect
From early childhood, long ago.
I’ve built the text again, word for word:
But mine is only shadow. Now we know
All origin is a Troy that burns,
All beauty but regret, and all our work
Runs like water through our hands.
That is the entire poem.http://www.cerisepress.com/02/05/from-wind-and-smoke#english