Eyes like frosted glass;
Rhythm like a kind of hypnotic. He sang.
She danced. When he played
upon the lyre she was ecstatic.
And through it all she smiled coyly,
as if such a pleasure
was that for which she had been impatiently waiting.
When he stopped, though,
she looked bewildered.
He was quick to call it enchantment;
imagined it, as well, to be his own,
and would have had her in marriage.
She was young, I guess,
and didn’t know better.
Narcosis is like that. Such a high
is not to be scoffed. Any one of us
would have stood perilously
atop a pillar, or swum
the straits in lousy weather
to be with such a lover.
But the danger is afterwards:
A compensatory depression
beats to a different drummer.
Thus she didn’t even wait for the bans
to be promulgated. And she didn’t wait
to get knocked up either, before
she took the advice of an obliging serpent
and scooted.
It’s a big world, you know.
This Eve-in-the-Greek-tradition
had more sense than the other.