Daphne, After by Carol Muske-Dukes

Daphne, After

 

So Spring blossomed in spite of itself.

Uniform skirts up-rolled high by wild girls

curbside, smoking. Still, two of us, heads

 

together, translating. Our selves as Stoic

teens, thinking Marcus, Marcus A.!

So: month of rose pagodas, of lilacs

 

impetuous, blue. Twigs spill from

her dropped text, as she flees

translation class, the nun’s query.

 

He demanded her name first. Just

steps from the bus stop. Sunset:

shade before ancient dark. Blossoms

 

beneath her, beneath the shock-light of

staggered street lamps coming on. Leda’s

Zeus, his suit & tie, swan’s hiss in her ear.

 

She told me only. The great wings of

aloneness closed in us, we learned how

the passive voice was magnified: “The soul

 

is dyed with the color of its thoughts.”

Powerless to move, she became past

tense of strength once standing tall

 

at her father’s grave. His name in brass

florets. But Latin offhand—“to seize or

abduct.” Ovid’s shudder: Vos mos non

 

sit sponsa . . . Once we might have found it

funny: You will not be a bride, you will be

a tree. At each ring where her flesh became

 

bark, a path opened: root split. Some

believe that anger can take the place of

love. She found the verb for it. Having to

 

do with the forest & a young girl running fast,

calling out—then silence. Becoming as she

had, one of them, reaching skyward. Their

 

witness, bowing. Those wings hidden in

the tree, meaning she was not ready to be

cut down, not ready to be chopped into little

 

sticks & tossed into fire’s assumed supremacy—

all that smoke, her ashes refusing to fly.