We must imagine Silenus, tutor

to the young Dionysus, squeezing grapes

into the toddler’s upturned mouth.

Grape juice!  like that vegetation god’s own

blood, and the delighted child’s mischievous

trick:  turning the sweet juice into a sharp

darkness inflected by the memory

of the blasting away of Semele,

his mother, womb, and world from him, a tarp

snapped by a lightning crack that would leave us

open to the storm.  He got a new home

in his father’s thigh, where his second birth

came.  He’d gestated near his father’s rapes;

this prenatal witness made him the cuter.

 

Imagine gestating in Zeus’s thigh!

Hera, his stepmother, wanted him dead,

reminder of the infidelity

she’d constantly suffered.  (From Zeus’s head

sprang Athena:  no mother was needed

for her;  her gestation was all mental.)

Hera’d destroyed all but Bacchus’s heart,

which Zeus fed Semele.  This is how she’d

become pregnant – different elemental:

Athena’s silver, Aphrodite’s dart

was gold.  Semele’s curiosity

piqued by Hera’s insinuation that

her foetus’s father was really not

king of the gods destroyed her with ferocity.

 

Silenus did not come from the city.

A satyr the Romans called “Silvanus,”

he was raised in the dark of the forest.

Hermes gave the newborn Dionysus

to nymphs on the mountainside of Nysa;

they raised him in the company of goats.

Silenus was something of an old goat;

he would eat almost anything and drink

ceaselessly;  he taught the young god to think

as if the mind were seated in the throat:

thirsty for endless experience,

people are torn apart, need to forget

the pain of their birth, and so need to toast

the god who makes forests out of cities.

 

 

What did Silenus teach Dionysus?

How is one a tutor to a young god?

Silenus knew the cosmos’ history,

and how there came to be woods on the slopes

of Mount Nysa, and what was to delight

a sentient being in the lovely nymphs

who always presented their creamy breasts

to the infant divinity.  Also

Silenus knew the cruelty matter

had for all flesh.  Matter is the mother

of all that live;  Semele was blasted

from around Bacchus.  The feeding frenzy

of wolves, vultures, and bacteria swarm

through gentle mammals like raging fires.

 

Lush means “filled with juice,” like grapes that ripen

after rain.  The fruit’s flesh swells taut with wet

nectar;  Silenus must have squeezed handfuls

of grapes into the infant’s laughing mouth.

But who discovered that fermentation

could occur, and transform the grape’s water

into an internal fire?  Silenus

was eternally soused after Bacchus

matriculated to his tutorial;

was wine invented by the young god

whose blood flowed fiery since his mother was

seared away around him?  Dionysos

inherited his mother’s mortality,

as well as his father’s way with women.

 

We see the smooth cool marble flesh, white eyes

without irises, of the god whose grapes

hang in pebbly clusters from the hard curls

of the formerly metamorphic hair.

Colder than cucumbers, Dionysos

cares for the fates of his followers no

more now than he did two millennia

ago and more.  Silenus is laughing

soundlessly as a stone.  The story he

tells of all life echoes in the empty

chamber bone of the skull, in which the sponge

still soaks up the descendants of Bacchic

blood in a sort of Greek fire that burns wet

flesh flamelessly in the cave’s cranium.

 

Perhaps the young Bacchus needed to know

what life was like for those not raised on

Olympus, that everything beautiful

and piteously horrid had to die,

that he himself would also have to die,

be horribly torn, like that imitator

Orpheus, same wine different mysteries,

beautiful men eternally young

who jumpstart all women, ecstatically

dancing, not knowing what indignities

they commit with electrified vaginas,

even the women wrinkled as velvet,

whose dignity is the last refuge, smooth

youth no longer giving them some control.

 

Dignity never was Silenus’s

concern.  He was born of the earth, in mud

he gestated and in mud he belly-

flopped when he dove for nymphs who too quickly

flitted out of his arms’ lecherous loop.

The sound of breezes’ delicate laughter

rippled over the mudbath he splattered,

shattering the serenity of still

woods.  Only after wine’s invention did

he submerge himself in drunken stumbling.

Bacchus, with his prenatal taste of death,

released darkness to eat away within

the must squeezed from the grape.  After that taste,

why worry about dignity?

 

Teiresias and Cadmus, blind and old,

respectively, were fans of Dionysus. 

“Yo, let’s shake it! show me how to get there,

Cad!”  Teiresias said.  Cadmus also

put on his leopard skins and shook his stick.

“Yo, Bacchoi!”  Of course, the shaking for them’s

at least as much palsy as ecstasy.

They forget that half century since youth.

Dionysus never grows old.  Foetus

in Zeus’s thigh, he must have overheard

the varieties of women being taken.

Hence, his proclivity to make women

loose their limbs and scream, their eyeballs popping.

Teiresias remembered being one.

 

To think a fat old man could teach a young

god what he’d need to know to charm the clothes

and sanity off a woman!  to lose

their conscious grip on their bodies and scream

themselves silly!  ripping men’s heads off

and their members and limbs, suck the flesh juice!

Silenus didn’t have to teach Bacchus

a thing;  he had to make sure the young god

survived his childhood, didn’t even have

to do that as Bacchus, when ripped apart,

would grow back the following spring.  All he

had to do was narrate the history

of the world and show him that people hurt

and craved wine to help them dissolve at times.

 

When I was younger I’d walk through the woods

along the narrow sewage-water creek.

It threaded through a topographic crack

where no one could extend the neighborhood.

The land’s converging slopes were much too steep

to build more houses, so they fenced it off

with a symbolic fence not high enough

to keep us kids from scrambling over top.

That narrow zigzag creek led to the next,

the Northwest Branch of the Patuxent River,

and along its sides I’d lope for miles.

I never saw Silenus there, unless

I brought him there myself a decade later,

hallucinating nymphs along those trails.

 

Chainsaws and weed whackers snarl and whine

as bipedal mammals wrapped in denim

and plastic tunics designed to reflect

headlights at night listlessly cut back plants

on a summer’s morning. Deep in the shade

there are impromptu trash heaps with TVs

and beer bottles, old sofas that stuffing

oozes from, new species of fungi foam,

a head of scum on a eutrophied stream.

Nature keeps on naturing, Silenus

knows it’s better never to have been born,

but it’s too late for that now, so he drinks

wine straight from the box and sleeps it off after

stumbling around, unreflective as deer.

                                                                        (2006)

 

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