A.E. Stallings: The Boatman to Psyche, on the River Styx

Here is the second of our three Psyche poems from A.E. Stallings' Olives. Critically speaking, it's fun to keep in mind not only the Classical rivers here as presented by the ancients but as they are reimagined by Dante. And also this poem.

The Boatman to Psyche, on the River Styx

          “But I have one last errand for you, my poppet.”

                              —Apuleius, The Golden Ass

Only a few have come here still alive,

Heroes seeking immortality,

Lovers who refuse to grieve.

They are found out by gravity,

How they unbalance the scow

With one foot still on the quay

And the other stepping into the prow

While evil-smelling bilge comes seeping

Up through the planks, as it is doing now.

The sorry hound is usually sleeping

(Three heads, no brain),

But his job is keeping

The inmates in.  He has no reason

To keep the living out.

All will come here in their own sweet season.

Perhaps you thought

No one would notice you among so many,

But you are not the shadow of a doubt,

You are the thing itself.  Your shiny penny

Will pay your passage, though it should be double.

You are two if you are any—

You quibble?

Aren’t you a double tug upon

The earth, and twice the trouble?

Gravid girl, you’re far gone.

I feel the quickening,

Obscene here where all frenzy is done,

Sickening,

A thing like that, a specter that looms

Out of the queasy future, ticking and ticking

Like a kind of bomb.

An x-ray developing in your chemical bath,

Your dark room.

You wonder how a blind man finds his path

Over the swamp of hate,

The river of wrath?

My eyes are ultrasound.  I echolocate

Like the pipistrelles that drop

Their slick of guano on the sloping slate—

Treacherous footing.   Here’s our stop.

So, you’re on an errand to the Queen,

To borrow her beauty like a pot of make-up.

It’s true that she has stayed just seventeen:

The sun can’t spoil her looks—

Her lips are stained with grenadine.

And here there are only stopped clocks

And no reflections.  A hint:

If she gives you a wooden box

Yea big—scarcely big enough for an infant—

Don’t open it, though you crave

A peek, a free sample.  You say you won’t,

But the living have a flair for narrative.

What if I tell you all the beauty ever worn

By loveliness was borrowed from the grave

And belongs to the unborn?

Originally appeared as part of "Three Poems to Psyche" at Valpariso Poetry Review. Currently appears in Olives, TriQuarterly Books/Northwest University Press.