That Singing
Temple Cone
Warp and Woof
Skeins of silk seem wedded to her hands,
She’s been working this tapestry so long,
Cerulean skies, beaches of bone white sand.
The suitors have almost forgotten her
Shut away with the empty marriage bed,
Waiting for a figure to appear at the door.
A look out the window shows nothing but seas.
Seas they crossed, desperate for glory,
Like dingy-backed gulls spiraling over shoals,
Plunging after all that shimmers and is gone.
The constant unraveling has drained her story--
Why do men yearn? Why cherish what’s out of reach?--
Of hope, of sadness, so what’s there is pure story,
Maidenly flesh, still firm, her braid fire red,
So simple simplicity is the ornament.
Odysseus left seeking change, dear man.
She has found no man can match her clarity.
That is why he’ll voyage across twenty years.
That is why she can lead them to slaughter.
Over time, all change shows a pattern:
The story has been changing over the years.
The suitors grow fat. Telemachos shines.
Odysseus is coming through storm and plague.
Odysseus with his black bow will drive
The crimson thread she shuttles back and forth,
A punishing rain upon those who break the pattern
That was woven from the story’s beginning.
A husband binds faithfully to his beloved.
isbn 1-59661-161-8
68 pages/$9
Temple Cone’s latest collection, That Singing, recreates the mythic world in a way that restores its immediacy, its loves, its losses, its conflicted passions. Temple Cone is a writer with a sure and deft touch, and as these poems unravel themselves to reveal the inner workings of a world, they braid themselves together in unexpected and transcendent ways. On the surface, That Singing serves as an intimate witness to the lives of the gods, but venture deeper into the world of these poems and you’ll discover the gods living within each of us, that which is altogether tragic, and beautifully human.
--Brian Turner
“The stories always get it wrong,” Temple Cone tells us in these ecstatic lyrics. The stories are the Greeks’, and what’s always been wrong is point of view, the masculine gaze, the silence of the beloved. Through the familiar pairings of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hades and Persephone, Hippomenes and Atalanta, Odysseus and his many counterparts--Penelope, Nausicaa, Circe, Calypso--Temple Cone makes the stories right. He creates a series of duets, polyphony where there was only the single voice before. Love is both night and daybreak, “that singing in the darkness.” Each poem is our guide between the underworld and the wide green fields above.
--Jehanne Dubrow
Temple Cone has published five chapbooks and two books of poetry, including The Broken Meadow, which won the 2010 Old Seventy Creek Press Poetry Series Prize, and No Loneliness, which won the 2009 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. An associate professor of English at the U. S. Naval Academy, he lives in Annapolis with his wife and daughter.