That which was known is unmemorable

Why is the face in the water a woman? Because
Rita made it? Because she said it? But it could
Be a man, indistinct there, that gaze
Across eternity. Would
Other women  see a man in the water, a case
Of anima/animus? No, they all always
Know that water-person is a woman,
Just as the poem knows, the poem.
Which is both. Then is it convention, the cultural
Input: Naiad, Ophelia?
Partly perhaps. But more it’s a question of structural
Consciousness. For the image is basal,
From before the beginning of all imagining,
The apriori of human feeling, ineffaceable
For good or for ill
As as such it is,          it must be,           feminine.
                            -Hayden Carruth, The Sleeping Beauty





Her name is reckoned from the memories of poets. Her name is unknown. Or changed. Her name is soft on the lips in the ancient Tyre where the fishermen chant “Ela-eee-sa, Ela-ee-sa”; her image always under the water capricious.
                       
In one of these memories, her name is the Phoenician translation of ‘Elishat’, the wanderer.

She came from the line of Hannibal, daughter of Baal-Eser King of Tyre, son of Ithobaal who begot the biblical Jezebel. Her blood flowed purple, gold; her blood flowed over the sword of Aeneas, over the sword of Acerbas, over her bridal bed engulfed in flames. Her blood flows in the second circle of hell where she is forever whipped in a whirlwind.

She has sacrificed herself for fidelity, or for lust, but most importantly for love. She has taken her life so many times and so many ways and for so many reasons that she is constant only in her self-immolation. 

In the distortions of myth is she made into what man is not, which is the other, woman. 

She is visited by ghosts. She is visited by whispers. She is courted by Kings. She is both matriarch and martyr. She is deity and queen.  She is cunning enough to throw her wealth of treasure into the sea, in bags of sand. Cunning enough to found an empire with nothing more than a bull‘s skin (troubling mathematicians with the of  the square of a curve). Yet unable to resist the curse of Cupid's bow.

Her voice penetrates the void of the underworld.  Traces of her likeness are found only in smudges on the stone slabs.  She is found by no one. We have drowned her.  And yet, we still search for her in the water.

So speak, memory-



You will call me Ishtar, wife of Baal. Demon, lecher, cannibal, witch. My symbol is the eight pointed star. My father is Anu, named sin. 

It is told that by my blessing the stallion was put under the goad, the halter and the whip. That  my love of the lion gave him a grave of seven pits. It was I, who dared to sit naked upon death’s throne, to have my corpse nailed up and ravished by 60 sores.

Lamenters!, and weeping women!
Whose cries like incense flood my gate!
My flag flies over the dark alley,
the shit shorn and the saint!

My voice is heard on the tongues of the guilty.
steeped in depravity, wickedness, and conceit.

It is I who will break down the door of underworld!
To bring the dead to eat  the living.
To have the dead outnumber those on earth.

So bring that whom has done this to me!
To reckon me as I am!
Spread his oil upon my body.
Put his crown upon my head.
Fasten his flute to my loins,
For I will inhabit his body!
And take that which was mine!