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    The Eleusinian Mysteries
    The Eleusinian Mysteries
    The Eleusinian Mysteries
    Ebook85 pages42 minutes

    The Eleusinian Mysteries

    By Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

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    The Eleusinian Mysteries is a poetic subversion of the ancient Greek myth of Persephone, in which the young goddess abducted by Hades is not a passive victim but a cunning protagonist in her own right who actively resists the narrative that has historically held her captive. Over the course of a series of interrelated narrative poems, s

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAubade Publishing
    Release dateMar 22, 2022
    ISBN9781951547202
    The Eleusinian Mysteries
    Author

    Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

    Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler is a poet, translator, and teacher candidate based in Harlem, New York. His translations of Russian and Ukrainian novels by Dmitry Lipskerov, Andriy Lyubka, and Serhiy Zhadan have been published by Deep Vellum, Jantar, and Yale University Press, and his work has appeared in numerous journals, including the BIG WINDOWS REVIEW, the PEACOCK JOURNAL, and TRAFIKA EUROPE.

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      Book preview

      The Eleusinian Mysteries - Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

      The Abduction

      Pebble-bruised Persephone perches on the bank,

      rasping her golden feet across the creekbed,

      her laughter fragile as consensus,

      fascination hunching her shoulders.

      Her mother sits sentry beside her,

      but mirror-gazed Hades craves something

      more godly than despoiling innocence

      as her nimble fingers manage the friction

      of line against reel—then every string

      of her is startled by the radiant fissuring

      of the surface and the exposure of the fish.

      A fit queen for his uneventful vaults,

      where nothing moves but causeless ripples,

      this girl so readily wounded

      by the sandy particularity of things that decently,

      behind a curtain of hair, she recoils

      from her catch even as she scrabbles avidly

      at scales that go on rising skyward—

      it has no eyes, its tail runs on springs

      & it pulls his chariot. Persephone soars,

      hauled aloft by the rod her hands still clasp

      and on the ground Demeter rages,

      heavy and loud with curses as the old man

      unhurriedly reels her daughter in.

      Orpheus Defends Persephone

      Far-ranging Orpheus subverts the verges

      of Demeter’s metered orchards

      & fields so irrevocably tilled

      their every regular harvest yields the same

      commentary from their steady keepers:

      it’s fixing to be another good year,

      or similar, whole utterances as single drops

      shed into the general flow, untroubled

      by the jaggedly agitating inevitability of names

      parting around things not wholly tamed.

      So, Orpheus surreptitiously makes such rapids

      as he can before her harpies interrupt him.

      He moves the blazes marking familiar bowers

      to provoke inappropriate remarks from the keepers:

      looks like rain, they haltingly pronounce on

      his ripe apples staged to fall out of cloudy poplar fuzz—

      yes, pervert Orpheus cracks open unspoken seeds

      and teases out the ramifications he prefers

      before practical usage can prune them

      and studs the space beyond the pale

      with scraggly desert gardens.

      It’s there in the grey veil between domains

      that gallant Orpheus makes his stand and sings

      his challenge. Hades doesn’t even slow down,

      just sics his assassins on the boy,

      his minimal nymphs, the merest sketches of sex,

      but those curves are graphed gravely enough

      to get under any mortal poet’s skin

      and attenuate his tendons till they snap

      and in a tantrum of black and tangent fingernails

      scatter far and near his hearty limbs,

      leaving only his throatless song intact,

      windblown machinery of slotted notes Persephone

      can operate, even through the whorl of chariot wheels

      and replay his prayer: hang in there, girl, I’ll be damned

      if you aren’t the most captivating captive I ever saw.

      Hardcore Movie

      Persephone talks a lot when she’s getting fucked—

      Hades shouldn’t mind that like he does;

      often it’s really her words he wants,

      smooth as silt, obstructing nothing.

      It’s her damn grammar, straight as an irrigation ditch—

      she got it from her mother,

      like the little furrows in her brow,

      this girl who burns tautly from pose to pose,

      like an electron slipping to another veil of promise

      without deigning to cross the inarticulate softness between—

      she only wears the four ordinary tragic masks,

      same as in porn that features mortal females:

      1. scorn, distracted with some triviality (fingernails, smartphone, gum)

      2. effort, the sheer mechanical conscientiousness of coiling rope

      3. ecstasy, wide-mouthed like a vessel for pouring water

      4. irony, her smile unmoved by his exertions

      & she never shows camera-skulled Hades any flicker

      of shadow between her frames,

      like when the performer’s expression decomposes

      into a loose rolling of components: lips, muscles, cheeks, red

      —even when her master’s brutality rattles the bedposts,

      Persephone talks dirty in immaculate sentences:

      "I want

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