Poetry – Page 15

Heracles Below by Ivan Calderon

Your feet press into the cliff face
like anvils over the eyebrows of the world,
yet there you stand
at the steps to Olympia
with a visage of cold lead,
an ice-embossed body
now snatched
within the portcullis
of my damp, cold hands.

Your pectorals are boulders,
you core cavernous causeways
where streams of runny persimmon
pour down your quads,
the blood of beasts,
the ichor of the Hydra,
the life of your mother,
the breath of your love,
washed down all the same.

So, you hide
beneath fluffy, curly lion’s hide,
blonde tufts and angelic puffs,
raise a chin that gleams
like the broad edge of a triumphant blade
after the parting of muddy rain.

Oh, your platinum grin narrates the epic
of a hero guided by an iron-clad heart,
by bolts of wisdom
from a pantheon so pure,
but your gaze,
like dim light
behind cloudy skies
over frozen grass
of a land that once
cheered your name.

Now, you’re in my house.

I rot in these damned tunnels,
wade through these shallow puddles,
my hair soaked in the carcass water
like the rats who scurry
beneath my throne of bones.

As I shift in the bog on
the seat of my chair,
I search through dark
as murky as the subterranean swamp
of my rat kingdom.

You, Heracles,
have always lived above.
You grew out of the roots of
people, food, and speech
to be seen as a god, to be known as a hero.
I, scraped out of the
belly of the mountain, only
to fall
far,
column of my spine
broken to shape
the pillars of the underworld.

Now,
how does it feel to reach the end?

Your frame rusted and bent

like a skeleton wound with aluminum wire.
You look out beneath the
underbelly of the world with
tin glands dry,
eyes
too tired to cry.

Heracles, what’s inside you?

Beneath your corroded steel skin,
the inferno hisses,
your cast-iron cheeks
melt
cascading,
a cauldron unable to contain
unending hellfire.

Achilles’ rage came from passion,
the murder of a dear friend
he followed the trail
sprinkled with the shards
of his broken heart.

At least he fought a worthy Trojan
while the target in your sights,

your wife and child,

were fruit flies
senselessly torn apart,
too small,
for all to see
what you had done.

Oh, great Heracles,
son of Jupiter,
now you lie with me

in a place gone too far
from the world to see.