Tiresias 

Who has been a woman and a man?

Who knows who has got the better deal?

Who lost both eyes and then gained second sight?

Who can foretell a baby’s fate?

Who knows the cost of knowing who you truly are?

Tiresias, the seer, he of the mating snakes and cane,

tapping his way first into the tale of Narcissus and Echo.

Tiresias who will foresee the tragic fortune of a child.

Tiresias who warned Liriope 

against the Delphic oracle’s decree,

Know Thyself. 

Narcissus and Echo 

Easy at the start to overlook a rape so poetic is the style.

A sinuous stream of water wraps round Liriope, and she conceives

a child so lovely that his mother worries if he’ll live to see old age.

He won’t, of course, yet he will grow in beauty unsurpassed,

but self-contained and cold, frozen by his mother’s fate perhaps.

So, quickly as the baby grows, his mother’s fears grow too.

There is a pool unruffled by the wind, that shepherds do not know,

where wild things do not stop to drink, where autumn trees don’t drop their leaves,

and this is where Narcissus lay, the day so hot he from the hunting slipped away

to be alone, far from the ones who’d love to hunt him down,

to catch him in their nets like a tender roebuck deer,

this golden boy almost on the cusp of thickening, almost become a man.

But there’s a nymph who saw him wander off,

cursed to only echo things that other people say,

but she has hair and legs and flashing eyes, and overhears him speaking to himself:

If someone’s there, come here, he says, sensing the burden of another’s gaze.

Come here, she quickly offers back, and running comes with undisguised desire

to try by force of arms and nymphic charms her broken borrowed words,

to win where others failed, enjoy the pleasures of this peerless boy.

But he knows all about those deities and nymphs, his mother taught him well.

I’ll die before I let you touch me once, he cries and fights her off.  

Touch me once, touch me once, the nymph humiliated flies. 

It’s then he spies the other in the water’s glassy screen,

and found the beauty others sought in him,

so suited to his wounded mind, so young and beautiful.

So close, so unattainable.

And there he pines for him, the liquid eager boy, without the power to enact his love.

He cries and reaches out his arms, 

he mouths some words of longing, words of loss. 

The other echoes every move in silent reciprocity.

But when they reach out to unite, the cold clear water keeps them both apart.

And then the penny drops. 

I know myself. It’s me I seek. What can I do?

And then the thought: Split my body from my self. I must be two.

The answer was of course to look away from what you want 

and cannot have. Look away, Narcissus, and you’ll be whole.

But he cannot resist the lure of what arises from the glassy deep,

it makes the anxious fear of living go away. And every time he looks,

he finds the image clearer than before as if accommodating his desire,

his gestures echoed in a perfect algorithmic match.

So now, although he knows his love’s in vain, 

he looks and then looks back again, unable to let go. 

And then he sees the mirror slowly turning black, 

his face reflected fainter in the darkening glass,

the colour blanches from his cheeks, the muscles slacken and grow weak,

he beats his body for the beauty it has lost, and lonely Echo answers blow for blow.

He bids himself adieu, he knows he’s wasted so much life, 

then cries aloud, Farewell, and dies. 

They say that hearing is the last to go,

Farewell, farewell, he hears, the final goodbye wave

of Echo who leaves him then to live invisibly in shadowed caves.

Then all Narcissus’ sister nymphs set up a wail, and cut their hair, and beat their chests,

but hunting for his body found none there, just a white and creamy yellow flower,

full of the promise of the coming Spring, but poison to the taste. 

Go ask Tiresias where the ghost of Narcissus is today, and he will tell you it is fixed 

staring at his ghostly avatar in the darkness of the Styx. 

And he will tell you, too, the more you look into the waters of this myth, 

the more you’ll see yourself reflected in its depth.