Graeme Hetherington: ‘Artemis and Actaeon’

Artemis and Actaeon

1

I used to keep myself awake,
Watch moonlight on my sister’s hair
Turn bloody and run down her face
Of pale angelic purity
My mother wouldn’t let me touch,

Or if my night-long vigil failed
I’d wake from dreams in which she died
And cross the bedroom floor to see
If I had killed her in my sleep,
Relieved if I could hear her breathe.

2

Divinely beautiful, bow-drawn,
Praxitilean Artemis,
Avenging goddess of the young
And innocent, you ambushed me

The evening I saw, decades on
From boyhood’s crime of sister love,
You smiling darkly like her in
My Greek host’s maiden-daughter’s eyes.

3

She was eighteen to my three score
When I tried at dinner one night,
By studying the other guests,
My cutlery, then the new moon

To avoid her eye, and you snapped
What I thought was my iron control,
Drowning me, way out of my death
In her steadfast lunar-lit gaze.

4

Unerringly, you struck again,
When she in front of parents, who
Knew little English, told me I
Was not a father-figure, but
A man to her. Such bold deceit

Was warning that she served your end
To bring me low, as was her face,
As seemingly indifferent to
The consequences of love as
Your statue’s pitiless regard.

5

And then she disappeared to take
Up dentistry in Athens while
I stayed and pulled love’s teeth in tense

Hair-trigger Crete, meeting again
Months later in her father’s yard,
Feelings for each other intact.

Lone foreigner among quick-eyed
Gossiping relatives, I sensed
The interest of starved chained watch-dogs

In bare white bones thrown out of reach
Shift to my bald but skin-browned head,
Aching fit to split wide from angst,

Imagined them freed, closing in,
Growls louder as I fled on foot,
Actaeon’s antlers on my brow

Promising even richer food,
The crescent moon bending to loose
The punishment feared all my life.

Graeme Hetherington