The Argo
One Poem by Jason Primm
The Argo
And a strange cry did the harbour of Pagasae utter, yea and Pelian Argo itself, urged them to set forth. For in it a beam divine had been laid which Athena had brought from an oak of Dodona and fitted in the middle of the stem.
— Appollonius Rhodius, The Argonautica
In the God’s orchard, I held the rocky ground.
And where I reached up, I let the wind speak its invisible shape:
My thoughts were seasons.
They held the same light like a single wavering note.
My leaves were new and the same.
When it was time, I let them go
And watched them move under me,
The torn pages of a book.
My first sea.
Now I am a stack of throats cut,
A forest murdered and laid end to end.
I floated and the men pushed me past the white water.
They pulled me with their oars into the stream.
I went where I was pointed,
But their words pushed and pulled me too:
The curses they spat
When they thought I couldn’t hear,
The soft urging to wind and sun and rain,
The words they yelled, and the ones they whispered.
Words made my mind a map that kept changing.
The silver water near the beach ran faster;
The blue of the deep swirled darker.
I spent hours every day
Trying to describe its shade.
It was Jason who would argue:
Really, an elephant’s hide?
Old or young? Dusty or wet?
Under a dark sky before the rain
Or in the dry light of the moon?
Elephants.
Who told you about elephants?
It took time to understand the slick shell of Jason’s words.
The words of the other heroes were like my ribs.
They beat empty in the salt air.
They held their meaning.
But Jason’s words did something different every time.
He did shameful things without shame.
He was moving ahead of it like we rowed ahead of storms.
Still, he was my friend,
That word so full of separation.
The story doesn’t give my words.
It wasn’t my story.
Mornings, I saw the blood red egg of sun
Crack against the horizon
And knew the great deeds
Sung by poets
Would not be done by me.
Why do I speak?
Maybe they were bored,
The poet losing them to wine.
Maybe my tongue was a completed rhyme,
An ornament
like a dog with three heads,
Or a woman with snake hair,
A fancy thread on a dark and bloody robe.
Medea was his friend too.
When we sailed together, we sang.
They would come back from the shore,
Breathless with running,
The hem of her long dress wet.
They were convinced
The world was full of fools.
With the treasure spread across my deck,
We would see the robbed on the beach,
Burning with anger, and laugh.
But, she couldn’t be a thief forever.
She took a house,
And Jason told her the stories of the sea
And me, the stories of the port.
They were true for a while.
You want to know what I said when we approached the cliffs,
When the black mouth was about to close upon me?
Nothing.
At the start, I was a cup of dry words.
I rode wave tops, light and happy.
The longer I was on the sea
The more water leaked in,
Always the same rotten places.
I sank lower in the swell
Where only the strong waves could lift me.
The days went on and he rotted too,
Until the heroes left him
And the merely able
And the drunks and poets,
Even they left him,
Men with nowhere to go.
The day we chased Medea, it took effort
To stay in the middle of the King’s slow fleet.
Jason wanted her to go. He was quiet
Like a priest before an oracle is spoken.
He asked his helmsman what she was throwing in the water.
He wouldn’t answer.
But I did.
My last words: Your children.
Jason’s words lose magic when you only listen.
The trick is what he makes you say back.
The last work he did
Was run me aground
And pull me past the tide,
A final unseen feat.
He propped my bow on a rock
And crawled inside my cup of shade to live.
He kept asking me questions.
One day, he thought,
If he didn’t yell or hold a fire to me,
But absently asked about a distant port
Or the color of the sunset
that I might speak again.
I don’t know if I slipped or he pulled me down.
He didn’t cry out.
I hadn’t seen that look on his stilled face
Since Medea stood on my deck with her ringed toes.
I feared the lazy men
Would drop a torch on me
And say I was a fitting pyre,
But they lifted me
And carried him to the surf’s edge.
He was a hero, and they were scared of me.
They think I am a ghost.
Those last years, he had wanted forgiveness,
And I wouldn’t give it.
His bones burned like wood.
His smoke rose like the canopy of a tree.
And now no more new words,
Just the rearranging of old ones.
Today, a fiddler crab
Walked the bleached gray length of me.
It made me want music.
I almost broke my vow and sang.
Jason Primm pursues modest goals in a coastal city. His work has most recently appeared in Juxtaprose Magazine, Palaver, Rust + Moth, Jelly Bucket, and The Southern Humanities Review. He maintains a blog at jasonprimm.wordpress.com.
Photo Credits: Hugo Simberg (1873–1917), Untitled, Courtesy the Finnish National Gallery.
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