Athena

Force of reason, who shut up the shrill

foul Furies in the dungeon of the Parthenon,

led whimpering to the cave they live in still,

beneath the rock your city foundered on:

who, equivocating, taught revenge to sing

(or seem to, or be about to) a kindlier tune:

mind that can make a scheme of anything—

a game, a grid, a system, a mere folder

in the universal file drawer: uncompromising

mediatrix, virgin married to the welfare

of the body politic: deific contradiction,

warbonnet-wearing olive-bearer, author

of the law’s delays, you who as talisman

and totem still wear the aegis, baleful

with Medusa’s scowl (though shrunken

and self-mummified, a Gorgon still): cool

guarantor of the averted look, the guide

of Perseus, who killed and could not kill

the thing he’d hounded to its source, the dread

thing-in-itself none can elude, whose counter-

feit we halfway hanker for: aware (gone mad

with clarity) we have invented all you stand for,

though we despise the artifice—a space to savor

horror, to pre-enact our own undoing in—

living, we stare into the mirror of the Gorgon.

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