THE STONE FACE OF EMILY DICKINSON
by Amy Clampitt
Page 11
I'm going to conclude with a shorter poem, which is one of the sequence of a poem having to do with the Medusa story. It is called "Hippocrene." Hippocrene, for those of you who are into Greek mythology will know, is the name given to the pool that was stamped by the foot of the winged horse, Pegasus, who was born of a decapitated corpse of Medusa, after Perseus went on this errand to get her head, which, as you also know, turned everything/everyone who looked at it to stone. This has to do with the Hippocrene, which is associated with the idea of poetic inspiration. As I thought about that pool, I found it connected in my mind with a passage from Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves, which I first read when I was a sophomore in college, and very unsure of my own identity, and that's perhaps why I've never forgotten this particular passage. It goes like this: "I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell."
The cold spring
of an intense depression,
moon-horror-struck posthumous
offspring of Medusa,
harbinger of going under,
of death by water.
Though above the pillars
of ruined Sounion the air
is calm, the white-lipped,
violet-hued flowerbed
of drowning, fraying
at the rim,
lies sleek with signals
of unbeing: the cold hoofprint's
doorway into nothing
metamorphosing from a
puddle in a courtyard,
the huge irruption
of blank seas the psyche
cannot cross: the terror-
twinning muse, the siren
and the solace: done and
undone by water--whether
beyond the stormy
Hebrides, the voyage
out, the long-looked-forward-to
excursion to the lighthouse:
the Ouse closing over;
a fin, far out. The waves
break on the shore.
