Bakkhai

Beginnings are special
because most of them are fake.
The new person you become
with that first sip of wine
was already there.

O grief without measure.

I don’t know how to look at you

A wise man is a well-tempered man

Will they say I look silly dancing around with ivy in my hair?
Well yes, but so what?
Dionysos didn’t specify his worshippers be young or old –
he wants reverence from all.

we do nothing but repeat it.
Beginnings are special
because most of them are fake.
The new person you become
with that first sip of wine
was already there.
Look at Pentheus
twirling around in a dress,
so pleased with his girl-guise
he’s almost in tears.
Are we to believe
this desire is new?
Why was he keeping
that dress in the back
of his closet anyhow?
Costume is flesh.
Look at Dionysos,
plucked prematurely
from his doomed mother’s womb
and sewn up
in the thigh of Zeus
to be born again later.
Life is a rehearsal
for life.
Here’s a well-known secret
about Dionysos:
despite all those legends
of him as “new god”
imported to Greece from the east,
his name is already
on Linear B tablets
that date to 12th-century BC.
Previousness
is something a god can manage
fairly well (“time”
a fiction for him)
but mortals
less so.
Look at those poor passionate women
who worship this god,
the Bakkhai,
destroyers of livestock
and local people
and Pentheus the king.
They had a prior existence once.
The herdsman describes them
lying at peace in the mountains
“calm as buttons on a shirt.”
This is the world before men.
Then the posse arrives
and violence begins.
What does this tell us?
The shock of the new
will prepare its own unveiling