Witch Craft Or the Spartan Queen

(To the Spartan Queen) Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra via Mi inoltrai in una selva oscura   ‘They drive horses down this hill’ She said, ‘They take them to drink down there, that pool, there’ She said it as though it mattered As though I should care, And it was dark and it seemed deep And I thought, ‘I wonder if it is safe. ’ Knowing that it was not.   She played with a shock of hair, Jet black shimmering Turning it round and round Coiling it about her finger Pulling at it, tugging it to shreds My heart, about her finger As though it had been hers to tear.   And her eyes were all smiles And her smile was jagged And I saw myself falling Down steep slopes to where The horses were drinking Knowing I should not be there Not wanting to be there Too near, too near the water.   She stood on the banks Gazing at me with a frown Petulant and childish in her scorn, Wrathful like a storm brooding Behind sunshine smeared on blue Me and her, and you But where are you now? Where were you when I needed you?   The witch looked at me and smiled, ‘Are you afraid of me?’ She asked, I smiled, I lied, well I tried, “No, I’m not, certainly not” She smiled, held it for a while as a flight of gulls slid across the sun vanished behind the moon losing themselves a brood of angry cloud came by, ‘You lie’ she said, ‘I see it in your eyes’. Alexander the great reached India Only to die, Flow away without a trace Away to immortality and oblivion. Not all his men could save him, All the king's horses all the kings men Could not put Humpty together again. 'what are you thinking?' Her voice is like a death knell In her eyes the pall of squandered yesterdays, how I did waste it all. 'What are you thinking?' 'Nothing much' 'That is not what your eyes tell' she lifts her hand to her face, a sable cuff rolls down arms like alabaster skin like the grave, fingers, ash stumps from depleted cigarettes, on the verge of snapping and breaking, so frail. 'Tell me what you're thinking?' she persists, I turn to her, fix her with a stare, 'I am thinking of this moment, of how to escape it and you, all that you are and all that we can never be, all that I want and cannot have, all that I have but cannot want, all that is you, all that is me all that you and me can never be where there is no us, all is lost when found and found only to be lost again! There, now you know', I said. She is gone, Faded like mist fades Washed away like an easy stain The smell of rain and pine, When she was mine, Rain falls on dark waters. What nonsense What bland, absolute nonsense, This poem, this emotion Humbug. They drive horses down this hill, To drink; One fell, broke his legs beneath him and died, at least for a little while. Carlos