The Voyeur and the Harpy

[newsclippings]

you ask to see all of me

This line is one that gives me the most trouble. This would be the only strong contender to allude the narrator to Persephone

perhaps you imagine yourself as the breeze
whose fingers will stir colour from the brooding lake
and paint it into clouds

One of those images they put on those oversold calendars, with the mountains and the glass lakes. I see this beginning as a little trite. Forgive me.

silent in the silt there are
rusted, twisted skeletons of shopping trolleys,
half a Datsun, someone’s dream of bliss in a wrought-iron bedhead
and I, who will need more than the six seeds you offer
to slough this season’s skin

I imagine Dali's Clocks painting or the setting of a movie Rowens mentioned recently, Wristcutters. It may also be attributed to a trailer-trash backyard. I wish I knew, but this stanza is one of the best attempts to pull us into modernity.

breezes do not reach the pipes that breathe
excreta into algal blooms, red as the storm that rends
mother from child

I like that you used "rends" in the second line, though I don't exactly know why you used "breathe" in the first. Was it in passing or did you really think about it? I ask because I don't want to offend.

you ask, but you
have no desire to discover
that here is no fire to purify, Demeter dropping someone's baby in some fire, or....?
only eternal decay
and someone else’s idea
of how to shape a life

This last stanza reads as a shrieking woman to me-- "you ask, but you // have no desire to discover" is especially regressed. I'm assuming on purpose, so as to envelop some kind of inherent, yet primal rage.

Well first, I needed to understand the meaning of all this. And like Milo said, the woman here is either Persephone or Demeter. And the poem, I'm assuming is addressed to Hades, who was squatting around looking at Demeter's daughter and a bunch of nymphs dancing around in a field (before he grabbed and raped Persephone).

The reason it would be Demeter is because of the title: Though harpies were also deemed ancient Greek spirits, I'm going to take a guess and say the Harpy here is Demeter, as she scoured the land looking for her daughter (they were also initially deemed to be beautiful winged women). The six seeds would be the six months she's given with her daughter (which some argue is only 3 months, plus a lot of visits from Persephone doing her queenly duties and showing famous visitors around).

Depending on which myth you're going by, Persephone may or may not have eaten the pomegranate on purpose (some say she fell in love with Hades but missed her mother, and ate it as a way to get some compromise--also there's a disparity among how many seeds she actually ate; the most recent story-tellers say 6).

Anyway, more onto the core of the poem, which now that I'm thinking about may also be addressed to Zeus (who helped his brother Hades out with kidnapping Persephone); I'm thinking may be attributed to an angry woman who was robbed of her child.

And this doesn't have to necessarily be attributed to ancient folklore.***

There are points in this poem where you address modern furniture and facilities (sewage), so I'm guessing there may be a link to some type of custody over children, and the mother is just not satisfied with only having her kids for half the year.

As for the critique: I'm just mad you made me think this much.
I'll revisit if I think of something new.

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Also I'd like to say that your omission of most punctuation here was probably on purpose and related to a recent thread, and I noticed.