Hallowed lightning of old! Hoary browed!
Zeus, I your daughter, strike lightning fear
into the hearts of men! Fan your wrath upon
Sicily and fructify with rains and promise soil
yet to be tilled – the pomegranate flourishes under
Semele’s blood. Danae’s gold spills begotten upon
a treasure chest waters. Leda’s eggs are swollen blue.
There is a salt in Semele’s blood, tang
of the ox she slaughters at Zeus’ lintel stone.
The altar is silent save for priestess of lightning.
Then, suddenly, torrents pour like the god’s bridal shower
of rice, off the caryatids who spit the rain like serpents.
Semele takes the ox head and places it atop her
wood bark hair, then dances Maenad, gore dripping.
The simulacrum of her hips are automated pistons.
Galatea robot of Pygmalion’s journey of the mind.
What else could Zeus create, but Semele? Mother of
Dionysus, first one to offer herself to the storm.
No mortal dared be eclipsed by plasma, no girl!
No bold warrior, and acolyte, had tasted ichor.
But Semele dreamed, and danced bull-headed, and sang.
Her song pealed with the cadence of the downpour, and
into the river, wine-red, she went, swimming for electrocution,
a key on a kite in that fabled cataclysm, and Zeus prayed
for restraint, but with blood of bull, he drew out elixir of life
and struck heaven-born, his spear, into Semele’s heart.
She laughed, bruised in lightning spatter from burst vessels –
like roots searching for succor across her blue-black skin.
Semele came to the shore, where the lightning god waited,
his eyes a wolf, his mouth hungered, panged for her starlight.
And they wept molten fire as they kissed in storm’s heart,
and the queen, the priestess, the daughter of Titan’s Bane?
She saw the ineffable, took Zeus’ crown, and bit into the gold.
Cut her first tooth on the divine.
And as Zeus Dis Pater bore her aloft into cosmos sublime;
Semele danced ox-mad through Olympus, and seasons turned,
stars fell, but the world was her wine cup, so she became
God, storm, All.
We Dance the Danse Macabre 