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Seth Abramson
Enki and Inanna, after the Underworld
He
carried her most of the way home,
over the scarp of a cliff and into the air’s elastic embrace,
which knew him a god and so
sent
him aloft without a whimper from gravity—
along highways with nothing below, toward the variable glow
from the warring cities, the winners in their spark
of triumph, the losers with darkened slats and curtains drawn.
He
made predictions:
entreaties
to be sent by envoy; a great
defeat; the largest troop movement ever seen, from this height
like a shadow creeping through elegant valleys
in
Sumer; a glint off the lake
near
the fishing encampment,
which meant nothing at all; the lavish and divine indifference
of his adopted brothers and sisters. He pretended
to
drop her
through a grate in the clouds where indurate sun speared down—
She squealed; he squeezed her elbow. Later she would recall
how
it is a god saves a mortal,
while plucking a laborer from his destiny or threading
an aesthete through the ravishes of time: through that trickery,
a bending of light where the horizon meets the ground
beneath
one’s feet,
the goddess would make men forget they were men,
so that she could forget she was not a woman and could float
if
she wished, could somersault permissively
in the empty air; and imagine, instead, that the way from here
to
there was in fact
too long for her feet: longer by far than she had ever traveled
on
her own.
SETH ABRAMSON is the cofounder and poetry editor of the New Hampshire
Review. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI,
the Antioch Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review,
the Iowa Review, and the Southern Review. A public defender
in New Hampshire, Seth graduated from Harvard Law School in 2001.
“Enki and Inanna, after the Underworld” appears in our Summer
2007 issue.
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