The Wizard's Sister*
Her happiness is fragile, illusory. Made up.
Like frost or thin ice.
(I respond, of course,
to the evolutionary imperative
of a bone held eight feet high.)
Her attitude ironic, salutary.
Like a prize at Smithfield.
(Specialist in alienation,
she throws the bone down by me in the mud.)
Or perhaps romantic: not cruel but unremitting,
relentless. Like life by moonlight.
* "She [Circe (Kirke)] is the sister of the wizard Aëtes, both being children of the Sun who lights the world, by the same mother, Perse, the Daughter of Ocean." Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu.
