Athena
Amy Clampitt
Force of reason, who shut up the shrill foul Furies in the dungeon of the Parthenon, led whimpering to the cave they live in still,
beneath the rock your city foundered on: who, equivocating, taught revenge to sing (or seem to, or be about to) a kindlier tune:
mind that can make a scheme of anything— a game, a grid, a system, a mere folder in the universal file drawer: uncompromising
mediatrix, virgin married to the welfare of the body politic: deific contradiction, warbonnet-wearing olive-bearer, author
of the law’s delays, you who as talisman and totem still wear the aegis, baleful with Medusa’s scowl (though shrunken
and self-mummified, a Gorgon still): cool guarantor of the averted look, the guide of Perseus, who killed and could not kill
the thing he’d hounded to its source, the dread thing-in-itself none can elude, whose counter- feit we halfway hanker for: aware (gone mad
with clarity) we have invented all you stand for, though we despise the artifice—a space to savour horror, to pre-enact our own undoing in— living, we stare into the mirror of the Gorgon.