Set beside the splendor of the classical past, present-day reality can seem, well, pretty lame. In “Hephaestus,” John Tripoulas takes up this theme and gives it a poignant turn.
The Artemision Bronze in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens is a splendid ancient artwork. With arms extended in either direction, the radiant male figure prepares to hurl a weapon, which is missing. Scholars debate whether the statue represents Zeus or Poseidon and whether the weapon would have been a thunderbolt or a trident. Tripoulas sides with Poseidon. Despite an injured leg, the poet has swallowed “a pain pill” and “my pride” (a nice use of the figure of speech known as a zeugma) and made a visit to the museum. Forced to stop and rest, he finds himself “befallen,” the bronze god’s perfect body towering above him. “Humbled,” he moves on to another gallery, where sorrowing women’s faces on grave markers return his sad stare. What he felt in the presence of Poseidon was the difference between them. By contrast, “mourning my lame leg,” he shares the melancholy of these women. He and they are somehow on equal terms.
Meanwhile, the poem transforms his weakness into strength. That lame leg, the sign of vulnerable humanity, likens the poet to the god Hephaestus, who was disabled after he was cast out of Olympus. It is Hephaestus, master smith, who fashioned the shield of Achilles and other wonders of art and engineering. And like Hephaestus, Tripoulas has forged something precious: not a magnificent statue, but a meditation on mortality that is in its modest way masterly.
Tripoulas is a Greek-American poet who lives in Athens. Much poetry in English today is fragmentary and gestural, passionate but oblique. Tripoulas doesn’t write that way. His diction is plain, his syntax lucid, his manner quiet—but generous and cordial, not reserved. His subject is the double consciousness that comes with living in a place where the ancient and the contemporary are conspicuously overlaid.
His poems take us to ancient sites and reflect on the myths associated with them. “Magpie Mind” is set on Muse Hill (Philopappou), a forested park adjacent to the Acropolis. Lingering there after sunset, Tripoulas is granted a kind of vision: “a kaleidoscope of pulsing colors”—a Ferris wheel—begins to revolve in the city below. Rather than convey transcendent order, this is an image of the world as a mesmerizing chaos of color, a sparkling wheel of fortune. Tripoulas fancies that it must be the work of “the consort of Aphrodite,” Hephaestus.
As he descends the hill, the spotlit Parthenon shines high above him, like Poseidon in the National Archaeological Museum. The great temple, “symbol of wisdom, order and peace,” by example scolds Tripoulas for his “magpie attraction” to bright things like the Ferris wheel. But he remains charmed by its lights and the “pleasure and joy” of life on Earth. What would the past be without the present?
