Oedipus in Kolonáki

To the Great Dionysia I've fled,

with me my mother shall not wed.

My father’s grave on Afric's shore

I've honored properly—no more.

I asked three questions of the Sphinx,

"ingenuously," the creature thinks—

in this twenty-first century Thebes,

we Aspies are disdained as dweebs.

Should I have stayed where I was born

and nursed my swollen feet forlorn?

Should I have sought a fresh solution

different from the Revolution?

Should I have loved whom Heaven sent?

(If so, I wonder where she went!)

“No and Yes, and maybe No,

for loving always is a trial,

even when you're good to go,"

the demon simpered with a smile.

“Screw those eyes! Just do your best.

Take medication like the rest.

Antigone’s in the nice café

having a drink across the way.

Theseus, they say, is coming later.

Creon—naturally—’s a waiter.”

Then, vanishing at last s/he queried:

“So where'd it suit you to be buried?”

Note: Oedipus, "though racked with grief, / by the gods' grim design still reigned over the Kadmeians," the Odyssey asserts (Od. 11: 275–76, trans. Peter Green; see also the Iliad, trans. id., 23: 679, p. 432n8), and Hesiod says he died a wealthy landowner (Works and Days 162–63). The idea that he died at Kolonōs, just outside Athens, may thus have been an Athenian invention—perhaps by the octogenarian Sophocles himself in his last play, Oedipus at Kolonōs.

Since Kolonōs was evidently named for an eponymous hero, my identification of it with Kolonáki, named for a column standing there, where I lived and caroused in the 1960s, is unsustainable. Se non è vero, è ben trovato!

December 12, 2024