Morgan Blalock

Helen of Troy at a House Party

That story is not true:
you did not go on the well-benched ships,
nor did you reach Troy’s citadel.
–Fr. 192, Stesichorus

You landed, instead, here:

on the right arm of a couch in a cabin
at the end of a dirt road after a turn
off a bridge that runs over a river;

you sit, shedding silence like loose hairs,
watching flames lick up a curtain
on the window facing the river
south of the cabin;

you have told no one about the fire,
have alerted no one to the hot halo
around the curtain, have not yet even
moved from your seat, hard-won
amidst the crowd heavy on every side;

you do not give an inch to the revellers
as the cabin begins to burn inwards
on itself, orange tongues
mounting the ceiling,

for you are simply chewing, and rather
loudly, on a handful of shelled hazelnuts
your mother bagged up for you
and slipped in your jacket pocket
before you left, saying cryptically,
                    you never know
                    Helen, these have been eaten
                    since the Mesolithic era
                    so they must be good for something;

now you too are eating hazelnuts
and their history, and watching this curtain
cease to exist, the ceiling’s reddening arc,
the boys who wanted so many things from you,
and none of them your name, angle
their bodies upwards and into postures
close enough to startled;

one of them, earlier, told you
                    Helen,
                    your face could launch
                    a thousand ships,
and you didn’t quite know what that meant
so you smiled and turned away, looked
at your face in the screen of your phone

                    —what about it would impel
                    a ship, and to where,
                    and to what end
—and see now, someone
has put out the fire, has doused the curtain
with a bucket of melting ice;

you suppose, upon reflection,
that it never really travelled
to the ceiling, perhaps that was a trick
of your eye, near as it is to punchdrunk,

the flame, since inception,
stuck in its place of origin.