Friday from the Archives: “Actaeon and Diana” by Alan Shapiro with art by Frank Hunter in NCLR 2004
It is time for this year’s Applewhite Prize contest! We’re continuing our Poetry Month highlights with “Actaeon and Diana” by Alan Shapiro, who teaches in the UNC Dept of English and Comparative Literature.
Actaeon and Diana
inspired by Frank Hunter’s photograph, “Ash Cave After a Rainstorm”
By Alan Shapiro
No place to look for, only to happen on.
Everywhere, the slender sound of rain
after the rain has stopped, a hearsay more
than sound of water you are helpless not
to follow all the way down the valley to
a hidden cavern over the high lip
of which the water changes as it spills
from mere water into incandescent mist
that brightens the dark surface of the pool
it falls into with even denser shinings.
The dark pool and the darker cave and even
the trees descending toward you from the white
light high above them in degrees of darkening
all grow darker down here for the shining.
No place to look for, no place ever
to expect to find and once you find it ever
to hope to dwell in or escape. The way
the mist hints at the hair the hunter caught
a glimpse of, the celestial flow of it
about the goddess as she let it fall
still bearing traces of the loosened braids,
the shining goddess gone as soon as seen,
the bright hair just the afterglow of hair
left in the air a moment above the pool
to dog the hunter no matter where he goes,
the hunter hunted by that vanishing
as you yourself will be for seeing this,
you to be scented out, pursued, as if
the punishment for such a pleasure were
the vision of it once the pleasure’s gone.
There is also an interview by Sheryl Cornett with Shapiro in the same issue. She writes, “A writer of Jewish-American heritage, Shapiro spoke in the following interview on art’s role in grief, his religious and cultural background, life in a Southern literary community, and the meaning of hospitality: intellectual, spiritual, artistic.” Read that online at Gale Cengage. Add the NCLR 2004 issue to your collection.
