Marsyas
Marsyas: was he a faun? a satyr?
From our vantage point, centuries later,
his ethnic background doesn’t matter;
what counts is, he was brutally slain.
Vietnamese or Jewish, satyr or faun,
no one lives this kind of horror down.
A gentle outdoors-loving musician,
he was killed in the open, in a Phrygian
forest. With surgical precision,
his murderer peeled his skin off in thin strips
while Marsyas howled through whitened lips.
All day: his howls and the cracks of whips.
Each morning, I show up at my job,
wearing like a fancy watch-fob
my stethoscope. At times, I’d like to drop
the heavy thing on the ground and sputter,
“Apollo, patron god of doctors,
deity to whom we pray, ‘Save us from slaughter,
protect us from disease’! How could you
be he to whom we pray for tidings good, you
who tortured Marsyas in the Phrygian wood?
How could you cause such suffering?
And what’s your planned penitential offering?
Remorse is nothing; sunbeams are nothing.”
From our vantage point, centuries later,
his ethnic background doesn’t matter;
what counts is, he was brutally slain.
Vietnamese or Jewish, satyr or faun,
no one lives this kind of horror down.
A gentle outdoors-loving musician,
he was killed in the open, in a Phrygian
forest. With surgical precision,
his murderer peeled his skin off in thin strips
while Marsyas howled through whitened lips.
All day: his howls and the cracks of whips.
Each morning, I show up at my job,
wearing like a fancy watch-fob
my stethoscope. At times, I’d like to drop
the heavy thing on the ground and sputter,
“Apollo, patron god of doctors,
deity to whom we pray, ‘Save us from slaughter,
protect us from disease’! How could you
be he to whom we pray for tidings good, you
who tortured Marsyas in the Phrygian wood?
How could you cause such suffering?
And what’s your planned penitential offering?
Remorse is nothing; sunbeams are nothing.”
“Marsyas” was previously published in Raintown Review (Vol. 10 Issue 1, 2011) as well as Lê's book, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011).
Artist and poet Jenna Lê contributed two pieces of art for the January-February issue of West Trestle Review: Train Reverie (paired with Gail Entrekin's poem, "Desire to Speak,") and My Mother Eating Clam Chowder, (paired with Amy Miller's poem, "The Weekends"). Lê is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018), an Elgin Awards 2nd Place winner. Her poems appear in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch. Her visual art appears or is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, Cutbank, Jubilat, Lantern Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Mom Egg Review. She has a B.A. in math and an M.D. and lives and works as a physician in New York City.
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Art: The Flaying of Marsyas, Antonio de Bellis via Wikimeda Commons
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