these jars were for pouring oil on husbands
when they’d died - so a widow could mourn
the shade delineated in jasmine’s
white-out world - neither ivory nor horn
in colour - while he strangely gestures
to the visitor once brought to his bed-
now it’s she who does the divestiture
in scenes where blood and tears are never shed
the dead do the mourning - whether they miss
the sun or instead envy their loved ones
is uncertain - except an armistice
holds the faint stone so long as the ooze runs
and the tomb’s bronzed and scented for a while
like his body was - from jars and cracked phials
Blackwells
Oxford
22 February 2018
The jar is this poem is a lekythos. Lekythoi were jars the ancient Greeks used to pour offerings of oil at burial grounds tombs and monuments to the dead. I am thinking of white figure lekythoi here by the Achilles painter, who flourished in the mid 5th century BCE in Athens. They also used a cylindrical container called an alabastron, which had to be cracked open, and a cosmetics or perfume container called a plemochoe.
The reference to the gates of ivory and horn appears in Odyssey XIX. False dreams come through the former and true dreams from the latter.