'To be Dead is Best'

It was a lovely stew. Great chunks of meat, As soft as cushions, beaded with golden fluid, Smelling of thyme and pepper. No one at home Ever made me a stew like that, I said to him. He nodded, and piled my plate,

And, just said, Eat.

He was very careful. He must have cooked it for hours, Rubbing the pieces with oil and herbs and flour To make them taste like any other meat.

Right at the bottom he laid the fingers and toes, Carefully curled. I had picked a finger up, Was watching it oozing drop after coppery drop, Holding it high on my knife, when I saw: Stared a long moment, and slowly saw what it was, And sat staring at what I could see, Saying nothing, and staring.

The vomit was filling my throat, my mouth, my nose,

Then filling my plate (and I thought, did 1 eat all that, I must have been hungry, was what I crazily

thought).

I stood up to breathe, and I knocked my plate on the floor,

Stepped into it, slithered, still vomiting, hearing a

roar In my ears in the room in the world, unaware it was me Screaming at Atreus. All I could find I threw, Plates, tables, benches, great greasy handfuls of stew, Cursing him, cursing.

At least the curse came true.

All this was a long time ago.

Thyestes is dead, the whole damned lot by now, Agamemnon, Orestes, Electra, are dead as Troy. Those maniacs, matricides, whores, Chasing each other with choppers, those gloomy bores, Wishing they'd never been born in elegant speech, Then going into the house to die with a screech, Disembowelled, or stabbed in the bath, or torn by a bull, Or surrounded by adjectives plunge in the froth- ing sea, While the old men tell us, 'Such is the only joy God gives to mortal man.' It is just as well We have learnt to behave, Apollo leaves us alone, Nobody murders his brother, or eats his son.

What worries me now

Is to think, If I hadn't been sick! If I'd eaten

it all, Then heard him saying, 'Those were your kids, you know,' Giggling and biting his nails in a lunatic joy —And nodded, and thought, Oh well, He had to do it; he ought to be put away; And as for the kids, because I'd read all those plays, I knew they were better dead, And said to my brother, 'Shake hands,' and we did.

'I know a doctor I think you ought to see.

Just promise that never again ...' If I thought all that I would rather be dead, I would know the old men were right, Moaning that early death is the happiest fate, That the thing to do with life is to give it back : I would surely be dead in fact

if I thought all that.

LAURENCE LERNER