Eurydice

1

There are no trees under the earth.
Good roots go to pulp in the mud.
The rivers of Hell are sludge
Leaking down the red gash
I sank into when I came.

2

I was Eurydice, witness.
The one song Orpheus told was mine.
If the trees attended, if the wind fell gentle to hear,
If thunder over the lightened field withheld,
If the sea hung between tides and did not break,
If lion paced beside fawn and forgot his hunger,
If lovers turned from love's struggle to Orpheus,
It was his tireless telling they overheard.

Earlier than song or lyre
I was ear and listener.
Silence, converse of eyes, was all,
Was need and answer, was mirror, was equal.
A long time breathing quietly.
Breath, the fragrance of other.
The word in the mind that named the fragrance,
Then correspondent breath, tremor of air,
And in my ear the sound of his thought unwound
The first song of Orpheus.

"Listen."
"I hear."
Heard, the made hollow,
Himself, musing river,
Wooer and celebrant,
From whom fell the unrefusable music.
For the song, becoming itself, forgot end and origin
And rose in him without need.
The wind became his motive. The leaves roused.
The trees spread their branches wide to carry his song,
And one bent and became his armed lyre.

Fables of self, streaming in the warm auricle,
Were borne down inner circles, unlaboring,
And burst on the drum
Unchanged,
Pitched purely into the standing air between us,
Heard purely in the purely passive body,
The ear of love.

But when, as he willed, I touched him,
He closed my hands in his hands, stopped the lyre.
He tasted self in my mouth, and the song stopped.
3
In the dry heat of the dog star,
Though the torch of Hymen choked and spit pitch
As it led him to me,
On the other side of the portal
We clasped in our own hands
The truth
Lovelier than every imagined thing,
Harder, happier,
Fact, that perfectly gathers to itself
Light, hymen O hymenaeon,
And Orpheus at peace,
Silent.

As Hell is, till he comes.
As the green world was, till he sang.

4

No serpent killed me.
Nothing that lives would hurt what Orpheus loved.

I walked to the river.
I lay down in the bed.
Something full of us lets go or is torn out
In the warm downpour that floods the declivity,
And we are dead.
In heavy rain I came
Here to Hell.

5

Then to the shaping lyre the trees rose up.
O Orpheus singing! O the tall trees of song!
And all creatures were hushed within themselves
Listening.
6
This way will come Orpheus.
Death will admit him through the soft veins of Hell
For the horned lyre, light lifted among shades.
Within themselves the dead will hear his music, and
A tree will rise in Hell.

Then, like no other,
Singing,
Though he eat with the dead,
He will go back
And I will go with him to the portal
Of death's winding ear, where I will listen
As his song reaches into the tender air forever
Living, lucent in the streaming Hebrus, warm
Under the world,
His lyre as stars risen.

　

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