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The Deaths of Orpheus
1. A FLATTERING LOOK
Look when my head washed up on the shore
I was singing through the salt – they seem sure,
and it’s mostly true – but by then I was mostly salt,
I meaning head and what remained of my throat.
When my eyes opened, finally out of that wine
fucking dark sea, pipers commanded the battered
coves in a moon-shaped bay, though by moon-
shaped, we mean only a part of it. Clouds
were squandered by the coastal gales.
Evening. I realised where I was in the arms
of a woman in whose arms the roll
and loll of my head ceased its hymn.
She carried me on the strings of my lyre
and though I couldn’t see it, you’ll know it’s noted
for nacre inlays on spruce and willow, my signature
in pearl on the rosewood tailpiece. They evicted
a tortoise for his hollowed resonator, for the tone.
And – I should settle this – three strings,
though I could have made you weep with one.
My hostess, with her dark-ringed eyes, had been weeping.
Her pinafore was the green of hunters and olives,
ferns and forestry, patterned with viburnum, haltered
by copper brooches at the shoulder over a rather suave
gainsboro undershirt the unlovely shade of the underworld.
She wore lilacs, mint, fennel in a bunch at her solar plexus
and I smelt the brightness of lemons from under me
and the broad freshness of their leaves. I sensed tortoises
on the ground. It made me so sad knowing she
was going to bury me here among the lemons
and the olives, with my lyre, in some lonely
adventureless grave. I’ve become the death again in every glance
backwards. I’m brave enough to do it twice.
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2. NYMPHS FINDING THE HEAD OF ORPHEUS
Always becoming, always becoming, instar
to instar, the salmon-pink sky runs
a jealous parallel along the mountaintops,
the mountaintops envy the scum of the sky –
each is envied by the black ash trees
swooning in their gothic copse
which only for context sharpens as a spear
the narrower birch with its adolescent rings
of years which longs for touch and hands
and more touch than the hands of nymphs in rockeries
and nymphs in the stream
with their torso-sized bronze water jug filled
and the opening covered by one girl’s hand
which is envied by waterlilies and peonies
and aconite for its transport – they itch to work
their frenzy of medicine elsewhere than this fresh pool
which seethes at everything other than itself
for being various and loathes in its algal
green flotage that depends on sunlight
resented by the accumulating moon
whose caprice impulses the currents around
whose currents I admire for their powerlessness
which is me half-drowned at the bottom and jealous,
O insects, jealous is what death is.
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3. RED
the tenses of my was streak like thinned paint.
My body resigns itself on this plinth
as a treasure for the vultures. My gorgeous
body is divorcing itself from itself.
My chest grotesquely arches. It is curved
like the lopped-off top of a circle, the rusty
chord drawn through. I’m Christ-wounded in the side.
I hadn’t imagined death this red roar,
but a slalom of light outpoured. I had
imagined not stasis nor the language
of my hands stopped, but my thought becoming
advisor to the order of things – the invisible
reminder yearly to the deaf, innocent
wonders of the world to...
