Orpheus Speaks

When you left Everpeace forever I wept so much

the first time. Now with summer gone and autumn's full ascent
daylight is sieved between mint and pine. The scents
so sharp seemed to make us real, our repeated reunions,
our repeated farewells, thinning us to sun, melting us
to marmalade residuum of pure abstraction, distant
because distance is what you need to feel whole.

I wept for the taste of berries in your mouth
and for the metamorphosis of roses ever perplexed
with how to bloom, knowing how their meanings changed.

Oh, come and go. Where is your breath I held

within my throat, where is your scar my fingers traced?

Because there was song, I learned to overlive the rose
by a day. Or two. Still now it scares me to disintegrate.

And how can I sing my grief when I have no words
with you dead the second time? You were the tune
once heard upon the crossroads of systole and diastole,

where no temple to Apollo is found.¹ You sang

our lives alive. Now dead as a Roman aqueduct

your song fluxes to the sea's slumberous ear.

It's true her murmurous waterways would not listen

if my music ceased instead. You composed

the ripened tang of berries, the taste of wild blue
elderbloom. You were the winefull cup and chalice
of the earth. Now with you dead anew, the leaves
of my songbook scatter to thorn and nettle vine; I unstring
my lyre and heartstrings, untie the twain pipes of heartcore,²
and step into the twice-full stream that sweeps me
out of time, to come and go amid your lost forms.


¹Temples in ancient Greece were often located at crossroads, particularly temples to Hecate or Hermes, both of whom are associated with the underworld (the latter being the psychopomp to Hades) and with liminal states, which contrasts with the function of the sun god Apollo, who instructed Orpheus in the art of music.

²Anatomically, the aorta and venae cavae.