Eurydice's Relief

Eurydice's Relief

[Eurydice was the woman beloved of Orpheus, a man who sang so beautifully that wild beasts stopped to listen. When she was killed by a poisonous snake, Orpheus went down to the underworld to bring Eurydice back from the dead. He sang his way in, subduing all in the realm of death with his music. Eurydice was released, but could only live again if Orpheus did not look back at her as she walked behind him to the surface. He succumbed to temptation, and she fell back to dwell among the dead. So caught up in singing his fresh grief was Orpheus that he was torn apart by a roving band of wild women who wanted him to join their revels, but to whom he would pay no response.]


All that trouble, just for this?
I admit it, when they called me from the Fields of Asphodel
I dipped my shadow fingers in the tears of the nearest creek,
And tried to primp.

To have him fill me again?
To have him inhabit my ears as a conch swells its shell
To have him rooted in the floor of my belly and the volute of my ears?
How, though a shade, could I not shout?

Persephone herself took me aside and gave me the news.
“He can't look” she told me. I nodded, a dumb leaf bobbled by rain.
She bent, a forest pine stooping double.
“And you can't listen” she said.

Up and up we climbed, spiraling as if building a shell.
Water splats were louder than his feet.
Listen not, listen not, I thought.
Behold him climbing, raising you up as he strides.
Stay filled with the rhythm of him, leaving this place.
Stay filled with the rhythm of him, starving death.
Stay filled with his rhythm, rolling morning down on you.

But no one had warned us of that curse of the dead: We hear what the living don't sing.
And I heard the song I could not stop:
Me, the sparkling earth in which he sunk his roots.
Me, the snake of gems who bit his forehead in his dreams.
Me, who licked clean the hollows of his lyre.
His silence boomed in me like blood..

Sing! I croaked. He whirled. He faced me, and it was done.
“All,” I heard, “For this?” I fled.

Pity me not. Blessing, I say, that I broke not the surface.
Every wound between us, it would flap its lips and yell.
It would summon the evil genie of that burrowing and that climb.
Nothing any mortal woman could pay would bankroll that.
I stay, prowling among the poets of the dead.
They will sing as long as I want, and time is unknown in our trickling shady land.
They love me, that I hear; I love them, that I am faceless as the trickling rocks.