Sunday, 14 February 2016

Eurydice


I

Quoth Orpheus: I belong in this limbo
where I miserably subsist
in my great lack of you.
Normality is monastic solitude for me,
routine and unremarkable domesticity
the offices and hours of my creed.
Quotidian tasks: the lawnmower
consumes its Eucharist of grass;
and the crisp surrogacy of toast
offers unremarkable breakfast transubstantiations -
these provide my rituals of waiting,
my holding pattern, my original sin.

Not waving, not drowning,
just treading water:
all my efforts are just enough and no more
to keep my head above water,
and so there is no grand plan
because there is nothing left
to invest in its execution,
and life is lived from moment to moment.

These futilities I accept and endure as my test,
my ordeal of self-flagellation without respite.
Abnegation preserves the absence you left me.
It is what I deserve for what I did to you:
to live a normal life,

and I will wait in plain sight for you
until the end of my days,
for you and for no other,
until we meet by the grave
and you can finally believe
the proof I offer of my convictions,
my constancy now complete at the end,
and futilities endured in tribute to our past
the passing moment of truth we shared,
and we can go down together at last into the earth
with no attempt to return this time.

II

We sang a song in flesh, you and I,
and inhabited the roles our bodies offered us,
performed the repertoire they prepared
in the motion of our graceful limbs
and the low orbit of our furtive glances,
in our poise and the elaborations of our dance
and also in the stillness and quiet seclusion of our love,
and celebrated every rite and ceremonial detail of life,
succumbed to every urge, luxuriated in our lusts,
resigned ourselves to every compulsion,
consumed life's diverse sacraments gladly and greedily,

but once the procession of forms passed,
once all substance was shed
and slipped like greasepaint from the face of night
what ghosts embraced where we once stood
commingling in the nocturnal exhalations
of the moonlit earth, breathing each other in,
knowing a nameless, everlasting love denied the living,
an heretical love glimpsed only as mirage in life
and known as wordless recitation among the dead
in which we are finally revealed to each other?

We shared that single breath of night air,
holding each other as we held it in, forever,
the entire cosmos one common lung of stars,

but the habits of a former life distracted me,
the allure of some distant beguiling starlike scintillation
irritating the corner of my eye with pathetic glamour,
making me disregard the perfection we experienced
interrupting our shared eternity,
and for one perfidious moment
I allowed time to assert itself,
and in my original sin neglected you
just long enough,
lost my nerve,
turned my head.

The world pivots and with sickening inevitability
the earth makes its claim upon you
steals the space where I imagine you inside me,
hauls unwilling exhalation from me
and sequesters it deep underground
in the undisturbed shadows of the tomb
and I am turned to stone with grief
in the cold cometary light of doom fulfilled
alone in the desert of your absence
where I now walk an endless corpse road
with no chapel to take my ease.

III

I imagine my fingers
running through your hair
like the cool black soil
of a shallow grave.

The soil is sifted
by that shifting cascade of black filaments
in which I clench my fist,
my mind drenched with memory and desire,
while you wait with bated breath
caught in suspended animation
beneath a heavy blanket of darkness
waiting for my resuscitating touch
to reach you and guide you back
to what?

I am suspended in the monotony of a single thought:
the memory of your body stiff and clenched and taut
in a spasm and paralysis of arousal.
Trapped in endless cycles of climax and exhaustion
in which you may find the grave we share commodious.

I imagine the respite you find from the light
in the mute captivity of your subterranean refuge
and I wonder why the path I follow to my lost love
doesn't find its way to you through sunlight,
doesn't lead me through pastures and the light of day
but passes somewhere else,
turns earthwards,
and goes through deprecation and inviolate shadow,
attaining you only where light can't penetrate,
deeper than the sexton's spade can fathom
far, far beyond grief and any grave.

IV

I am your altered Orpheus today,
and you are my re-wrought Eurydice.
I spent my tears in your tomb long ago,
ten thousand years ago when we were young.
I plied my silent lay, wordlessly prayed, 
milked tears from hard stones in your tomb in vain,
raised palaces of grief with my stone tears
piled over your grave in unrelenting sorrow,
from whose barren throne the rise and fall
of Man's dismal empires is observed
until at last I forgot who I was and wandered
lost in the amnesia, drained, deranged, 
to where you eventually found me, traumatised,
trading gibberish for trash in the marketplace, 
bartering birthrights held at a villain's valuation,

and now I recreate you once again, as you created me,
compel you to inhale by my command.
Fasten that air inside yourself
as if you breathe in the entire universe!
Make yourself the sky's sepulchre.
Become the immutable firmament for me.

V

Once I faintly heard ancient echoes
and walked in continuous ecstasy
among the trees and stones and waters
all garrulous with languages of glorious monotony
and the world was my window on eternity,
the scope of my ken unchecked by doubt or limit
and spontaneous melodies kept this idyll deathless,
making the author of every stain and blemish
halt and pause to listen as unsummoned songs
maintained all things in that unwitting innocence
we only become aware of by its loss,

until at last industry shatters the lyre
and now all familiar spirits fall silent
are transformed and seem strange and alien to us,
haunting and persecuting we who abandoned them,
spurned their fellowship and took up tools instead,
inventing tasks, imagining deficiencies where none exist,
and the tyranny of what is both unnecessary and incomplete
usurps our contentment with irremediable dissatisfaction,
and everything unexplained now prompts terror and dismay,
not delight, and demons prowl where angels once played,
as an ancient truth can now only be asserted as a curse,
and the companions with whom we celebrated mysteries
must assume terrible new forms to catch our eye.

We do not curiously enquire after these misconstrued wraiths
that appear in the hell we manufacture for our waking hours
from the ruins of a nature we delude ourselves we control
or penetrate the dreams our stagnant minds develop in sleep,
for the knowledge we surrendered can never be restored. 

But I refuse to die
without being reminded of how it once was
and I will take my broken lyre
from the peg where its wreckage is draped
to sound the single threnodious note of which it is still capable
in remembrance
performed before the inept and inebriated audience
that riots in its own filth in these dilapidated halls
filled with decrepit properties and gaudy painted replicas
mocking the ancient and original venue of my song,
and ignores me. I do not play my lament for them.

I play it for you, Eurydice. 
I find the strength to flout this futility
only for you.

VI

We are beyond love, you and I,
or approach it by a different route
pioneered where no-one ever treads.

There is no procession through sunlit pastures
to an altar where vows are exchanged
to loud applause and wide approbation,
to be observed only unto death,
promises formed from words deemed binding
until the air that made them is snatched by the whirlwind
and the flesh they constrain is changed,
thawed and transformed into something new
by the entropy and amnesia of its fugitive atoms
that meet again and again without recognition or recall
in some other form,
gathered by the roots of a forgotten rose
that blossoms on a midden at midnight
replenished by each day's fresh refuse
nourishing the black petals that feed amnesia
no,
the abyss is the altar of our dark matrimony
and the steps we have taken towards it remain
forever untouched like footprints on the airless moon
where no winds will efface them,
unknown,
except to those that made them,
and the congregated stars
who bear their witness of eternal indifference
to the impressions that persist in dust
where we have passed,
and our stone vows
are as lasting and monumental as a sepulchre.

VII

You exist. I act.
You are desired. I am necessary.
Feminine. Masculine.
These are the principles we embody,

and we embody them so well
we cannot live except in our mutual trance
we dare not breathe, we hold our breath,
for fear of setting things out of balance
disturbing the equilibrium
distracting attention from our perfection
with sighs and sweat and exertion

because life, it turns out,
contrary to expectation, if not dumb experience,
is not an outcome or an achievement or a prize,
life is failure and repetition and disappointment
and continual re-adjustment and modification
as a course is steered
between competing catastrophes
by a novice helmsman
towards the promise of a port
a destination merely guessed at
by a bearing that is chosen through the storm
a bearing which eventually leads
to what turns out to have been
just an accidental stain on a map
and then the provisions run out
and Odysseus waits for a miracle.

I commit the gravest error,
and find myself without you,
stranded beneath that sun
which walked beside you like a gaoler
in the days before my loss,

VIII

and I will wait in plain sight for you
until the end of my days,
for you and for no other,
until we meet at the grave
and in the sum of all futilities endured you will see
the final proof of my constancy
and we can go down into the earth

together.

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