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.