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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