"Eurydice"
Don't believe what's been said.
It was Orpheus who died first.
His song faded as the daffodils
tolled like bells in the wind
announcing the arrival of spring.
While the days grew longer,
I cut my hair in mourning. It fell
in clusters around the room, stirred
into flight by the slightest breeze
or footstep to sow my loneliness
throughout the house. His lyre lay silent
on the white bedspread, pillows
that still held the silhouettes
our profiles burned into the cloth
from our last night together.
But somewhere in those strings
his vibrations lingered; life beyond life
awaited the touch of my awakening.
He took me so easily into the world
of troubadours filled with gardens, balconies
and oaths of love sworn forever.
A tide of notes lifted him off the ground,
up to the window and into my arms
that opened like a night blooming flower
to the waters of the moon. Now my fingers
hesitate to touch the strings of his lyre.
They are a gateway to the twilight world
that borders life and death. Should we meet
again I'm uncertain I'd recognize him
in anything but the movement of his melodies.
2.
Death has bleached his eyes with a truth
I cannot undo no matter how many tears
are shed as I replay his songs in my mind.
Prayers fold my body into ghost-hands
that reach out in blindness to touch
the steel of the strings. I absorb their vibrations
into my tendons, bones, and marrow
until my whole being resonates with
longing for his presence. My life has become a song
that calls him back from the caves
of the underworld to sing to me
how far he traveled for my love,
what he sacrificed to worship again
at my feet. Even as the cold hand
of Persephone pulls him deeper, the hope grows
he will break free, follow my voice
through the glacial blueness of strings
that open like a birth canal to receive him.
© 2005 Jim Doss
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