I stood inside myself like a dead tree or a tower. I pulled the rope of braided hair and high above me a bell of leaves tolled.
Because my hand stabbed its brother, I said: Make it stone.
Because my tongue spoke harshly, I said: Make it dust. And yet it was not death, but her body in its green dress I longed for. That’s why I stood for days in the field until the grass turned black and the rain came.
Who knows? Maybe it would be simpler. When she was alive, her body confused him; he couldn’t think clearly when she was close. Scent of her skin made him dizzy.
Now, where she had been: only a gaping hole in air, an emptiness he could fill with song.
Gregory Orr, from “Far below, plowed fields…”, Orpheus & Eurydice: A Lyric Sequence (Copper Canyon Press, 2001)
With my words I’ll make rocks weep and trees toss down their branches in despair.
In its heart each object guards a tear so round and absolute it mirrors all the passing scene. Those clear globes are the souls of things. I want to shatter them. I want to make them sing.
My body was never marred; no dart of Eros ever pierced my skin. Where my heart was a pomegranate is— how could I be moved?
And yet, as he sang, I watched pale faces in our hall of ghosts swaying like a meadow and memory blossomed. I saw again my lost companions wandering in sunlight in the upper air. I walked among them green and careless, not hearing the rhythm of his chariot approaching, not yet caught in the sickle of his arm’s curve.
At the field’s edge I searched for lilies; never saw the god whom love had ravaged, myself the flower he’d come to gather.
He stood before the throne and we stared, astonished, at his breath pluming in the cold air.
And then he strummed his lyre and sang the things we knew and had forgot— the earth in all its seasons but especially spring whose kiss melts the icicle’s bone so that the dead bush blooms again.
He sang the splendid wings sex lends.
He sang the years passing like sparks flung in the dark: anvil, tongs, and hammer toiling at pleasure’s forge.
Last of all it was loss he sang, how like a vine it climbs the wall, sends roots and tendrils inward, bringing to the heart of the hardest stone the deep bursting emptiness of song.
When Eurydice saw him huddled in a thick cloak, she should have known he was alive, the way he shivered beneath its useless folds.
But what she saw was the usual: a stranger confused in a new world. And when she touched him on the shoulder, it was nothing personal, a kindness he misunderstood. To guide someone through the halls of hell is not the same as love.
When someone you love dies suddenly, the process of surviving them is complex. Part of the difficulty is separating out your entangled identities. Grieving, you celebrate the love bond between you and the dead one, but also, as you grieve, you are distinguishing yourself from the dead one.
[…]
When I imagine healthy grieving, I see the living one packing a little boat with clothes and food and mementos. The dead one climbs into the boat and when the time for departure comes, you send him on his voyage into his new life. You, the living, stand on the shore and watch as the lost loved one rows out into the dark alone.
No one spoke to me about Peter’s dying. No one told me how to help my little brother on his journey to the land of the dead; no one showed me how to bless him and let him go. No one offered to help me sort out the threads of memory and guilt and grief that confused our two identities into a single tangle. I did my best. It felt as if I sat for hours on the floor of my room, trying to separate out our two selves, but I could not—it was hopeless. And so I gave up and thrust the whole snarl back inside my body, back through my own wound that had opened when Peter died. From then on, Peter and I were inextricable in my thoughts. He became a part of me and lived inside me more intimately mingled than warp and woof of the same cloth, basic and mysterious as the place where the pale blue of veins meets the scarlet of arteries.
Gregory Orr, from “After,” The Blessing: A Memoir (Council Oak Books, 2002)
And when she touched him on the shoulder, it was nothing personal, a kindness he misunderstood. To guide someone through the halls of hell is not the same as love.
