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.
