Orpheus

By A F Moritz

He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods

had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song

and there she was, Eurydice restored, perfectly naked and fleshed

in her rhyming body again, the upper and lower smiles and eyes,

the line of mouth-sternum-navel-cleft, the chime of breasts and hips

and of the two knees, the feet, the toes, and that expression

of an unimaginable intelligence that yoked all these with a skill

she herself had forgotten the learning of: there she was, with him

                  once more

just for an instant as she vanished. And then he heard her from

                  behind

the invisible veil, absence: a shrill and batlike but lexical indictment.

Why had he violated the divine command, why, when he had seized

all song to himself and robbed her of power to open her own

                  oblivion?

It grew in volume and now seemed to spew from an insane old

                  mother with one breast

hanging like a huge withered testicle from a rent in her weathered

                  gown,

who was being watched by a tall woman, copper-helmet-coiffed,

                  richly suited in salmon colour,

a mythical allusion, since salmon were long extinct in the bays and

                rivers here:

songs never brought them anymore. The young restrained breasts

                and the old free one

oppressed him equally and he went to live among men, waiting for

                the crazy

and the competent to join forces and come for him with their

                  scissors.

Orpheus listened patiently to my poem and when it quieted he said

                  to me:

That wasn't it at all. I sang outward from my face to blue spaces

                  between clouds,

to fern fronds, and men and women sipped my song as you drink

                   from a stream going by.

What I sang is lost in time, you don't kmow what it was, all you have

                  is your own

old stories about me. And if women tore me into pieces, maybe that

                  only signifies

each one keeps part of my body, which is melody among visible

                  things.