Orpheus Suite

David Hickman

1

Gone from her. And the silence was a dare.

Each song dissolving into the mercury mirror. Each note

a monument to the silvered isinglass where she had finally turned and dissappeared. And wind and rain were the music and the dance.

Where each drop of dew held a fugue of darkness

that repeated itself everwhere like a history of imprisonment,

and the body's betrayals of the words it must repeat:

bubbling like music out of pink and blue gelatins:

to mark the days of our graces and defeats.

What else was there? He would descend.

It made no difference at all that they considered him insane.

2.

Only now did he know she had wanted death.

He remembered her cadences, the pleading that was her body and so her breath. The clarified juices that cascaded in the garden: the purpling swells and densities of her skin, and the polished riffs of her sighs and laughter inviting, dark, inevitable as he pressed.

That a thing so beautiful could have needed him!

That was a puzzle.That and the fierceness with which she admonished him. And he made of his confusion a torch-song and a gift.Turned inward to the silence to sing the riff.

3.

Nothing to surpass her but the song itself. The waving of olive trees. Incendiary sparkling of her coarse blue hair. Falling as misery, as shadows of a stair, angular, sharp, ascending and descending through the permanent evening to arrive at her figure without belonging or intent. Or so he imagined

it must always be. A fugue, or a memory, in which the fullness of her hunger meets the wound of her despair. And he is left with no one, and a song beyond gender, beyond comparison of the tulips and their flaming cups, until finally

there is a light and he is arriving nowhere.

4.

Dreamt of her: apparition to dispel the incoherence of his breath.The lush confusion that formed the song, the lucid arousal that he remembered. And Euridyce sighing at the darkened stair. A shade among the machinations of hell, where spent words ignite in dry black flames the pitiless inscapes of a poetry that must fail. Still he dreamt of her And the dream day was a pill, a matrix on which to hang the motives of his grip: how the shadows of the oak trees writhed on the grass. And the ancient, packed earth where she had danced for him, took everything from the mystery and gave it back again, untouched.

5.

In death's blue country where dissapointment is a school, the wind was darkness, and the rain was blood. She was as beautiful as a memory, smooth ,unlinear. A thing to hope against. A song of pleading in which silence was unmoored. Her blue eyes flickered against the shadow's grid. And the moment he thought of her he remembered: flagrant bursts of magenta and emerald. The leers of shades filling the space around him. He, looking only for Eurydice, speaking often and long with the lovely and strange. Sang a song of his own dissolving there, into the darkness that held her, pale negative of spring.

6.

His throat the song. His flesh the music. The strings of a discipline of deep munificence. Remembering suddenly the orchid in her hair. The white dress that draped her as she approached the dark. Gone from the garden into a foreign care. And he is finally distracted by death's pure face. The last of her heaving and the blank tv. What else could he have done but sing? Inside the silence and the soundless rain. Walked from silence into shadows of the air.

7.

Dante knew the exactitudes of death. Described the circles of the human negative. How quickly fear can turn to violence, that it's easier to poison a man who has faith, or sucker one who aspires into an expensive waiting game. He saw them all. The clouds of their hate. Their offices and deceits, the soundless furies of the sufferers, who had finally learned that behavior has effects, that greed is no excuse for wholesaling death. He saw them there, and heard Orpheus whisper, singing as he crept through the darkened city, in love with Eurydice, a tenor in their midst.

8.

But Orpheus dreamt of her, and the hidden sun. Gold foil and bells. A tone of disparate phases and implications. "A song too crafted to be undone." He was only a wave in the space she was-- a diffidence, an implosion, unmasked and unplugged. The notes of her emptiness expunged in breath. And the dutiful hemlocks that lined the abyss where he led her upward toward the possible kiss.

And they were not unlike a song of the absurdity of song.

9.

As he sang he knew it was memory he sang. "a piece against the pieces that were still." "A fetching shape of the arousal's music", fading and rising against her body's absence. Against tract housing and the telephone's insistence. The bright junk mail and the bosses' intransigence. Gone from us all into nothing and its trance. "A single voice against the swelling of business." "And the revisions of twilight against the cardinals as they play"

10.

Death is a window. A snake in red grass.

There were blooms against her body: tiny agate blemishes

that  rippled wet. A blue translucence to her empty breast.

And beads of a dew she could not caress, having made of her hands a pattern of randomness, a silence that no longer grasped the silence. Or the Ceasuras of her own song that refuse to dissent. "A silence that comes anyway and will continue to come: singing of its need against the fields in the distance that will always hold love's beauty and its preposterous cravings"

11.

Still he instantiates a song of green.

He is the silence in the poplar trees.

And drives around the block at night

to listen to tunes, to sing what was

against what is. He is in fact, a pattern of speech.

A definition that appends the loss of Eurydice

among the pallor of the ruins of time

"that has forgotten belief and the qualitative aspects that underpin the field"

12.

As the water is a lyre that sings itself awake. As the maenads were violets that grew from rage. And to refuse them is to refuse the taste of ash and blood."to break from the collective, from genders cliches of envy and ruin." And find the widening sky enough. Its blue and umber. Its smeared pastels of yellow and pink above the gurgle of a grainy stream,washing Euryidce from the banks and the moss. A place to come to, if not to touch, among earthen fugues of indifferent love.

13.

What else was there to do but sing?

Nothing beautiful had escaped his wandering. Not the women of the town. Not the tall ruined men or the perfected trees. His song had whispered of Eurydice. The shadows of her anguished stare. "And he lay down quietly, like the negation of a theme", his head floating lightly. Mouthing waves of the sea.