after
Rainer Maria Rilke
Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes
(Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes, 1904)
That mother lode was luminous with souls.
All else was dark with death’s mythology.
Humans grow anchored to such silence,
their blood an ore among those roots,
a feldspar crush of porphyry
where nothing else is red.
Beyond the rocks a mist without memory
or ambition, a forest lost for form
and there, spanned by ribbon bridges
the lake’s blank face and depth
of pitiless, grey immutability.
Through a sufferance of grassland the pale
path
rose, just the width of one direction, thin
as the thread unravelling from her shroud.
First and last the way was theirs to follow.
He walked ahead, edgy for his luck to hold,
with each further step his slender chance
less so, devouring the distance whole.
His cloak’s loose pleats, sky-blue with larks
or where larks dwell (the notes
made all the difference), just hid the lyre
crooked numbly there, its fragile curves
a twist of deadwood in his heavy hand.
His wits were curs, first out of earshot
then to heel, now a second sight
reading the next blind bend, then a laggard
circling behind, nosing for a scent
defining life from death.
He listened for the two
whose coming sealed the bargain.
How noiselessly they followed… the echo
of their footfall lost in his, the echo
matching step for step
some certainty of ascent.
When he paused to listen a stillness
soaked his senses, a chill of doubt moving
his mind a little, belief itself
a little word to test the enterprise,
though looking back was sacrifice
and recognition wreckage—
ghostly, the two:
the Messenger God, the found path’s Lord,
beneath his hood the lantern look that
guided,
and by him there the sapling staff
and steady brush of ankle wings, and to his
left,
her hand in his laid gentle as a promise, she.
Love refused her death, the struck lyre
a world the mourning made, a resonance
turning on her absence as a world reborn;
home’s hilly fields, and water
winding to a fall of meadow
rounded by still stranger stars:
the same sun and yet a crippled light without
her.
The bled rock of handmaidens sobbing, clouds
knotted with a bleaker rain, could not equal
the lyre’s lament, the loss that love
refused,
each note stubborn with redemption.
Her death was larger than her life.
Within the scented grave gauze, slackening
as they went, her gentle, patient pace, the
deference
of the God to her condition, gave each
uncertain step
a coyness and a grace that shoaled against
eternity… ahead, the distant figure,
anonymous,
some prisoner to ascent… death’s intimacy
a star burning in her mouth, a sun
and the fruit of that sun
ripening to a deeper bloom, palpable,
in her throat its warm pulp; its sweetness
dazed.
She had escaped humanity, its wifely claims.
She was its widow now, or else a girl again
among wildflowers at evening, within the
petal folds
her signal presence closing with the light.
Even this God’s touch, transcendent, his
shadow
of a shining ether, she found
troubling in its weight.
She belonged to no one now, love’s racking
heat
behind her, summer’s drenching brightness
fading from her hair, a sense of poetry,
a fragrance, the flattery of goodbye.
Now she was the rain, water’s braids unbound.
Now she was harvested, now she could answer
as a sustenance,
a being rooted in being
so that, hearing in the God’s voice
pain for something she no longer understood,
with the halting words: He turns to see!—
she only sensed the sorrow, wondering
half-aloud, Who?
In the distance someone stood,
a silhouette against the entrance
to the living world, a man apart,
unrecognised,
who saw the Messenger turn along the path
already fading, following the figure
already turning back,
whose tattered bindings held her
to a measure of uncertainty,
a puzzle of direction her steps resolved.
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