Continuing the Story

You are not here, Beloved, but I know

you remember how mist

rises off a river, and the story

continues, as it must,

Eurydice just past the threshold

but not yet embraced

by the darker recesses of the cave.

If there is light, it is dusk light.

She is still apparent,

watching as the lifeline in her hand

turns to dry streambed,

her breath to a light wind in the reeds.

And Orpheus? He’s a confluence

of birdcall in the meadow.

Bless loss, Eurydice whispers. She can

still form words, although soon

they will lift in a cloud of clatter, like birds

in the pine grove. And her mind?

Her mind is an empty mirror

in which the world now recedes,

as once it had advanced, confirming her—

broken cloud, empty gate,

the throat of a flower, the thick

bright beak of a thrush; olive trees

on the sloping hill, each callus

of lichen on stone, the shiver of a leaf.

Heartbeat, yes. Footfall, yes.

And then his face . . . She can still

see the face of her lost beloved.

After love she used to hold his head

against her breasts as he slept, and once,

their bodies slippery as fish,

they made love in the river.

River is lure and longing; river is

the deepest bow one can make

to the fact of being wed to a cosmos

light-years deep. Bless loss,

she says to the fern by her foot.

And while I do not understand, not really,

the story ravels into actual rain,

and the grass, the stones, the cedars,

the pond—everything I daily conjure,

blurs. What was I thinking of, all those years

trying to be good, trying to be known,

trying not to falter into loneliness?

Nearer death, I bow. Here I am.

Once, I don’t know why, water formed

in the hollows of the planet’s surface,

primeval pools so still they held

the farthest furnace flares of the stars.

And in those pools the cosmos

turned toward itself, aware of itself

for the first time. As deep as all space

and light, as deep as the visible,

I am even now a ripple in that pool, Beloved—

and this, it occurs to me now, is freedom.