After The Ball
The dancing over,
masks long since discarded,
woman curved in sleeping
disarray upon the bed,
he shrugs into a dressing gown
and walks out on the balcony.
The city, in its own disarray,
is also sleeping. He hears
a single car around the corner
and then, surprisingly, the clip-
clop of a ridden horse.
It should be dawn, he thinks,
by now it should be dawn.
The sky, however, shows
no sign of lightening.
The stars still shine.
He smiles, amused:
it should be dawn
but equally, he thinks,
he should know the name
of the woman in his bed
and he does not.
A light breeze lifts the leaves
of the oaks below. He gathers
the robe more closely about himself,
enjoying the feel of it
against his skin. The robe
is navy blue with silver trim.
Nicolette. Her name is Nicolette.
The horse comes back
along the boulevard:
a chestnut ridden by a man in grey.
He hears from below the voices
of two young girls walking past.
His head turns reflexively
to follow them up the hill:
a meaningless motion of desire
like a roulette wheel
after the ball has dropped.
PART
THREE
Guinevere at Almesbury
The hooded ladies here are wonderfully kind.
They have been gentle since the day
I first arrived, and even more so since the night
a messenger came riding through the rain
to say the king was dead.
They brought me shears and watched
in silence as I destroyed my hair.
A circling hawk cried once and flew away
into the trees. Will anyone believe
in days to come how much I loved my husband?
I sat awake that night beneath
the dripping leaves, then under the quiet stars
that came out after the rain moved on.
The garden here has mild-hued flowers
and large-leafed trees for shade.
In the morning and at dusk songbirds
send sweet music through the air.
I am learning how to live without desire.
When Lancelot came here from France
to be the hunting hawk to Arthur’s hand
I watched myself falling into love
and lay down at night hiding it.
I learned. I laid a naked sword
along my mind to bar him from my centre,
smiling with all proper courtesy
upon him, as on every man at court
until we were caused to be once
alone. I was made to see his own mask
crumble, baring the brilliant pain behind.
I could not hide from that.
There was no place to hide.
I was brought into another life
and began to live with grief,
for Arthur knew. He knew me as he knew
each single star that swung about like
pointers to his north. I heard the silence
of his soul beside me in the dark
and his forbearance broke
my heart, for I loved him.
Will anyone believe, in days to come,
how much? I loved them both.
For my hair, now cropped and ragged,
all that bright aspiring
was sundered and sent to war.
I am learning how to live with this.
I thought of dying more than once.
The last time, the night that Arthur died.
Not since. We cannot be other than
we are. I loved two men. A kingdom
broke for it. Something fell that was a star.
We cannot be other than we are.
I never dream of one of them alone.
I see them on a forest path,
riding together. Dappled, autumn
leaves, a slanting sun just risen.
Or in battle side by side
with bloodied swords,
in the hard north. Or talking
a winter night away beside a fire
in a kingdom that has not fallen.
In those dreams I was never in Camelot.
That pain is worst of all.
Those images wake me, shivering,
needing comfort, knowing there is none,
except for this: they are not true.
Dreams are not always true.
It was for me, it was for me,
it was for love of me that Camelot
became what once it was.
Lacking Guinevere, there is nothing there.
And what I let make, I let destroy.
I will die someday. I loved them both.
At The Root of Her Tree
The people of my village
await your next coming.
They perform songs
and complex dances
to commemorate visitations
and implore a swift return.
The last time, you appeared to us
in the shape of a soft-winged bird
that sang a summer
in the wood beyond our houses.
The time before that
you came as a woman.
You gave yourself in love
to my father and bore him
a child in midwinter.
You named your son
and were gone
in the morning.
So I have been told.
I grew up without you.
Changeling, talisman:
guarded with care,
loved and feared.
I was never allowed
to fight in our wars.
Women, ever since I can remember,
would bring their warriors’ weapons
and their newborn children
for me to touch. Later, they began
to come for themselves.
One night in that summer
when my mother
came to us as a bird,
I went into the forest.
The night was mild.
A sky spilled with stars
hung above me. One fell
to the world, somewhere.
Moving under grey-green leaves
I came to where my mother
was still singing. I saw her
on the branch of a moonlit tree.
Her wings were silver in the light.
Her head was tilted back. Her voice
soared above the forest,
the tilled and fallow fields,
all the curvature of earth.
In that creature
of uncompromising joy
what thought could there be
for a human child
begotten one green year
for who knows why?
I listened for a woven time,
and then lay down
at the root of her tree to sleep.
In the morning I went
back into the village
and learned that a woman
had borne my child in the night.
I came to the place where she was
and took the infant in my arms,
carefully. I held it close
to my beating heart and,
bending my stiff head down slowly,
let its triumphant crying
drown the singing of my mother
in the deep, surrounding woods.
Goddess
You, love, are of the sea.
Your unfathomed tides coil
&nbs
p; through circled mysteries to hold
those who always were to come.
To you, love, we carry the sun.
Suspensions of laughter we give you,
moons over summer-still waters,
and the whispers that consecrate shadow,
turning away from the living
with inadequate words
as offerings in our arms.
Will you not show yourself?
Over the blurred edges of dreams
cried by carried need you,
ravagingly distant, shimmer,
re-opening the unhealed wound.
Words unspoken linger
longer than the spoken
in the unwhole heart.
You, love, are ocean cruel
knowing (you knowing) that once
having almost seen your face
or half-heard a half-promising voice
in what is unlocked between seconds,
we are star lost and sun lost,
consumed by a wanting
of more than chimeras,
helplessly sculpted by you.
Being Orpheus
What else could he have done?
Her steps were silent on the stone.
He could not speak or turn, he could not
Turn. Could not see if silence
Wrapped her rising with him.
The road shrank upwards; light was far away.
Somewhere below, two figures watched in shadow.
But were they watching two ascend, or one?
Were those her footsteps that he could not hear?
Behind him was a god who never stained himself
With mercy. Light was a long way off.
What would he do if in the end
He turned under the sun and was alone?
And somewhere then, behind all mysteries,
Where magic had its source, where
Sorcery was woven and the gods were born,
A song began. A song of mourning and lament,
Of sorrow not assuaged in all the years
That, following, towered into time.
Being Orpheus. A song of loss to break
The hearts of beasts, to break the grip
Of earth on stone, to bend the starlight
Streaming to the world.
Light was so far ahead it was a prayer,
And the only god who mattered was behind.
He could not speak. Silence was the law
Through his contracting universe.
But still there grew a music,
Spinning itself down within his making,
In places where he did not know he was.
A lament that was crying for a sorrow yet unborn,
Sorrow that might not be unless he turned.
And yet the rocks would break, the trees.
The silence was a weight upon his life.
He could not speak to curse but
Knew he had no curse to speak
For he had won. Had turned his eyes
Without and walked a world to ending
To stand before a god and sing her back
To life. Being Orpheus. He could not
Love her more. Had followed, living,
Into ways where life was not.
He could not love her more.
The silence was a weight upon all life.
If he could reach back for her hand,
Back to touch her robe, a strand of hair,
If he could know.
And somewhere now there was a song.
With words of loss to gather even Sirens
Into stillness and the harrowing of grief,
And a music that had never been before.
A music that had never been before.
Somewhere, twice, the phoenix tried to scream.
There was an agony of silence, a plague.
We turned. There was light. I saw her eyes.
And what choice had been his?
Or ours, who followed after?
None of us could reach behind ourselves,
And when the breaking light came blindingly
How could we not turn, for whom
The sacrifice had long ago been made?
Sacrificed and having sacrificed,
we came into what appeared to be sunshine.
There seemed to be a clearing, trees and rocks.
There was a lyre. And somehow our hands moved,
or seemed to move, and then we sang.
Because there once had been
a song of grief, of mourning and lament,
of sorrow not assuaged in all the years
that, following, towered into time.
Because there once had been
a music that had never been before.
What else could we have done? Once being Orpheus.
This Falling Tower
‘To see things clear, if even through your tears, to
recognize, notice, observe—and have to put it all
down with a smile at the very moment when hands are
clinging and lips meeting, and the human gaze is
blinded with feeling . . .’
—Thomas Mann
Your love goes in silver under the moon.
She robes herself in gold beneath the sun.
When she moves through darkness, she gathers
about herself a blackness of the first night.
She whirls within the room, turning about the floor,
her hair spinning into circles. You know this music.
But watching from the balcony
you are frozen into stillness,
while images shiver through you into life.
Chandeliers are dancing on the glass,
your love is wrapped in scintillating hues,
the room is turning, she is turning, you
are motionless and cold, and line
by line you draw them to a stop.
In that porcelain tableau the whiteness of her
skin springs outward like starlight. They stand.
Details record themselves. Time passes,
does not seem to pass. You feel your pulse return
to seek the music in the room. Light moves,
as you step inside and take her hand.
And take her hand and think, and always think,
of porcelain and chandeliers, of stars
and wind and the night before the sun.
You dance. The obligatory distance
breaks your heart. You love this woman,
dance with her across a ballroom floor,
she whispers in your ear, glittering.
But even now you can turn to the window
and watch yourself watching both of you.
On that balcony, outside the splendour
of the spinning room, someone
with your name can almost smile,
and someday in a room that is waiting now
you will work with words to build a falling tower.
Your love has eyes in which a soul can drown,
or be revived. Write it down.
This Truth
Nothing compares.
Though we be
bound backwards
across the spinning
wheel, though our
stone words
never ascend
the slope to you,
and though
your face
is never shown
clearly to us,
dreaming or awake—
though this truth
be bitter truth,
nothing compares
to almost you.
Medea
I wanted the man who came on the blood ship.
They came for the treasure of my father.
(Not I.) I stole it for them
and sailed away on that ship.
At sea, with the black wine unstopped,
I unbound my hair and wrapped
; my legs about him as he drove,
breaking what I was. My blood was on
his cloak. Triumph sang, sang.
After that we were every night together,
sliding past lands familiar as stars
to them, but strange as love to me.
He taught me to do the things
he needed to have done.
When my father’s fleet in swift pursuit
appeared behind us like a stain at sea,
racing to regain his golden treasure
(Not I. My hair is dark, dark.),
it was easy to think of the death of
my brother, Apsyrtos, whom we had
carried off with us, and certain things
followed upon that. The pieces
of his body flecked the choppy sea
until my father stopped to harvest them.
And so he let us go: the fleece on the mast, and I.
I watched their drooping sails shrink behind.
Jason watched the birds feed on the waves,
standing straight as a man, stiffly apart from me.
He slept alone that night and so I slept alone.
Later we were wed, blessed with children.
But I should not have been left by myself
that night to learn the things I learned.
Various Things
I am the child of a full eclipse.
When I was born the sun
was blocked by the moon.
I have a propensity for alleyways.
The women I have allowed myself
to love have been uniformly dark.
One night a girl asked me to hurt her.
Later, I went down into the street.
Long before dawn. The city very cold.
No moon. Stars hard and far. A solitary
drunk approached me, singing
to himself. I let him pass.
I have never kept a job
for more than half a year.
Various things. I am not
particularly responsible.
Now that winter is coming
I am more content than at other times.
In summer I would not have let him go.
Hades and Kore
I have stolen maidens from their mothers’ sides.
The brutal rose I wear in my lapel
has petals that do not fade. Young girls
have seen my walk and followed me away
from their annihilating lives,
the rag dolls they have scarcely left behind
slumped forebodingly in brightly empty rooms,
as bodies that once cradled them were opened.
I have lingered over cigarettes,
taken girls telling me their fantasies
in twilit motel rooms creased by neon
urgencies, on the ragged edges
of whatever grainbelt town or city