A couple of weeks ago I published Role Model, a poem where the speaker adopts the persona of Orpheus, from the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, to help put words to a relationship delineated by the poem.
Shortly after Role Model was published, a regular reader reached out to me and asked me a series of questions about the poem. Who was the titular role model? What did the mirror image, at the start of the poem, mean? Why would the speaker of the poem
pray to the god we’d built with our hands
— and so on? I became concerned that I hadn’t communicated my intent clearly enough with the poem I’d published, and started to examine the poem with a more critical eye. I decided to see if I could rewrite it in more of a narrative style, which I believed would help readers make more sense of what I was trying to say. Today’s post, The Tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, is the result of those efforts. It’s a series of seven short poems that recount the imagined story of a romance. Some parts are lifted quite clearly from Role Model; many parts are new here.
I’m very keen to hear what people make of this — so, please do leave comments below, if you have any thoughts you’d like to share!
THE TALE OF ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE I. He knew that if he looked back she’d no longer be there and yet he could not help himself: there she was, as beautiful and as open as an eyeball with no lid. She always knew how to let the whole world flood right through. II. Holidaying together in Japan they saw Mt. Fuji from a cable-car and there was a sensation of floating (not falling). It was, quite literally, a suspension of disbelief. “Does the cable-car go down to the lake?” she’d asked, turning to face him and silhouetted against the sky. She wanted, she’d said, to visit the temple by the water which contained the tombs of her ancestors, the lacquered gateway that led from this world and to the diaphanous next. He’d stared at the map for a long time but for the life of him he could not figure it out. III. In those days he often found himself unable to sleep. Instead he’d stay up and pray to the gods they’d built with their bare hands. He remembered too his first day at secondary school. His mother had shown him how to tie and loosen his uniform necktie. How he had been unable to do it at first. His two palms held together in prayer were like two lovers’ faces touching, he decided. IV. The first time they’d slept together she’d begged him not to take her virginity all over again only to laugh harder when the time eventually came. The next morning he’d cooked a perfect omelette. V. As time went on she seemed to survive on the smallest of things he left behind. Each time after they made love (increasingly less) he’d watch her run her hands through her glossy black hair as if shaking loose a box of words. VI. They’d argued because originally he’d wanted to go to Egypt to see the pyramids but she’d complained none of her ancestors were buried there. “And there are too many tourists,” she said. She informed him that Egypt was for the uncultured. The gods no longer resided there. VII. And yet when she left him as the Oracle had always promised she would he’d remembered something he’d kept buried for years, as if a shipwreck had been cut loose from a reef: it was his mother standing at the kitchen sink wearing marigolds and crying pink tears, her face distended with grief. The sink had been filled with water, he’d recalled, and in amongst the water floated pieces of rhubarb.