Poetry
Eurydice
I was born small and dark as the cypress-shaded river.
My blood leaked from my skin to the reeds and
tangles of the shore and I knew
my flesh was woven into the earth.
At night, my mother stuffed me full of figs
and pomegranates. But still I would not grow.
I watched the black-tail deer and dahlia gallop
upwards over the hillside. Fiery and distant,
they celebrated the chastity of the oleander-hued mist
obscuring the mountain peaks.
In the razed fields, my sister haggled with
the local boys, figuring out the worth of her pale
thigh against the raw bloom of crepuscular flowers.
How was I not to marvel as the bloated light of morning
thickened to birth lambs and harbors,
saffron and skinned canopy flowers?
My memory holds the shadowed plum trees hostage.
Orpheus Arrives
I saw you first in the place
where the river bursts into a riot of
shadowed foliage. I was puny and had
no father. I wore lark feathers in my hair and
my fingers were stained with the tangles of blackberries.
Men took no interest in me.
So, what do I first remember?
You were a raw wind that lifted everything.
The branches trembled and bowed beneath
your feet. And, in my hands, the clay pot in
which I carried my mother’s milk
expanded into a round curve of forest.
Eurydice in Love
After we first lay together,
the malachite armor of the cypress grove
melted away to reveal my body grown somehow larger
and quivering in the jaws of baptism.
Now, I sleep like a drunk in the trampled grass,
surrounded by acorn shells and beer bottles.
At night,
the sensuous temptation of raven wings
unfolds its petals and crushes me. You kiss my elbow.
Your ankles clash like cymbals for the glee of
deer and sparrow.
As for me, the very hillside begins to flee my footfalls.
My sprouting breast and womb, brimming with salt,
dusts the soil and makes it still-your touch
truncating me from the earth.
Men know nothing of the old body’s silent death;
bougainvillea strangling a tree trunk.
Thus, when the serpent strikes it is not in fear
but in the bitter recognition of something in itself
that has been lost.
My mouth stuffed with mud and violets,
I forget your name as I fall.
The sound your chest makes delights the bullfrogs.