Fata Morgana: Poems

Five Feelings for Orpheus

Five Feelings for Orpheus 1 Orpheus sits on the strumming esplanade losing his head for water. Florid light sounds noon, currents green with overflowing sun and dumped industrial wastes: the Chicago River turning mineral, all emerald, tourmaline. 2 The song: I don’t remember the park, how you rose, moon, held it in your thin white fingers and let it fall, with only your pinprick eyes to mark the spot. The song he can’t remember uses up the light, the night delivers him unmothered, otherless. 3 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 3 3 There is a hell for every color he can find, all knowledge rain (pane of wet glass, one death leads to another): grass body drenched in waywardness, wind turning too quickly back. The representation exceeds the man in whatever night he imagines, his bewilderness eaten by greedy birds. He hears and errs. I think it will rain, therefore I am: married to a map of world, and he is not song. 4 Music has hollowed out a heart in him, singing lack. A white rage discards spent skin, leaves only the left hand of the illegible: a notch in cold escorts him into disbelief. He opens the door to the poem and steps inside. 4 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 4 5 Orpheus falls apart in hell, finds himself adrift down the river of person reversed: wakes up and goes to pieces of the amniotic sea. (Eurydice’s secreted under waves: she stepped off a scarp of loss, her hoarded voice drowned out.) And the laughing rain asks Who have you ever loved? as if to use up the distance between them. 5 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 5 ...