Orpheus

By A. F. Moritz b. 1947

He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods

had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song

and there she was, Eurydice restored, perfectly naked and fleshed

in her rhyming body again, the upper and lower smiles and eyes,

the line of mouth-sternum-navel-cleft, the chime of breasts and hips

and of the two knees, the feet, the toes, and that expression

of an unimaginable intelligence that yoked all these with a skill

she herself had forgotten the learning of: there she was, with him

once more

just for an instant as she vanished. And then he heard her from

behind

the invisible veil, absence: a shrill and batlike but lexical indictment.

Why had he violated the divine command, why, when he had seized

all song to himself and robbed her of power to open her own

oblivion?

It grew in volume and now seemed to spew from an insane old

mother with one breast

hanging like a huge withered testicle from a rent in her weathered

gown,

who was being watched by a tall woman, copper-helmet-coiffed,

richly suited in salmon colour,

a mythical allusion, since salmon were long extinct in the bays and

rivers here:

songs never brought them anymore. The young restrained breasts

and the old free one

oppressed him equally and he went to live among men, waiting for

the crazy

and the competent to join forces and come for him with their

scissors.

Orpheus listened patiently to my poem and when it quieted he said

to me:

That wasn't it at all. I sang outward from my face to blue spaces

between clouds,

to fern fronds, and men and women sipped my song as you drink

from a stream going by.

What I sang is lost in time, you don't kmow what it was, all you have

is your own

old stories about me. And if women tore me into pieces, maybe that

only signifies

each one keeps part of my body, which is melody among visible

things.

Albert Frank Moritz, "Orpheus" from Conflicting Desire. Copyright © 2000 by Albert Frank Moritz. Reprinted by permission of Ekstasis Editions.

Source: Conflicting Desire (Ekstasis Editions, 2000)

Biography

A.F. Moritz (Albert F. Moritz) is the author of more than 15 books of poetry; he has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Relit Award (for Night Street Repairs, named the best book of poetry published in Canada in 2005), an Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. A Canadian citizen, Moritz was born in Ohio and moved to Canada in . . .

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