To Orpheus

By Blas Falconer Blas Falconer

It isn’t madness but shame for wanting

and shame for not having what I want,

which is a kind of madness—drunk,

3 a.m., the stairwell too steep to climb.

The bed can wait. I go to the pool instead,

strip and step in, the smell of smoke and sweat

washing from hair and skin. The wet kiss:

his mouth pressed here, my neck, and there,

my chest—in the end—went nowhere.

Cars pass with coupled strangers. I wade.

The brick wall stretches into the sky,

the sky empty, save the constellations,

whose lives I love—yours most of all,

father of poets, whose lyre filled trees

and stones with awe, the lover torn to shreds

and thrown in to the river. Tonight,

you’re the swan, lost among pinholes of light,

your throat bitten by a black hole

that takes and takes and never fills. I kick,

stroke my tired arms to buoy this body.

It makes ring after perfect ring, but each one

breaks along the edge. You who never were,

did you look down on the world at last

and see that more won’t be enough? Not now.

Not ever. Want picks the human heart.

You’re the lie I won’t believe forever.

Blas Falconer, “To Orpheus” from A Question of Gravity and Light. Copyright © 2007 by Blas Falconer. Reprinted by permission of University of Arizona Press.

Source: A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press, 2007)

Biography

Poet and editor Blas Falconer earned an MFA from the University of Maryland and a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston.

The poems in his debut collection, A Question of Gravity and Light (2007), utilize both free verse and received forms to explore themes of sexuality, otherness, and loss. In a voice “at once detached and enlivened,” critic Yasmin Nair observes in a 2008 review of A Question of . . .

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