Orchid & Eurydice

By Joshua Clover b. 1962 Joshua Clover

In one version you must convince every living thing one by one

to weep until he climbs back into the marriage-house,

that earth about which it is said that bread is the glue of the earth.

Certainly glue is money, the phrase “the tears of things” is money,

the revelation of the Woman Clothed in the Sun is money.

The lake is a disc of bright money buying a few plain birds down,

they climb back nervously as you hurry through, plain birds like a

plain song,

that moment when four or five are around your knees

like Zeno’s arrow, rising by halves, like Eurydice’s bread,

& still the possibility they might intersect,

you would be the one who was struck by a flying bird,

somewhere between a blesséd fool & village idiot,

the only one to persist outside the local economy,

drooling at travelers, holding yourself, slinging incomprehensible

advice,

you would learn the trick with museum wire

where you snap the heads off quiet animals in front of the store,

tempted equally by science & dirty work. . . .

I am trying to invent a way for you to buy me back—

Source: Madonna Anno Domini (Louisiana State University Press, 1997)

Biography

Poet, critic, and journalist Joshua Clover was born in 1962 in Berkeley, Calif. An alumnus of Boston University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Clover has published two volumes of poetry, Madonna anno domini (1997) and The Totality for Kids (2006). His poems have also appeared three times in Best American Poetry, and he has written two books of film and cultural criticism: The Matrix (2005) and 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This . . .

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