Songmaker, or The Orpheus Blues

(I imagine the Bards of antiquity, strumming their lyres, as they would entertain at banquets or in courts extemporaneously or with long odes committed to memory – usually all well-known, and heard and repeated for sheer love of the telling. I'm of the impression they did this with a kind of practiced detachment, so that, just as ballet lets the body emote with disciplined vigor, face impassive – likewise I think rather than getting emotional they let the words themselves carry all the power – the meter, the timing, the turn of phrase... It was standard to begin, not with "once upon a time," but by applying the device of "remembering" a cultural myth or legend familiar to all, whose significance held a measure of symboloically historical value as well as artistic, so that it wasn't merely that you "told" - but how you told. Which may explain why this little number seemed to carry more impact when I've read it aloud than when it's just read – in fact it really should be read aloud, if even to oneself. Composed and illustrated over a coffee break at Ft. Huachuca, summer of 1988, parts reworked early 2004.)

Songmaker (or, The Orpheus Blues)

by S. Inayat-Chisti

And do you remember Orpheus, how he sang to his Eurydice,

how he composed out of her fluid tresses and wove
their fragrance into songs of Eurydice, for Eurydice,
to the edification of all nature, of all natures.

Have you heard of his little lyre-harp, strummed and plucked
with honey'd fingers; this was his own stringed heart –
pouring out odes and sweet melodies for love of her.

No Narcissus he, lost he was not in his own reflection,

                                                           but lost in his reflection upon her.

Yet his greatest distraction was yet to come . . .

While she walked, walked with him o'er Grecian meadows,

his manner young, naive, devoted as it was spoilt in the privilege
of having her near, their flesh mingled its scent with the wild grasses,
their kisses with the rush of swallows' wings, their sweet whisperings
with the reeds, and their laughter with the wind as it carried
the perfume of poppy from field to field.

And their destiny was mingled with the groaning mountain passes

as they watched the Poet and his darling in their sighs.

     When she died,
           when she in the blush of youth fell to the viper's bite

                  and lay there still, the music died in him;

and through the haze of tears he thought he beheld
a pair of winged feet alight, a waved wand bear her away.

For when he drew his face from the dank dirt now drenched
in his grief   she was not there, not in body nor in breath . . .

Into the gaping pass he ran, and catching only the last glimpse

of her garment – now her shroud - as it slipped off
                                                  into the Unseen forever -

he hurled his fists against the rock in poignant, impotent rage,

                                             heedless of his bleeding cuts.

He cast the lyre off into the fields to be trampled by beasts
or played with by gypsies - it no longer mattered.

He would not leave the gate to that Hades, of which the many spoke,
that Underworld of the departed, of faded ghosts and stolen dreams.

How much time passed and fled, how silent were those passes now,

                                         how morose with him the fields.

Food? A poison; the water of gamboling streams?
When he bent to drink

he saw there her face and his throat contracted.

He sat. And he waited without hope, loved without being loved.

And his poetic tradition triumphed
                                       in the very sorrow which would stifle it.

And he opened his mouth, after many days he broke the silence,

for she was – she was alive, there in his heart.

And he sang, without harp and without a hand to hold in his,

he raised his voice to the valley – there on the crevice ledge,

and cast out the last knot in his throat and sang:

"You have left me by the viper's tooth,

taken my soul and abandoned me;

gone to the grayer side of the Styx,

you flit untouched by the knife which cuts my heart,

you are spared the lingering wound."

Each living syllable rang and resounded against the mountain,
and all the woodland creatures knew his voice
and were touched by its harmonious tones.

"Receive, O receive my voice from this impassable distance,

this veil but a hair's breadth and so unyielding!

Know, my love, that your face is not brittle to my heart,

that your fragrance is as native to my senses

as is the Earth to her children.

Would that your image so washed in my tears

could reassemble itself into breathing flesh, that I

might embrace you now,

and draw my ear close to your lips' own words,

to your sigh of answered longing! . . ."

And he stopped and listened, and he trembled a little.

But for the lightest breeze tickling his cheek there was no response.

Sighing there he wept, for O, where was the magic now

even in his golden tongue to bring back that former happiness?

Had he been a god, all the created world would have danced
in his vision, stones and oaks would have swayed!

He had been satisfied to dance for Eurydice
                                          and to cause her to dance.

His uttered inspiration of beauty was not lost on the gods, however.

And fleetfooted Hermes in particular was moved, no less Apollo.

As it was this shepherd-god who drew the curtain shut

between the youth's former bliss and his present living death,

so too did this Hermes grant him one chance to regain

what had been snatched away.

The cave in the pass opened, and the immortal beckoned
with his wand, that same wand which passed, so they say,
over the eyes of the fallen maiden, closing them forever
to this world before she was led away to the depths.

    Orpheus leapt

and with renewed vigor and some trepidation,    

                          leapt after the god-herald

and followed through every dark passage down to the great River.

There did the messenger and guide turn to him and speak for the first time:

"Presently I'll give to thee thine e'er belov'd Eurydice -

but blind and silent must thou go, and no emotion must thou show -

and turn not left nor turn thou right, else remain bereft in darkest night;

for shouldst thou faithfully this do, as I instruct, she'll follow true;

but lose ought patience, turn to see: thou'lt lose her for eternity."

Commissioned thus, he followed trusting, followed step for step.

And at the dismal River's bank he paused and
                                             turned as he was signaled.

Turned to begin the slow excruciating ascent back

into the corporeal light, back into the meadow's splendor,

his heart beating madly. Footsteps!

          he thought – he faintly heard, not two behind him, but four.

                   Two of the god and two of his Eurydice.

He walked obedient, that hopeful happy lad and lover.

The fresh joy of youth hovered o'er his dark locks, pricking his scalp,

waiting to return as rose-blossoms to his cheeks and to set

the sun's glow back on his brow.

The world was waiting for renewed song as he walked

in baited anticipation for his lady-love.

What is that mood, which slays the virtue of patience
before its matured fruition, this hubris of kings? Poor Orpheus!

      poor hungry, impetuous Orpheus. The visionary who may not look.

The singer who may not speak. The anguished lover

who may display no mood or feeling, no ardor, else lose all . . .

    . . . He turned, . . . only to see

for a second – yet a thousand times worse – time, his only joy

led by her hand, back to the joyless beyond – beyond e'er his grasp.

Horror-struck, his heart came to ice and from the dying embers

of his belly there shot a single flame through his throat,
                                                              enraged and wounded:

"Eurydice!" echoed over the passages to Hades' throne unmoving,

                     pounding against rock walls as his fists once had,

                        and returning to him as empty.

Empty he had come and empty he left, now the moreso for his folly.

He stumbled into the fields, stumbled over his harp, picked it up,
strummed it, hugged it tightly, tight as his raspy breath.

Through hot tears he composed new odes,
                                  for these were all he had left -

or did you think a Poet can be less a Poet even had he wished it so?

A Poet may not even end his life before his last word has been said,

the last note uttered; he breathes for his Muse, wittingly or not -

     Orpheus wandered alone, wishing to be alone in his aloneness,

        taking to caves, sharing his lot with the beasts of the fields.

Had he thought he had aged before?
Now he truly aged but took no notice.  Only weeks had passed.

And his sorrow touched the depths of his agony and found there:
                                                                                 his ecstasy.

As he could find no existence within himself
he divested himself of himself and found existence only
                                                          in her who once walked with him.

Everywhere he looked was her face,

the eye and ear of the beholder were entranced in her vision,

as he alone knew her, as his heart had created of her . . .

In his wandering old haunts, wild creatures and passersby gave way,

knowing him to be mad, and respectfully listened from afar,

enraptured by the rhapsodies now spun from his sacred aloneness.

They say that Pan wept and Apollo recorded them
                                                                        for Olympian pasttime.

When an unruly band of prankish partying hooligans came upon him

he silently rejected thier crude overtures to join them in their wild,

                                                     cacophonous revelry.

Nor had they taste for his condition,

mercifully ending his earthly deprivation by tearing him limb from limb

               and playfully tossing him in a river

                 where he with a sigh submitted, and there drowned.

Perhaps, we ponder, sober and retrospective,
perhaps now to be joined with his Eurydice after all,
in that vague place, colorless; or in, perhaps! in some new pasture
entirely beyond the contemplation of pleasure or pain;
let us open our minds and our hearts,

for the Bard never says.

                                          Perhaps . . .Songmaker.