Well, I turn to a more serious poem.
No, not really.
Even more-- you know, they're all serious.
But this is even more serious.
It's a poem from my third book, The Color of Blood.
And it's called, "To Eurydice in Hell."
It's a poem that tries to use the Orpheus and Eurydice
legend to relate to the experience of a poet who meets
a girl in a bookshop very shortly after she's come out
of a mental hospital.
And he hopes that, by the power of his poetry,
he can keep her sane.
But he can't.
Then Orpheus walked in a dark forest of books and people,
thinking of nothing.
But when Eurydice came, the leaves paused on the trees
to listen.
The wet snail cocked its horn.
It was morning everywhere in the pulsing wood
he called pleasure.
And the sun shone.
To be stones rolling in dark brooks was a new beginning,
and dead things broke into flower.
So Orpheus sang.
But Eurydice walked in a close alliance
with nothing that watched her.
Only the song of Orpheus could make her well,
and that not for long.
For nine days, the bad core of Eurydice rotted.
But on the 10th, Eurydice died and the whole inside of her
moved into hell, where she lay as naked as nothing.
Only the flesh of Eurydice has stayed alive.
And the nothing within her came out
and gashed its name in her belly that bled for Orpheus.
Take away the bones, there was nothing to hold Eurydice.
Take away the skin, she has no passport for the lonely wood
where Orpheus sings.
Praise her in razor blades.
It is only through pain that brings pleasure,
that sad Eurydice lives now.
So Orpheus sang.
Then Orpheus came into hell, who had no love for the mad,
and hated the blind silence there.
And the darkness reached out its arms
and wrapped Orpheus, too, in its chloroform.
And he spoke with dread mud and water
to let her go, prayed to the hot bands and the wall
that they might leave her.
Hands are a spoiled nuisance.
They pull the soul out.
Stay away, Orpheus.
Here there was only the rule of nothing.
Eurydice has gone into skin.
She is no one here.
Look, there is no one here.
So Orpheus sang.
Alas, there is only, tomorrow, the black nowhere to go in now.
Is that it?
Walk, Orpheus, by the sounding Thames.
Your head, the black nurse struck from your future,
sticks like a heart in the hospital.
You have no brain now for the world you live in.
It bleeds in the cold river Eurydice has dissolved into,
you call hell.
But look, Orpheus.
Eurydice is a star whose face kisses your bloody lips
in the water.
You two are at one now in the sky.
So Orpheus sang, believing nothing, to Eurydice and hell.