Here's the poem called "Head of Orpheus."
I guess that's enough.
I wrote this poem after a painting-- one
of many paintings by the French symbolist painter Odilon Redon.
And he is someone whose work I have admired for a long time.
The beautiful work that he did in color later in his life
especially, and I wrote this poem a bit
in homage to his work.
Other poems in the book nod to it as well.
"Head of Orpheus."
When it was time for the suffering to end,
we powered down and sat on the steps
as if waiting for a chariot drawn by a loss for words.
If only the mind were made to reflect the world more
completely as if we agreed to it,
we would be free of so many difficulties.
The path ahead of us miraculously wrinkleless,
cleared of fallen things.
What I saw or heard or felt would be an echo of what was,
a duplicate of the present willow traced by the sun
on the fishpond of our wakefulness.
Easier said than done!
Turns out the friction between what's real and my take
on it might be the battery that keeps me awake, to begin with,
and I hadn't stopped to consider what happens when we sleep,
all those fudgy distortions and embellishments tricked in gold.
This only goes to show how scatterbrained hope makes me,
how poorly we navigate when we don't look back
to balance what's ahead of us against what's behind--
fair analogue to what's outside us versus in.
You have less to say at this pivot point than I imagined,
or maybe you're just keeping it all to yourself for now,
but know as I go on detangling these lines from the invisible,
it's always you I'm reaching out for, even more
so now I can't see where you've gone.