WEBVTT

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Here's the poem called
"Head of Orpheus."

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I guess that's enough.

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I wrote this poem
after a painting-- one

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of many paintings by the French
symbolist painter Odilon Redon.

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And he is someone whose work I
have admired for a long time.

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The beautiful work that he
did in color later in his life

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especially, and I
wrote this poem a bit

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in homage to his work.

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Other poems in the
book nod to it as well.

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"Head of Orpheus."

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When it was time for
the suffering to end,

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we powered down and
sat on the steps

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as if waiting for a chariot
drawn by a loss for words.

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If only the mind were made
to reflect the world more

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completely as if
we agreed to it,

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we would be free of
so many difficulties.

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The path ahead of us
miraculously wrinkleless,

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cleared of fallen things.

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What I saw or heard or felt
would be an echo of what was,

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a duplicate of the present
willow traced by the sun

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on the fishpond of
our wakefulness.

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Easier said than done!

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Turns out the friction between
what's real and my take

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on it might be the battery that
keeps me awake, to begin with,

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and I hadn't stopped to consider
what happens when we sleep,

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all those fudgy distortions and
embellishments tricked in gold.

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This only goes to show how
scatterbrained hope makes me,

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how poorly we navigate
when we don't look back

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to balance what's ahead of
us against what's behind--

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fair analogue to what's
outside us versus in.

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You have less to say at this
pivot point than I imagined,

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or maybe you're just keeping
it all to yourself for now,

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but know as I go on detangling
these lines from the invisible,

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it's always you I'm
reaching out for, even more

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so now I can't see
where you've gone.

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