eurydice to orpheus

Edmund Dulac, "Orpheus and Eurydice" (c.1934) [Watercolor & Gouache on Paper]

notes in the margins of a book i am still writing, that is not yet finished, sing to me what i am feeling; aphoristic melodies of thoughts i discover i am having before i can write them down.

and you are the author and instrument, some sort of guide across the styx behind which i have hidden. cerebus is charmed, my mind-ever-vicious, tamed; i am opened and you go into the dark and heavy what i am.

(even as a child all i wanted to do was to paint the page black, complete and entire. so i went here, to a place where finality could be attained, to a place where i would not have to hear any voice (your voice so wonderful), where i could establish the safety of a world, and leave no other space on the page for anything else.)

too light to be restrained by the inscription of laws that forbid the song C leading me outward, page by page, around the margins of the body of the text so that i am no longer trapped where i had fled and set up guards, in myself, in the interminable internality of being me C you chant and enchant me.

proclamation of resurrection

proclamation that there must be a nothingness, an other death, than the one i write: a willingness to die (like you undertook in coming to me). to cross, to step past the end of the line, to look for meaning prior to the first word, after the last period, in the space you have opened around me.

overwhelming space, refusing to let me write a life that goes to the edge of the page, that is all encompassing; leaving me to either founder in my attempts to script out the sound and to assert only eurydice C or, to admit (an olympian admission, to truly hear the song in hades) that the best of me lies with you, in the music that impinges on the margins of the page.

-LoA