ORPHEUS, FINALLY

No music. Or, music sans audience, sans swoon. Once
he’s played for the blue-veined gods and they’ve given in, what else 

remains? No notes. The maenads hurl rocks against his chest. 
Can Orpheus act as clown now? A tragic one?  

What to write post-resurrection song? The maenads sense 
the mourner’s singular despair. They circle, demand a show. 

The maenads are dirty, bare trees, hair smelling 
of too much musk. Longing fits in a refrain, but now, 

like being blasted on a screen, a player gone—something 
must happen to the body of the hero failed. 

Half-victory, strange, yes, 
a signature floating on the water,

Orpheus now: a medicine chest full of scripts—one for sleep 
and one to stay awake, one to cloud and one to clear. Healers 

trace meridians, portals, offer poultices of herb and vine. Orpheus 
reads the book of answers, makes offerings to the gods. The maenads’ 

taunts become the teeth of a sea creature that embed under the flesh 
then grow a second creature. The limbs of Orpheus begin to sing 

for the rocks, for the Aegean blue that he should have sought with 
his almost-alive-again wife. His shoulders sing for all tunneling 

creatures, all who lack eyes. His knees begin to masquerade 
as stones covered with moss. His heels imagine the view 

from the crook of a tree. The maenads want a song but there is 
no song, only the body that cannot remain. Now it’s not 

enough to be gouged. Now, the body must be ripped, scattered 
and flung. The bones begin their own, independent song. 

Muscles reveal themselves to the sun, to the sky. Grass 
meets lungs. Now the notes spill out. When a man 

can no longer make song, the body finds its final music; 
the new form joins the songs that have always been, those that started 

long before Orpheus, those that began, 
and live, even now, in the water. 


SUSPENDED LYRIC
 
On short winter afternoons 
when school kids and shift workers spill out 
to sidewalks just broad enough for one, 
among terraced houses packed like rows 
of yellow teeth, the bud remains 
unfurled. Here, the rose 
is born sick, the sky a letter 
you don’t want to open, still 
in its perfect white envelope 
on the table. Somewhere not so far off 
there is a bird with fiery wings who will rise,
turn to ash and then rise again. 

I am not this bird. 

Behind so many closed eyelids of the gods 
thick gray mist obscures another realm.
At the center, a blue world 
that might have been beautiful. 
In the middle do we still descend, 
as the stories go, or surrounded 
by insufficient language
must we now learn another route,
our map filled with clues like calibrated, 
legislature, and brachial, privilege, 
labor, and score. 

Must we now find another way to translate, 
fishing in ice holes for remnants of words, 
wayward pilgrims inventing some creature
immune to the cold 
who might bring back answers 
to our endless queries? 
                                    
Which way was up again? 

And if fire, if what’s to be retrieved 
lies in a burning realm, we try 
to decipher the bright bird’s wings, 
distant stretch and churn. We might register
language, moving language, might find crest, 
scarlet, feather; a specific rhythm 
and glide, we might try to follow 
such suspended lyric, and when 
it disappears from view, we tell ourselves
we will surely find it again.

 
SMALL CHILD STANDING AT THE HEAD OF THE TABLE, AUVILLAR

At the restaurant in the French village, the father,
on watching the adoration 
                 of his child from the large table
of women, hoists her up 
                                    and plants her, like a doll, 
on the empty chair at the head of the table. 
                                                                He stands
back in the dark as all ten ladies croon, look at her jacket,
 look at her shoes, her eyes, her hair. 
                  She is learning
what happens with beauty. 
                            The girl stands still enough 
to be sculpted, head slightly cocked, does not even appear
to be breathing. 
                   What is to be gained 
in the refusal of faith? A fat dove, 
     round as a pebble, balances on the tip 
of a willow tree at dusk, the layers 
                                    of green turning into themselves
through the valleys. The dove coos. 
                                                      The child fails to tire
of such worship, 
       her Grecian 
             curls, Grecian toes. 
                                                                  A point 
in Pax Romana;
                                    some peasant 
throwing open shutters in the Renaissance; 
      today. 
          While the sun is still high, yet not brutal, men 
sit on stools in their yards among the pink hydrangea, 
playing guitar, accordion, singing. 
                                                  Why wouldn’t it
be good here? 
                     
           In refusing faith,
one stays unbroken, varnished, immune. 
                      I would never wish to be adored, 
one says, and isn’t. 
                            But in all such refusals, 
            there is one bright cell of the heart
                                                               that goes on 
longing to be noticed. That someone will come along 
and break it, will turn so many avenues of stone 
                                  into breathing.


About the author:

Tara Moyle is a therapist and educator. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and has published poems in publications such as Birmingham Arts Journal, Armchair Shotgun, Confluence, Diode, and AGNI. She lives in North Jersey and is working on an autobiographical novel, The Effects of Icelandic Volcanoes on American Spinsters. 

Feature image by Nick van den Berg on Unsplash