Eurydice

But still after seven years I met you again like a movie

by accident in the street:

a psychologist, a mother

still tall with small feet

still to be called beautiful

dark haired yet with one gray streak

as if the human had marred the human

But still it was hard not to smile

that lovers died or that death went on

like a life or that we

lived again before the blue steel

toy angel of your new daughter

who was yours and no man’s

though I slept like a husband and wore your bone ring

And still the gulls glinted

and we fed the ducks and horse

on Amagansett’s white beach

and still any wind blew the clouds

at the abandoned elevated road in the dusk on the Hudson

where the bulbs were screwed

as to the metal of some war

And still you asked what I thought

whatever I thought I thought

and your daughter played doctor

when nothing seemed wrong but that

you stood at the yellow chrysanthemum

I held on her birthday

like all that you must not take

Or as when a woman takes anyone

to return to men as you said

that I had you to have nothing

whatever you said I withheld

to dream myself barred with the dead

at my barred crib

on Spring Street and on Water Street and on Ocean Avenue

So that the abstract dark grew

particular as of no particulars

like the shadows on the floor

or like that man and that woman

who still woke to the dawn

from whatever had been mammal

to thirst with the first salt of the reptile

Whatever love raged as to cure

love’s second failure from the personal

blasphemy of its metaphors:

like the sun as the great

black arachnid in the tree

to track men by their vibrations

or like the dark on the stone in its blast that had been a man

Though you wrote in my book: for H against despair

and the mystical blue of your eye

like a chip of the air

still sparked in the room

whether of the mind or actual

close, total, yet unfathomable

as the glitter that was the sea

Or as the terror and the awe

of your body as your body

of whatever sent us back to the underworld

whatever hope meant or to yield

that you hung up in the dark when I called

whatever the dark was that blew

up an image to the enormous shining

like some dead actress in some dark theater on the screen