In time, I’ll meet you here again: my ship’s berth

swaddled in birch bark, stuffed with mosses.

Fragment from some mute, irredeemable past:

another mouth sewn closed against a tide of earth.

Telling the Wasps

Telling the Wasps

It wasn’t the bees I thought to tell but wasps

the evening you died. Not things that fly

from Earth to the underworld bearing sweetness

on their wings: grief made me bitter

and so in bitterness I went to seek

what roots among the mud and leaves, hanging

its home in ashes. I wanted to believe

this world would be our only one:

what other streams could run more cold,

what trees bloom with darker fruit?

I was happy here once, as were you.

I wanted to stay and grieve in the failing world

where we were human together.

And so I fell among the wasps, whispering

your name into the hole I scooped

beside the marshy winter creek, where wind

now scours the freezing water. Where reed

on broken reed hums its numb refrain,

and love turns in its mud home, and sleeps.

IV

IV

Marsyas

Marsyas

We think Marsyas is the one

who changed, slipping from the forest

to challenge Apollo, staring at the god

he could never rival as if

into a harshly lit mirror, each recoiling

at what he found there: the jealousy knifed

inside the mortal talent, cold perfection

threaded through eternal rage.

But then the muses stirred behind them.

And Marsyas, out of the painful human wish

to be admired, cannot help but play.

And afterward, the cutting,

the stripped corpuscles, the ruined mouth—

Only after his victory would Apollo reach out

and clip three small muscles from the satyr’s throat

and shoulders, and dry them on a rock, and string them between

the curved horns of his lyre. Then the god

would pull a song

through that tender sinew, telling himself

it was not the crying of one

who has lost everything he loves but the god’s

own singing that he heard, and after which

the muses strained because it was the song

of someone who knew what it was like

to be alive, which the god could not bear

to know, or to stop playing.

And so Apollo, unthinking, binds himself

to Marsyas: the god taking from his rival

fear and desire, the satyr hardened by the god’s

cruel skill, until both songs

writhe inside each other, sung

by one who cannot understand death, and so

never understands what he plays,

knowing only how his hand

trembles over the plucked muscle:

adding, he thinks, something lower to the notes,

something sweeter, and infinitely strange.

Pasiphaë

Pasiphaë

So after M died, she turned

to the dog. His copper eyes, the sinewy

haunch muscles. The way he perched

by the door of M’s study as if

sensing the body he missed

behind it. Something she would not

let herself feel, dry-eyed

at the funeral, refusing to gather