Eurydice or is she
Her underworld simulation?
Here I stand to lead her from the dead
Myth burdens me its grandiosity
The underworld’s ambivalence
Drifts between the real and apparitional
Mountains then ravines of memory
Inland lakes of slant distorted mirror –
She is not as I remember
Nor might she remember me now
But follow on slipper-slurred footsteps
Another ploy of haunted evasion
I look back – to remember memory –
I turn a page of photographs which merit
Few assents amid the negatives
Her bedside lamp illumines
One pale star the dusk allows
So the entangled past entices
With skills too late acquired
To set the links in line and re-arrange them –
The unoriginal conjugal puzzle-ring
While some insist to solve it
You first must let it fall
.
Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer
.