It is like a flower
living in a dead, draining rat,

how faith cannot last
in the body of Orpheus,

a body that has lost
everything twice.

*

Why didn’t God
choose Orpheus, as he had

Israel, once O wouldn’t sing
for any Olympian

but his father, who is the sun?
Though even Apollo

will turn away from that rebel
son eventually.

*

This is how those women
find him, his swagger

first a kind of siren call.
But when he refuses them

they tear him, his head severing,
his head draining down

the river like a baby’s ball.

*

Orpheus in hell is Orpheus alive,
his pride still much wider

than the god’s: the size
of his voice, the strength of it—

or so he thinks. See O
trace the length of the dead,

searching for a wife who was false,
who was bait, for a life

that was never his own. See
Persephone and Narcissus wait

for the next meat of the throne.

–

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