ORPHEUS AFTER EURYDICE

O'KEEFE: THE BLACK IRIS

Don’t tell me that Orpheus failed.

An artist understands about faith –

the hours, the years, the life,

watching a blossom disclose

its throat, the secret

fur on the narrow tongue –

a blood-tinged light

crossing the perilous curve

of the corolla’s horizon,

nun-like petals that hide

the passion of patience inside,
a burgundy cleft in the heart

cowled with a hood of blue –

Look long enough at anything,

and it will grow in you –

One breath from embracing

black, in the center

of the blossom of your life,

he won’t turn:

not the Orpheus who sang

so much better after love, after death.

~ Oriana

**

Too many poems about Orpheus. Too many poems about O’Keefe. But let’s face it: these figures, one mythical, one historical, have turned into archetypes that shape our personal and collective psyche. The interpretations can be endless, and they keep on coming.

Why? Why do these stories have such great staying power over the millennia? Why, just in the last decade, hundreds of new poems about Orpheus? Is it that we too have tried to save someone we loved, gone through hell and back to rescue our beloved – and failed? Is it that we are all betrayers? Or is it that we all wait for the magical person to be save us and lead us to the world of light, and the savior is bound to betray us?

Or is it more simple: we try and try to find the answer as to why Orpheus turned around. Would we have been capable of absolute faith?

These are huge questions. My poem takes a more “narrow slice,” and looks at Orpheus as artist. An artist has to have infinite faith and patience. Georgia O’Keefe knew that, so I posit that it was difficult for her to accept the myth. Orpheus the poet and musician, through his years of disciplined, passionate patience, would not have turned.

Yet perhaps it’s not the turning or not turning that is of critical importance here, but the loss of the beloved.  If we have lived a while, we all come to know this loss.  It changes us, and, if we are artists, we unwillingly admit that we have become better artists as a result. As Louise Glück says, “I have lost my Eurydice . . . and it seems to me I have never been in better voice.”

Another aspect of an important myth is that it is timeless. In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the critical moment of his turning around becomes an eternal moment.  There is a suspension of time, the way it seems to happen to important memories. For instance, I am always that seventeen-year-old girl who is boarding the jet that will take her across the Iron Curtain (remember that phrase?) to the West. I can easily imagine a scientist, weary after many hours in the lab, at the moment of discovery. And I can imagine Orpheus forever holding within him the image of Eurydice’s face just before it dissolved. The exquisite poem by Lenny Lianne is a meditation on this moment.

ORPHEUS AFTER EURYDICE

Over and over he recalls

the clockwise motion of his body at the bend

in the uphill path as he turned
to glance back, and glimpsed her gazing at him.

Before her face scattered, swept away
as if in a roiling sandstorm, her looking back
at him rippled through his whole body,
binding them together.

In the same clockwise motion seconds turn
into minutes and are worn down, compacted
into memory, his image of her watching him
fills his new afterlife, so when he closes

his eyes to recall her, he remains unsure
is it he who sails through the space
that excludes her, or is it she
who travels across it and keeps coming toward him.

            ~ Lenny Lianne

**

This poem is an example of taking a very “narrow slice.” The music and the imagery turn on each other, imitating the turning motion of Orpheus. But he isn’t the only one who performs an action. Eurydice, usually presented as a passive character who does no more than disperse like smoke after the fatal glance, returns his glance, and in that glance they are united forever: she keeps coming toward him.  

Michael Peterson:

I think the fault in Orpheus's turn is with Hades, not Orpheus, just as in the ludicrous instruction to Lot to not look back at Sodom and Gomorrah. We look back – it's what we do.

I love your poem, especially juxtaposed to O'Keefe's painting. Very powerful (and erotic). You mention a suspension of time in your comments. I think of these as stopped clock moments. I have many in my life, tattooed across my soul, still very much alive and influential.

**

Oriana:

Thank you, Michael, for your perceptive comment, which hangs here like a shining fruit on the Tree of Knowledge. Yes, we turn and yes, we eat the Forbidden Fruit. Positing God's existence, that was his cunning scheme to ensure that the fruit would be eaten.

Jorie specializes in presenting the moment just before the transformation. We know how the story ends; she forces us to stay in the “before,” the glance, the fruit, already within us, but still unravished, always just about to happen, to step into the eternal.


**

Marjorie:

“Orpheus after Eurydice” is short, to the point, and very skillful.  And it is quite interesting from the standpoint of what it does with physics.  There's Orpheus's ending question of whether he moves toward Eurydice to close the distance between them or whether it's Eurydice who moves toward him (though never quite arriving, so that Orpheus's fantasy of gaining Eurydice is never really consummated).  I also thought that using "clockwise" motion at the beginning of the poem was very clever, since it allowed Lenny to use "clockwise" again to describe the seconds and minutes during which Orpheus might have gained Eurydice but then, in a trice, lost her.  It's a haunting story, this tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I think Lenny's poem captures the haunting uncertainty in it.

THE SEEN VERSUS THE REAL: JORIE GRAHAM’S “ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE”

Felice Casorati, Ritratto di Silvana Cenni, 1922


ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

Up ahead, I know, he felt it stirring in himself already, the glance,   

the darting thing in the pile of rocks,

already in him, there, shiny in the rubble, hissing Did you want to remain   

completely unharmed?—

the point-of-view darting in him, shiny head in the ash-heap,

hissing Once upon a time, and then Turn now darling give me that look,   

that perfect shot, give me that place where I’m erased....

The thing, he must have wondered, could it be put to rest, there, in the glance,   

could it lie back down into the dustiness, giving its outline up?

When we turn to them—limbs, fields, expanses of dust called meadow and avenue—

will they be freed then to slip back in?

Because you see he could not be married to it anymore, this field with minutes in it   

called woman, its presence in him the thing called

future—could not be married to it anymore, expanse tugging his mind out into it, tugging the wanting-to-finish out.

What he dreamed of was this road (as he walked on it), this dustiness,   

but without their steps on it, their prints, without   

song—

What she dreamed, as she watched him turning with the bend in the road (can you

understand this?)—what she dreamed   

was of disappearing into the seen

not of disappearing, lord, into the real—

And yes she could feel it in him already, up ahead, that wanting-to-turn-and-

cast-the-outline-over-her

by his glance,

sealing the edges down,

saying I know you from somewhere darling, don’t I,   

saying You’re the kind of woman who etcetera—

(Now the cypress are swaying) (Now the lake in the distance)   

(Now the view-from-above, the aerial attack of do you

remember?)—

now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be recalled,   

now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be taken in,

(somewhere the castle above the river)

(somewhere you holding this piece of paper)   

(what will you do next?) (—feel it beginning?)   

now she’s raising her eyes, as if pulled from above,

now she’s looking back into it, into the poison the beginning,

giving herself to it, looking back into the eyes,

feeling the dry soft grass beneath her feet for the first time now the mind

looking into that which sets the ___________ in motion and seeing in there

a doorway open nothing on either side

(a slight wind now around them, three notes from up the hill)

through which morning creeps and the first true notes—

For they were deep in the earth and what is possible swiftly took hold.

~ Jorie Graham

 **

Lenny Lianne:

It's hard to look at just one poem in Graham's book [The End of Beauty] as all seem connected.

As always in Graham, time is one of the themes. Here, she implies that every moment is already inside him (and us?) and waiting or impatient to be realized. And/or there is one eternal moment waiting to be realized and that one moment negates, or undermines, the concept of future.

As for Eurydice, she realizes he has this moment within him and goes forward to meet it. For her, the glance embodies being seen and her image taken within him. It embodies recognition and she reaches for that recognition by looking at him looking at her.

**

Oriana:

I think Lenny's analysis is very perceptive. Eurydice fully anticipates that annihilating glance.

What she dreamed, as she watched him turning with the bend in the road (can you

understand this?)—what she dreamed   

was of disappearing into the seen

not of disappearing, lord, into the real—

And yes she could feel it in him already, up ahead, that wanting-to-turn-and-

cast-the-outline-over-her

by his glance,

sealing the edges down,

saying I know you from somewhere darling, don’t I,   

saying You’re the kind of woman who etcetera—

and yes, Eurydice looks back into his eyes, since she wants to disappear into the seen (the perception, the literary story) rather than the real. I agree with Lenny that this could be understood as Eurydice's wanting Orpheus to carry her image within him, to seal herself within him forever, her face and body now indelible in his memory, the way she looks in the moment of his losing her. Rather than real life, she prefers this transformation into an eternal image.

Note that doorway that opens "nothing on either side" -- this could imply the void before birth and the void after dying. But myth and great art are immortal -- though constantly re-visioned.

A marvelous touch here is that the real is full of Hollywood-type clichés. This makes it easier for us to understand why Eurydice would reject it.

Note as well that the beginning of Graham's poem has in it the Rilkean impatience that seems to characterize Orpheus, his trying to anticipate the future (as well as reaching back into the past):

And his senses were as if divided:

while his sight ran ahead like a dog,
turned back, came and went again and again,
and waited at the next turn, positioned there –
his hearing was left behind like a scent.

. . .

This poem was written during a period when Graham was interested in the human desire for closure. We want something to end – we may even want the world to end – so we can see what the meaning was.

Another interesting aspect of the poem is the shifting point of view. We start with the glance being animated as a kind of tempting serpent, but eventually the main focus is Eurydice. It’s her active response, her decision to look back at Orpheus, even though it means her annihilation (though not in the realm of the story, “the seen”) that is the revision of the myth.

In Graham's third volume, The End of Beauty, the poem that precedes “Orpheus and Eurydice” is “Self-Portrait As Both Parties.” It’s yet another, indirect approach to the myth.

Imagine the silt and all that it was.

The grains that filter down to it through the open hand of the sunlight.

How its rays weaken down there. How when it comes to touch

that smoothest of girls the slow bottom of the river,

is it Orpheus as it glides on unharmed but really

turned back with its one long note that cannot

break down?

How would he bring her back again? She drifts up

in small hourglass-shaped cloud of silt where the sunlight touches,

up to where the current could take her,

up by the waist into the downstream motion again into the

hard sell, and for a moment even I can see

the garment of particles which would become her body,

swaying, almost within reason, this devil-of-the-bottom,

almost yoked again, almost quelling her weightlessness,

flirting here now with this handful of

mudfish his fingers touch silver . . .  But they gun

through the weeds, the weeds cannot hold her

who is all rancor, all valves now, all destination,

dizzy with wanting to sink back in,

thinning terribly in the holy separateness.

And though he would hold her up, this light all open hands,

seeking her edges, seeking to make her palpable again,

curling around her to find crevices by which to carry her up,

flaws by which to be himself arrested and made,

made whole, made sharp and limbed, a shape,

she cannot, the drowning is too kind,

the becoming of everything which each pore opens to again,

the possible which each momentary outline blurs into again,

too kind, too endlessly kind,

the silks of the bottom rubbing their vague hands

over her forehead, braiding her to

the sepulchral leisure, the body, the other place that is not minutes

~ from “Self-Portrait As Both Parties”

**

This is a Rilkean Eurydice, who wants to remain dead:

dizzy with wanting to sink back in,

thinning terribly in the holy separateness.

and

she cannot, the drowning is too kind,

the becoming of everything which each pore opens to again,

the possible which each momentary outline blurs into again,

too kind, too endlessly kind,

the silks of the bottom rubbing their vague hands

over her forehead, braiding her to

the sepulchral leisure, the body, the other place that is not minutes

-- I assume that "the body" is here the dead body, for which time doesn't exist. Or else it's the body as opposed to the mind; time exists for the mind.

Also, Eurydice can no longer be grasped. This is in line with the Ancient Greek conception of the shadows in the Underworld. Thus, Odysseus tries three times to embrace his dead mother, and cannot.

I shamelessly brought this poem in because I am enchanted by the beauty of it --

Imagine the silt and all that it was.

The grains that filter down to it through the open hand of the sunlight.

How its rays weaken down there. How when it comes to touch

that smoothest of girls the slow bottom of the river,

is it Orpheus as it glides on unharmed

-- and more gorgeous lines. The idea of sunlight being Orpheus is immensely original and poetic.

**

You may say, but what about women poets identifying with Eurydice, speaking in the persona of Eurydice? There is h.d.'s Eurydice ("At least I have the flowers of myself") and Linda Gregg's Eurydice. Those of you who participated in our discussion of Jack Gilbert will readily recognize that this is Eurydice-Linda speaking to Orpheus-Jack Gilbert. I find the line "You were always curious what love is like" especially revealing.

EURYDICE

I linger, knowing you are eager (having seen

the strange world where I live)

to return to your friends

wearing the bells and singing the songs

which are my mourning.

With the water in them, with their strange rhythms.

I know you will not take me back.

Will take me almost to the world,

but not out to house, color, leaves. 

Not to the sacred world that is so easy

for you my love.

Inside my mind and in my body is a darkness

which I am equal to, but my heart is not.

Yesterday you read the Troubadour poets

in the bathroom doorway

while I painted my eyes for the journey.

While I took tiredness away from my face,

you read of that singer in a garden

with the woman he swore to love forever.

You were always curious what love is like. 

Wanted to meet me, not bring me home.

Now you whistle, putting together

the new words, learning the songs

to tell the others how far you traveled for me.

Singing of my desire to live.

Oh, if you knew what you do not know

I could be in the world remembering this.

I did not cry as much in the darkness

as I will when we part in the dimness

near the opening which is the way in for you

and was the way out for me, my love.

                       

                                    ~ Linda Gregg, Too Bright to See

**

Here the biographical temptation is very strong, and we may start thinking, “Oh sure, Jack Gilbert messed up his first marriage with non-stop infidelities, his betrayals of her trust that he was committed to their life together, which led to divorce; his second wife, who in his poems seems devoid of her own personality [actually she was a sculptor], died, becoming Eurydice material for the troubadour's poems.”

We need to return to the poem itself, and surrender to its lyricism and its insight. Eurydice already knows how this will end: she will cry even more when they part because he does not really want to share his life and his world with her. At the same time, Eurydice’s last words are my love -- this is not h.d.’s angry Eurydice, but rather a sadder and wiser Eurydice who remains loving, but is perfectly resigned to what will happen.

And thus, by a commodious vicus we come back to Lenny’s comment that the end of the story is already contained in it long before it actually takes place. In fact one could argue that already the beginning contains the end; that's why Greek poets thought the first word was so important (e.g. the first word of the Iliad is rage). 

It is amazing to see the power of the myth to stay alive for thousands of years. Of course each writer (poet, composer, movie maker) sees it through a different lens. This means an eternal freshness and new attempts to grasp the mystery of life, love, and death. 

THE AMERICAN GOTHIC: TWO POEMS

Grant Wood, 1930

This famous painting has become an icon of the Puritan strain in America. The poems below hardly need any commentary. Both of them are essentially humorous; both point out the echoes contained in the painting; both get inside the minds of the models, making us see the process of posing (and by extension, the painting itself) as somewhat absurd rather than solemn.

 AMERICAN GOTHIC

Just outside the frame
there has to be a dog
chickens, cows and hay

and a smokehouse
where a ham in hickory
is also being preserved

Here for all time
the borders of the Gothic window
anticipate the ribs

of the house
the tines of the pitchfork
repeat the triumph

of his overalls
and front and center
the long faces, the sober lips

above the upright spines
of this couple
arrested in the name of art

These two
by now
the sun this high

ought to be
in mortal time
about their businesses

Instead they linger here
within the patient fabric
of the lives they wove

he asking the artist silently
how much longer
and worrying about the crops

she no less concerned about the crops
but more to the point just now
whether she remembered

to turn off the stove.

~ John Stone

**

I particularly like

the tines of the pitchfork
repeat the triumph
of his overalls


and of course “this couple / arrested in the name of art”

**

DR. McKEEBY

We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.
  ~ Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard,

recalling the forgotten days of silent film

Dentists don’t pose, he repeats
each time the painter pesters him
to stand in borrowed bib overalls
and stoically hold a hayfork

as if he’s a testament to honest work
being able to fight off Depression
foreclosures out on the Great Plains.
He never lets on how he loathes

the low, board-and-batten
farmhouse and its falsely pious
gothic window (from a kit
out of a Sears, Roebuck catalogue).

Never mind that lines on the arches
of that upper window repeat
in the creases in his lower face
or the upward thrust of the tines

of a common farm tool recur
in the front of a smudged denim
outfit the artist loans him
to embody a symbol in the painting

(not a portrait, the artist assures him).
Dr. McKeeby never discloses the cluster
of clear thoughts huddled inside him
as he stands in his dental office

with as much down-to-earth dignity
as he can muster after office hours
while clutching a clean hayfork
and silently staring at nothing.


    ~Lenny Lianne

*

Lenny Lianne explains:

It's interesting to note that the figures in Grant Wood's "American Gothic" never posed together.  The model for the female figure was his sister and the male, his dentist.  Another tidbit is that on the woman's dress is some ric-rac binding which was out of favor at the time of the painting (The artist had a hard time finding some) but, after the painting, ric-rac had a resurgence in popularity.

 
Oriana:

This is fascinating! Thank you for giving us the background of this painting. Wow! So the "farmer" really was his dentist! This blows me away. The painting will never be the same to me. Again, reality proves to be wilder than anyone suspected. 

In the poem I especially like 

Never mind that lines on the arches
of that upper window repeat
in the creases in his lower face

But more important in this poem is the revelation of how fake it all is.  This is a dentist in borrowed overalls, clutching a “clean hayfork,” and that the “gothic” church window has come from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue. All this exposes the artificiality of art. Nevertheless, this illustrates the saying that art is a lie that tells the truth.

It’s interesting that the epigraph from Sunset Boulevard reminds us that faces can be eloquent. Grant Wood wanted the faces to be solemn, a comment on the Protestant work ethic; these two poems pull us away from that dour seriousness.

This painting by Grant Wood is so well known that it has indeed become an American icon.  But it stands for a time when the idea of “pursuit of happiness,” enshrined by Thomas Jefferson as one of “unalienable rights” (“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) was certainly not prominent, to put it mildly. 

**

Hyacinth:

This is such an interesting painting.  Perfect title: "Gothic" and the church window, his "frock" coat. Her almost nun-like dress. The pitchfork reminds me of the trinity: father, son and holy ghost. 


I love the insights into Wood's painting – like poetic license. I guess artists bend the truth to make a point. It's so funny. Thanks.

Jack Gilbert's End of Paradise; Lenny Lianne's Last Word; Oriana's April Snow

"The End of Paradise" is perhaps the most memorable poem in Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven. Note the masterful touch of having two angels of death here rather than one. This adds imaginative richness and dramatic tension to the poem, since the two angels can be given different personalities, and they can interact. Be warned that these angels do not exemplify the conventional, Victorian sweetness and light. This is part of the poem's genius: the unexpected image of the angels.

The poem is a wonderful example of the interweave of story (a limiting factor, to follow Gregory Orr’s categories) and imagination/mental plane (a limitless factor).

THE END OF PARADISE

When the angels found him sitting in the half light

of his kerosene lamp eating lentils, his eyes widened.

But all he said was could he leave a note. The one

wearing black looked at the other one in red who shrugged,

so he began writing, desperately. Wadded the message

into an envelope and wrote Anna on the front. Quickly

began another, shoulders hunched, afraid of them.

Finished and wrote Pimpaporn on it. Began a third

one and the heavy angel growled. “I have Schubert,”

the man offered, turning on the tape. The one in black

said quietly that at least he didn’t say “So soon!”

When the ink ran out, the man whimpered and struggled

to the table piled with books and drafts. He finished

again and scrawled Suzanne across it. The one in red

growled again and the man said he’d put on his shoes.

When they took him out into the smell of dry vetch

and the ocean, he began to hold back, pleading:

“I didn’t put on the addresses! I don’t want them to think

I forgot.” “It doesn’t matter,” the better angel said,

“they’ve been dead for years.” 

~ Jack Gilbert

**

My favorite passage in Gilbert’s poem is:

. . . The one in black

said quietly that at least he didn’t say “So soon!”

It reminded me of Bergman’s “Seventh Seal” – how the protagonist tries to delay by playing chess, and an actor hopes that there is an exception for actors.

I also enjoy the part where "the man" (Jack Gilbert often writes about himself in the third person -- a ploy known as "third person confessional") offers to play Schubert for the angels. I'm crazy about Schubert -- exactly the music for angels. 

But let’s face it, it’s the unexpected title that startles the reader and makes the poem irresistible. In the context of the poem, it's the title that is the deepest message.

*

A friend of mine wrote a poem modeled on Jack Gilbert’s scenario. Note that her angels are more pleasant. It's a delightful, humorous (or semi-humorous) poem. We can all identify with this situation. And no, doing crosswords puzzles does not protect against Alzheimer's, that death of memory, of self. 

THE LAST WORD

after Jack Gilbert

When the angels came, he was working

on the Sunday crossword puzzle.

He’d filled in apple for forbidden fruit

and, down from the first letter,

penciled in agape in the squares,

then stopped, caught more off guard

by the incongruous intersection

of greed and ungrudging goodwill

than by the two sinewy, winged figures

who looked like extras in a Zeffirelli film.

All he said was could he continue

the puzzle. Both the angels shrugged

so he took up his pencil again.

The two drew near, leaned over him,

close enough for him to discern

the faint scent of his favorite flowers,

lilies of the valley, those delicate bells

that never ring. Hemingway, one said,

pointing toward a five-letter space.

Donne, the other countered dryly.

“But I have so much more to finish,”

the man mewled, showing them

a baffling expanse of vacant spaces.

By the time he put down the final

letter, the sky had given its last

rosy show of the day and the man

said he would slip on his sweater.

When the angels led him toward

a brightness, he tried to let go,

arguing, “I don’t know if I gave

the right answers.” “No one does”

was the angels’ reply.

~ Lenny Lianne

**

I tried the same writing exercise, but abandoned it when my chief angel emerged as a figure with tattoos and the lingo of a bar bouncer. What a shift away from beautiful, feminine angels! I’d rather stay with the conventional soothing angels. Joseph Campbell says somewhere, “The Angel of Death looks horrific from afar, but she is beautiful when she comes near.”

A very different figure of Thanatos as a handsome young man visited me in a dream that gave rise to this poem:

APRIL SNOW

I climb to Condor Lookout,

into snowdrifts of clouds.

To what altar do we wade,

white procession with snow-lit pine?

That night a beautiful young man

dawns at my door –

with a rifle, a soldier’s uniform.

He smiles a shy, boyish smile.

I don’t seduce, I don’t plead.

I chat: where is he from,

is he happy. I want my last

moments to have tenderness.

He is the age my son would be,

if I had a son – this handsome

Thanatos, life's farewell gift,

like the trees shining in crystal.

Over his shoulder I see
the slopes sparkle with moist breath.

His smile covers everything.

Don’t worry, I say, I know.

I show him my daily list,

little whips of chores;

my walk before sunset,

when the light is the best.

But with petals of April snow

the wind has erased my tracks.

Pines and firs go with me.

I only want tenderness.

~ Oriana

**

Tenderness -- that's what we ultimately want from any angel, isn't it? Even Jack Gilbert's angels (who make me think of the fallen variety) show kindness by letting him write his final messages, though they will not lie out of kindness. And that last truth-telling line in both Gilbert's and Lenny Lianne's poem is perhaps the most interesting one, in terms of human values. We are truth-seekers.

**