Roiled by dismay, divorced from the earth
he fell, heart silent, stilled, dismembered by the maenads’ hand
plummeted down through dark miasmal mist,
down to an ash-strewn folly of a beach,
mud-mired, torso-twisted like ancient roots,
he forced himself to calm, to think: “Contemplate man’s origin; music
to assuage these torrents of distress: play lyre; music
from plangent strings. The earth,
the sand, stones, all of them will dance. Let the roots
of trees rustle to the rhythm of my hand.
I shall walk this ill-omened abomination of a beach
until the howling within my heart is dulled. I’ll thin the mist.”
His song evokes the snake, rising, phantasmagoric, from the mist,
shows love betrayed, surreptitiously pirated away. Such music
has a plaintive tone, but calms uncertainties to which this beach
is heir. He toed the ruffled earth
at the river’s edge, inanely stretched his hand,
and pursed his lips, as if, reliving love, he’d find therein his roots.
“Think of the Titans, and how their demise gave roots
to the birth of man, obscured by time, a kind of mist,
the product of lightning, soot, enormous heat, the magic hand
of Zeus. There is no sound: neither thunder nor music
can describe this feat; no way compare the powers that made the earth,
to the dead and dreary air that fills this stretch of beach.”
So how may one comprehend such truths: a beach
that’s permutations on a whorl of sand, unborn silicates, lacking roots,
unable to nurture even a field of stones? But somewhere in the earth
lie components and the will to mix, where a carboniferous mist
combined to form the bond of love and life. Not even music
could describe that wonder we have at hand.
Orpheus at a breach in time, a dangle of dead feet, dipping his hand
into brackish black water which limned the beach,
listening with inner ear to distant music
of the spheres, well aware that he must root
about within himself if he’s to dispel a noxious mist
that would drag away and drain all melody from the earth.
Only a hand of fine discernment could ever dissever these tangled roots,
uncover a bloom on this terminal beach, and dispel the mist..
Music and Love,Love and Music, unsung heroes of the earth.