This is the story of a love affair. The title is based on the purported nickname William Randolph Hearst used for the clitoris of his mistress Marion Davies.

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Sunday, 1 June 2008

Eurydice

My love is in love with death,
infatuated,
ready to jump this way or that
if he crooks his little finger.
She knows he is a destroyer
but she doesn't seem to care.
She longs to subsume herself
into this early grave.

To me, on the other hand,
he is an old friend
I must treat with respect.
He visits each October
and I stretch my hands
to the cold flames
of his autumnal fire.
We sit and discuss those who have left,
with love and regret,
an end to mourning,
a closure.
That is his function in my life,
for life it is,
his visitation the frame around
the seedtime and harvest
of the circling year.

This is the time of her time also,
but he stands at her invitation
between her self
and the promise of her being,
seeking non-being.
She is life itself,
and he should be just the janitor,
opening the doorway
to a fuller life.
She runs to another, darker door,
leading nowhere.

I have tried to charm her
back to the sense of what is,
rather than what could never be.
My harp jangles
with the wrongness of it.
My head is turned also.
And furies lie in wait
to tear our love to pieces.

If I do not take care
I could be lost
in this underworld
of abandoned souls.

He smiles.
The race is not to the swift,
but to those who disengage
from his crooked gameplan.
Les jeux ne sont pas faites,
and he loses.

She has bet all on black.
The wheel spins
and keeps on spinning.
In the dawn the sky is red.
A warning.

Pray God she heeds it.
28/05/08, 08.08am

1 comment:

Karl said...

I was asked about the meaning of the French words, Les jeux ne sont pas faites. I replied:
It's a play on words.
When bets are being placed round a roulette wheel, the croupier says
"Faites vos jeux, m'sieu-dames", literally make your plays. Then when
the wheel is about to be spun, he says "Les jeux sont faites" (the plays have been made).
But I have made it the negative, meaning the players (ie Orpheus and
Eurydice) can change their plays.
Originally I wrote "Les jeux sont faites", but I realised that meant there were no more choices, ie it's too late.
But I don't believe it's ever too late, for you or me, for Orpheus or Eurydice.
She responded by complaining that she was not "in love with death".
I replied that the poem may have been INSPIRED by her, but was not necessarily ABOUT her.
I once wrote a poem (part of my Bestiary of Impossible Loves), Portrait of My Love as a Snake. My love at the time objected: "Are you saying that I'm a snake?"
Well no, but all of us have snake-like attributes.
What do you think about this one, Rosebud?

Her skin wasn’t at all slimy and slithery.
It was dry, cool not cold to the touch,
and as she wound her coils around me she was almost warm.

She had enormous strength, and she could crush the air out of me without hardly thinking anything of it,
yet I never felt in danger from that force encircling me.

Her teeth were amazing.
When I saw her carrying an egg without breaking it I was no longer afraid of them.

In theory, she was poisonous,
yet the flavour of her mouth was sweet, with a slightly bitter after-taste,
like a good wine,
or a flake of chilli in a curry.

She could have swallowed me whole,
and when we kissed I sometimes feared she was going to.
Yet she always grinned and regurgitated that part she had taken into her throat.

Her tongue was quick, an arrow to my heart,
touching my chest skin like a feather,
in and out, in and out,
and then moving on, as if tasting the air,
in and out.

I would find her cast-off skin wound into a corner of the bedroom
and I would hold it up to the light,
seeing its pattern against the window like a stained glass.
I tried to keep them as souvenirs of what she had been, the skins,
but she would not let me.
These skins are lies, she would say.
That was never me.
And she was never she, even with her new skin,
because I knew that tomorrow I would find the old skin discarded,
as I feared one day I would myself be discarded.

I had heard snake flesh was good to eat,
so when she died I sliced and casseroled her.
They were right.
She was very good.
And now when I flex my muscles I feel it is her strength that is powering me,
her coils protecting me from a world gone lonely and cold.

August 26, 2003

Never let a poet love you. We are liars, all of us.