After H.D.’s “Eurydice”

  by A. Palmer

How can you turn back for me

the one still lost in the pear tree’s downy pollen

still crowding the flowers

a bee tasting like a phantom

a shadow on the petals and leaves

I am moonlight

the placid watcher

impassive

sent from something so cold and fiery

from the closest star

the closest flower catching light in still-open cup

You will kill me with a bowl of water

filled up with rain

a gift

a drink

I thought of you as a creature

dark and ethereal

less a human by a lack of organs

I see that you are only immortal

only older than me

I feel without kin in this subterranean abyss

I bathe in the Lethe and pray to sleep

Instead I find this middle air

between burning water and warm clay

I will sleep instead with you

in the blueness of this light

in the bone-tree orchard

with the pears hanging

and the trees, their burning bones held up

“I who could have slept among the live flowers at last”

find only reverie, the echoes of sleep