A Festschrift for Tony Frazer
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From  Then and Now – Opus 3, No 1 (The Death of Innocence)            
     Rainer Maria Rilke:

ORPHEUS. EURYDICE. HERMES

 

 
It was a strange dark mine of souls –  
As still as silver ore, they pulsed 
Like arteries in its darkness.  Blood 
Welled up through roots, flowed off into people, 
Seeming as heavy as porphyry. 
Otherwise no red –  
 
Only rocks 
And unreal woods; bridges over nothing; 
And that great grey blind lake which hung 
Above its distant bed like clouds 
Of rain above a landscape.  But also,  
Between soft meadows full of patience,   
A single path – like a pale strip 
Of linen laid in the sun to bleach. 
 
And on this single path they came. 
 
In front the slender man in blue –   
Wordless, impatient, staring ahead, 
With steps which took great bites of the way, 
Swallowing them whole.  His heavy hands 
Hung clenched among his garment’s folds, 
No longer aware of the light lyre 
Twined round the left, a climbing rose 
Growing in the boughs of an olive. 
His sight and hearing seemed to divide, 
In that the first, like a dog, ran off 
Ahead – turned round – came back – stood waiting 
Again in the distance by the next 
Turning, whereas his hearing hung 
Behind like an odour, almost as far 
Back as the footsteps of the two 
He hoped were following him on up 
The slope.  But only distant echoes 
Of his ascent, his cloak’s swish, reached 
His ears.  They’re coming, though, he said 
Out loud – hearing his words re-echo… 
And so they were.  But terribly, 
Terribly quietly.  Had he turned then 
(And with that single backward look 
Ended this work), he might have seen 
Them, seen how quiet they were, unspeaking: 
 
He – the message-bearing god of travel, 
His hood pulled over his bright eyes, 
With wings which fluttered round his ankles, 
Raising his slender staff of office –  
And, guided by his left hand, she.  
 
So greatly loved that, from his lyre, 
More wailing issued than from mourning 
Women – a world of wailing, where 
All things were present: wood and valley –  
Village and road – river, field, and beast –  
Even, to make this wailing world 
Just like the other Earth, a sun –  
And a still and starry sky which wheeled 
And wailed: a sky with disfigured stars...  
So greatly loved. 
 
She, though, hand in hand with the god, 
Her short steps hampered by her shroud, 
Uncertain, gentle, and unhurried, 
Sunk in herself, in her gravid being, 
Gave no thought to the man in front 
Nor to the pathway leading to life: 
Sunk in herself.  Her presence in death 
Utterly fulfilled her. 
She was as full of her great death 
As a fruit is full of sweetness and darkness:  
A death so new that she grasped nothing. 
 
She had become a girl again 
And was not to be touched.  Her sex had closed, 
Like a young flower at dusk; her hands 
Had grown so unaccustomed there 
To marriage that even the weightless god’s 
Infinitely delicate guiding touch 
Seemed too familiar, seemed offensive. 
 
She was no longer that blonde woman 
Echoing here and there through his poems: 
No more their broad bed’s scent, its island, 
And that man’s property no more: 
 
She was already loosened, like 
Long hair – dispersed, like fallen rain –  
And shared, like an abundant hoard. 
 
She was already root. 
 
And when the god 
Stopped her abruptly, pained and blurting 
The words, He has turned round!  she still 
Grasped nothing but asked quietly, Who?... 
 
– Far off, though, dark in the bright way out, 
Somebody stood, whose countenance 
She could not see.  He stood and watched 
How on a narrow path between meadows 
The message-bearing god, with grief 
In his look, turned quietly round and followed 
Her form returning now the same way, 
Her steps still hindered by her shroud, 
Uncertain, gentle, and unhurried.

WD Jackson
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