LYRE IN THE SKY by KELLY JARVIS
“But oh! As to embrace me she inclin’d / I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”
O
~ John Milton
light, dooming himself to a lifetime of sorrow. People have talked of how his songs turned sour when he lost me that second time, of how his angry audience, wanting him to sing of joy, tore him to pieces, of how the gods crafted a constellation out of the strings of his turtle-shell lyre. But although Orpheus and I have been reincarnated over generations and across lands, doomed to repeat our tragic roles in every life and destined to be studied like ancient mythologies, no one truly knows my Orpheus, my husband, my love, the man who sacrificed everything to sing the song that I needed to hear.
rpheus…” My voice, barely a whisper, is drowned out by the howling wind billowing up from the dark realms beneath. I choke on the sweet funeral scent of lilies lining the river Styx and summon the last ounce of my strength. “Orpheus…” He stops, his silhouette framed by the golden glow that guides us back to the spring world above. I see the muscles of his shoulders tighten. I hear him struggle to still his breath. I feel the pause and space between us flood with his fears, each one as palpable as a falling stone. I know that he is listening. *** Everyone thinks they know the story of Orpheus, the famous shepherd who wed a wood nymph only to lose her to the fatal bite of a black viper. Scholars have marveled at my husband’s arrogance for following me down to the underworld, for using his poetic prowess to negotiate the terms of my release from death. Writers have criticized his lack of trust in Hades, the giver of wealth and the lord of the dark, who warned him that if he looked back to confirm my ascent to the upper realm, he would lose me forever. Poets have said his own stupidity caused him to glance back over his shoulder as we journeyed upward toward the light, dooming himself to a lifetime of sorrow.
Time is different among the dead. I have sojourned below the soil for only a few hours, and yet I have been here for centuries. Apollo’s fiery chariot does not penetrate our perpetual dusk. No ticking clocks mark the hours of our deafening silence. Our past, our present, and our future flow through us like waves on an eternal ocean, and our veiled memories dangle limp in the air like the laundry of the living hung out to dry in the sun. I brush against the linen softness of one memory, and, for a moment, I am at home in the early bloom of my forest, entwined in his arms. The path is lined with the season’s first
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