Nine Orphic Elegies
from A Dream of Adonis
© 2007 David Brendan Hopes,
used by permission

1

Yes, I am writing poetry again.

It was the ache each morning
which I recognized, at last,

as the pain of a vocation

— in the ancient, in the mystical sense —

unrealized.


Not that I expect it to matter all that much,
except to the cats who go ignored an hour,
except for the phone which goes unanswered
one time for a reason.

Except to the spirit — bird or beast —
sighted at daybreak in a shield of mist —
turquoise in some light —
fleeting, irregular, but faithful
in his surreptitious way,
which called my name in the first days,
waits for me to find the appellation
to call back —

when it will, the guidebooks swear,
cling to my window
and gush forth.

2

At sea's edge
his lyre lies amid the jellyfish.
This is all that remains of famous Orpheus
   that man-maddener, that infuriator of women,
who, by all but the maddest accounts,
got what he deserved.

Because of him I think there must be a meter
to justify the longing of brutes, to uplift
even the puniness of the puny.

Because of him I listen for Tyrannosaur's thunder
in the scolding of the she-wren.

Look little, he said, go to hell.

3

Oh poets of the street,
shut up.

4

Oh poets of the street,
forgive me.
That last was too blunt.
Let me begin again.

Suppose you were a fossil, awakened by those rude
tools, starting up, trying to graze,
trying to hunt, as nobody had explained to you
your altered circumstance.
Suppose you were zero knocking at the door of numbers.
Suppose you were a woman named Mankiller.
Suppose you were God, dying, worried about
all those many children for whom you had
not adequately provided.
Suppose you were the first Alien, us jabbering and pointing, the flashes flashing,
   Senators puling their pig-Latin from a safe distance,
Home rolling blue-white in the southeast sky.

Suppose you were a strong man wrestling with your sons.
Suppose you were a red coral.

That is the secret.
A poetry not of where we were but of where
we are going,
not of some wound inflicted on our grandfathers,
but of blessing delivered to our children.

Oh,
damn the biddy poets celebrating their small sweet steps,
those biddy peckings at the trampled scratch.
Damn the roaring boys who never bothered with the words
to roar with, spilling the hot, stupid blood
of empty sacrifice.
As your mother said in a somewhat different context,
leave it alone.

What we are is poetry for someone else.
What we suppose is the frontier unforbidden.
Like Orpheus who wanted to be a husband.
Like Orpheus who wanted to be a god.

5

Possibly for nothing,
all this getting up in the darkness
and wrestling with poems;
all this standing with feet spread
at midday defending this and that
which seemed, once, beyond question,
the sand under those feet
each day more slippery, sifting
away into the abyss;
all this gliding between doorways
by night, reading the signs,
sniffing the traces of love
on its bent, annihilating path.

I can say truthfully at forty —
well past forty, then —
that I have nothing I wanted,
never had but for trembling

moments which I myself
more than half invented.
Not the friend (keep this from my friends)
I assumed would guard my flank
through danger and hilarity;
not the lover I imagined
passionate and steadfast,
we like two heroes out of Shakespeare
meeting again at acts' end
through unimaginable adversity;
not the line of volumes
gobbling the shelves,
announcing to the cosmos
what I thought of it, which
written and achieved in that sorrow
before the sorrows of morning,
wander now like princes
denied their heritage, lied to
concerning who they are,
whose demeanor and pretensions,
considering their present circumstance,
strike the mass as risible.

Not that. No. Nothing.

This is the point where the poet writes
"and yet —" fingering the person
or conception which makes it all worth while.

Let us be thinking then
of the beasts on the mountain
holding off oblivion so I might
walk among them one last time.
Let us lay the telephone in its cradle
building a world on that whispered blessing,
maybe; let us discover
the rhythm, the turn of phrase,
which in my smallness has sufficed
to turn my focus
to the burning point
which is a further day.

6

Night her oldest legend tells
In this midnight black with spells.
I sit up late, trying to refine
the spirit's last half-uttered line.

Watch while the old mosaics break
into shapes of bodies I would hold,
shapes of bodies I would take
unto my bones, against the cold.

Night hums along the telephone;
light in one window burns alone;
equal love, unequal hate,
contest, while I sit, and wait.

I snatch pictures from the roiling sky,
from where the gods and rovers come
red upon the reddened earth to lie,
and the wild swan glides unto her home.

I have heard the human heart is time
as the archer Love is blood and light.
I mean, should will succeed tonight,
to interrupt his arrow in its flight.

7

It is not true one sacrifices quite everything.
I have, to be honest, loved one or two
better than I loved God or art or anything,
a statement, times being sharp and new,
one knows not whether to thunder or defend.
And one or two, unlike any verse,
I will love wholly to the end.

It is given to the heart to nurse
a few selected terrors through each stage.
Mine? Well, one thing would have been worse,
that after blood and sacrifice and rage
I not been, really, very good.

Ah, Auditor, you drop your eyes so as to betray
no judgment, no emotion, as you should.

Yes, I expected it another way,
but, as the saying goes, no harm, no fault.
It's satisfaction on one feather to display
the peacockry of William, John and Walt.
Or, if not that — I see your eyes —
to have kept faith in such a way
that their discernment won't despise,
having loved, as I said, some things enough
to push them before me to the skies.

8

      Taking up the task again after long interruption,
      I think of what first haunted me —
      thrush in shadow,
      hawk, her shoulders peaked that instant before flight,
      sea against granite, violent configurations
      of force and resistance such as never
plague the hearts of those who are
home.

A music of removal, some would say,
a sweetness untouchable,
empty of the songs of men
who have given their spirit
to the outer world.

They do not know how far
some must go to get to the place
where they started.

      I think of a boy's face hidden under pain and doubt,
      like some prince, cause lost, waking in exile.

      I whisper,
      I will build it from the ground up.
      The lords of the world say there is no ground.
    I answer,
      I will thunder from the sky down.

9

      It is recorded that the women laughed
      at mournful Orpheus in the spring,
      though he survived the wintery night
      pure of the wide world's arrowy delight.
It is written that one man alone
would dance without dancing for the Bone;
That one man could look into the water
and not see the image of his fallen father.
      It is recorded that a lad in hell
      set monsters maundering in the mire,
      knowing of all griefs one full well:
      the sound love makes upon the lyre.
      All that fury sleep under this skin.
      Rip it open. Let the dance begin.

David Brendan Hopes teaches all the creative writing genres at the University of North Carolina, Asheville — poetry, fiction, non-fiction, playwriting — and has developed de facto specialties within the department in Shakespeare, Drama, Irish Studies, Milton, and the Romantics. His poetry has been published in the volume Blood Rose, as well as the author of A Sense of the Morning: Field Notes of a Born Observer, essays on his observations in the wild; Bird Songs of the Mesozoic: A Day Hiker's Guide to the Nearby Wild, both books in The World as Home series from Milkweed Editions. He has won several important playwriting prizes. Abbott's Dance (Siena Playwrights Prize Winner, 2003) and Man in Flight were both performed in New York, and The Class of 1950 was premiered in Nashville at the Southern Playwrights Conference. 7 Reece Mews premiered in New York in 2004, and a one-act called Piss appeared at the theater festival in Liverpool, England, in the fall of 2003. Hopes is staff writer for The Critical Review, and has poetry forthcoming in a number of national periodicals. Active in the local theater scene, he appears regularly with Asheville Lyric Opera, Asheville Community Theater, Area 45, Highland Repertory Theater, and is a bass with Cantaria men's chorus and the All Souls Cathedral choir.

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