La Morte d'Euridice
after Niccolo dell'Abate
It’s not about the city,
we say. It’s about the city,
the wall text says—mostly,
as though some other fable
were present in this canvas,
some other strangeness.
As it is, they must be wrong,
these invisible people
who hang this language
beside so much shimmering,
beside these words of light
only barely resembling buildings:
stone and spire, arch and
bright vennel. I wonder
if this place has a word
for shadow. Such frailty
there is in the world,
and so rarely found:
this morning you told me
I have the hands of a silversmith,
and ever since then
I’ve avoided looking at them
for fear that I will see
not what you saw
but what you didn’t:
an instrument plucked
by nails not of our understanding,
the bright body fleeing,
the dark body maturing.
Look: for all we know,
she doesn’t even know
it’s there, intent as she is
on her angel. I wonder if the city
has clocks, blind old maestros
orchestrating all the ways I’d tell you
I miss you, even as
you stand here beside me.
Blind old maestros
waving their blind old hands.
Again you ask me
to tell the old story, wear the old lie
smooth as a pearl:
the poet charming hell, losing his bride
a second time
because loving her with just one sense
could never have been
enough. Later his head will float
down the river,
tossed there like a rotten fruit
whose flies have become
notes, bars, grief sonorous enough
to drain the world
of its very pigment.
But none of that is here,
not to Abate. There is only the city,
bright thing untroubled
by its nonexistence, bright claws
reaching for the sky
that spills over like so much satin
into our laps.
Where did this vision come from,
this visitation so like
a fever, and how could it
have lasted the twelve years
it took him to tell it? Did he see
the same city all that time,
crouching at the edge of his palette?
Did he see us standing here,
two moons in dark orbit,
locked into each other’s gravity?
Maybe they are right.
Maybe there is only the city.
Somewhere inside you, my love,
is an animal ravenous and close,
as somewhere inside her
flees the now-forgotten shepherd
is a drop of venom winding its way
toward her heart—
a drop left behind like a card
by a snake so tiny and unreal
that we’d never know the thing
was crawling there by her foot
if the title hadn’t told us
to look for it.
Benjamin Morris is a native of Mississippi but currently lives in Cambridge, England,
where he is a graduate student in archaeology.