Two Poems

Barbara Holland

Brown University

The Sybil of Cumae

Out of Avernus, up from beneath
the overhanging rock and shifting
of intensity of darkness, I became
manifest in climax of joined brasses
and bowed strings, declared myself
in trumpet salutation, in carved
and weathered wood, yet had not turned
to face the open portal of my genesis.

This was my hour to pray,
as music, concentrated in my head
behind the ivory of brow, the gate of horn
too bright to burn as sound shot
upward in a beckoning of Pentecostal flame
and wept its fire behind me,
then flickered its hunger from my shoulder,
died and in its death, diluted darkness.

I was suspended, carnal, and yet flesh,
light given form by creep of shade
as from the march of clouds, of pits
and of depressions upon the marble hold,
hand on my forward thrust of vision.
Brightness died and softened the desert
of my body and I, alive, remained
an artifact and out of Time.

Hear me! I speak in smoke;
a web of spray obscures my meaning,
moistens its brittle thorns
and gloves them with the eyes of angels.
Come upon my presence suddenly
to feel a sword and breathe away
and leave you petrified, as I, an illusion
of the deft deceit of portraiture.
I bare you before the bold eye of the future.

Look and go blind. Hell lingers
in a dust drift when the eyes
are born again to morning, and retreat
within the remnants of receding sleep
to find once more the promises
molded out of fog. Whether in truth
of ivory or through hallucined horn
the blast becomes your image,
look on min, high on the long note
sounded over Hell, the golden leaves
break brains and wake the dead.

Eurydice

He was never completely
convinced of my presence. He felt
that the minute he turned
his eyes from me I might vanish
as once, in fact, I did;

that a lover crouched always
under a toadstool, ready
to seize me by the ankle
and, gripping it, would yank me
underground, as if the surfaces
I trod with him were water,

or that another might be hanging
from a bough by his knees,
fishing about with both hands
in the dusk below
for my hand, reaching.
There was one
in the closet under the stairs,
one in the laundry hamper,
and one who sang madrigals
in the smokehouse every evening.
What an ear he had!

When he came down
to Hades, singing,
What shall I do without Eurydice,
I all but answered him in song:
as did you always
with Eurydice.

He turned back to look at no one,
and I laughed.