Orpheus Leaves Me His Lyre
-for Mike Finley, King of the St. Paul Poets
the dried red and orange
maple leaves
are fluorescent confetti
fragments of you, smiling
crunching shells
under my black ballet flats
tomorrow
faceless blackface
clowns on stilts
will gather you
into quiet piles,
to haul you away
what news will you bring
from the sawdust underworld,
what revelations?
do your words
have more power now,
to tame flaming tigers
and make gilded
cypress trees twirl
under the amethyst sky?
brother,
you left behind your lyre
Go forth, Susan.
They will throw rocks and branches.
They won’t harm you.
You will swing
on a red velvet hoop
in silver garters
and play music.
I am not sure what
to do with your gift
it should be
in more worthy hands,
taken to heaven
by plasticine muses,
set among melting stars
someplace where
cheap accordion music
and salted peanuts
are abundant
but your gilded words
rest
under some bruised
blinking neon angel
on the dusty kitchen table
among unpaid bills
and junk mail
a calliope circus of
papier-mache masked
black-hooded
beggar priests call—
banging tambourines,
seeking your songs
and I send them away
there is nothing to
offer
but clumsy chords
even you
could
not win at chess or
dazzle Death
with your music
it took you
on a parade of
dancing white horses
it will take me
it will take us all
About the Author: Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press) and Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press).
Image Credit: Anselm Feuerbach Orpheus and Eurydice (1868-1869) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
As It Ought To Be 