the window below him
gabled in light,
and he muttered and listened,
his honored impatience
grown loud at the song
of the bard by the fire.
Melodiously, Arion sang
of the world’s beginning,
the shape of us all
retrieved by the hands
of the gods from chaos,
the oceans inscribing
the dream of the plains,
the sun and the moons
appointing the country
with light and the passage
of summer to winter,
the bright land’s corners
lovely with trees,
the leaves quick with life
with nations of kestrel
with immaculate navies of doves,
with the first plainsong
of the summer sparrow
and the song from the bard
sustaining it all,
breathing the phase
of the moon’s awakening,
singing the births
and the deaths of the heroes,
all of it rising
to the ears of Orestes.
And rising beyond him
it peopled the winter stars
with a light that hovered
and stilled above him,
as nightly in song
the old constellations
resumed their imagined shapes,
breathing the fire
of the first creation
over the years to the time
that the song descends
in a rain of light
today on your shoulder
with a frail incandescence
of music and memory
and the last fading green
of a garden that never
and always invented itself.
For the bard’s song
is a distant belief,
a belief in the shape of distance.
All the while as the singing
arose from the hearth and the hall,
alone in the suffering wind, Orestes
crouched and listened
slowly, reluctantly
beginning to sing,
his dreams of murder quiet
in the rapture of harp strings.
VI
HIERONYMO he called himself,
HIERONYMO when down from the battlements
he came, supplanted and nameless
entering the hall
in the wake of the wind and darkness.
Arion dreamt by the fire,
and his words were a low, shaping melody:
the tongue of the flame
inclined in the hall of his breath
and the heart of the burning
was a map in the eye of Orestes,
who crouched by the hearth
and offered his harp
to his father’s slanderer,
smiling and smiling
his villainous rubric,
TEACH ME YOUR SINGING, ARION, he said,
adopting the voice and the eye
of imagined Hieronymo
deep in disguises,
and none in the court
knew Alecto’s son –
TEACH ME YOUR SINGING, MEMORABLE BARD,
THE LIGHT IN THE HEART OF WINTER,
SINGER OF ORIGINS, FRAMER OF HISTORY,
DRIVE MY DEAD THOUGHTS OVER THE WINTER PLAINS
LIKE WITHERED LEAVES TO QUICKEN A NEW BIRTH!
Old Arion smiled
at the boy’s supplication
at the fracture of coals,
at the bright hearth’s flutter
at the nothing that swirled
at the heart of the fire:
for something had passed
in his distant imagining,
dark as a wing
on the snow-settled battlements,
a step on a grave
he could only imagine
there in the warmth of the keep
where the thoughts were of song
and of music and memory,
where something still darker
was enjoining the bard
to take on the lad
who knelt in the firelight.
SOME THINGS, he said,
THE POET BRINGS FORTH.
OTHERS THE POET HOLDS BACK:
FOR WORDS AND THE SILENCE
BETWEEN THEM COMMINGLE,
DEFINING EACH OTHER
IN SPACES OF HOLINESS.
Softly the old hand
rose and descended,
the harp-handling fingers
at rest on the brow
of the bold and mysterious boy.
The apprenticeship was sealed
in Orestes’s bravado,
the name of HIERONYMO
fixed to the terms of indenture,
all in the luck of an hour,
and depth of a season,
but somewhere within it
a darker invention
that sprawled in the depths
of the heart and the dwindling earth.
VII
So masked in intention,
in a sacred name
for a year and a day
Orestes surrendered
his anger to music and wind,
apprenticeship honed
on the laddered wires
of a harp that the gods whispered over,
of a wandering in lore
and the cloudy geographies
tied to the fractured past,
and he dwelt by the poet
and traveled to Dargaard
to the heart of Solanthus,
to imperiled Thelgaard,
to nameless castles of memory
where the knights abided
in yearning for something
that moved in the channels of history,
redeeming the damaged blood of the rose,
while the story that Arion sang,