Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
When Orpheus looked back, he was heading home from his first round–trip to Hades, having freed his wife, Eurydice, from the hands of death.
He listed the reasons for his journey, an all expenses paid katabasis, a descent to the underworld. It was because:
a) he loved her
b) he loved her
c) he loved her more
When Orpheus looked back, he was recalling the only photo taken of their wedding day. He kept the picture on his bedside table.
In it Eurydice wore a pleated mid-calf length skirt and a sequined corselet, bought from a charity shop, and was running in freshly mown grass, peppered with the heads of sliced daisies. Five minutes after the snapshot was taken, a snake bit the bride on the ankle. She died from venom poisoning.
When Orpheus looked back, he had already, (he continued counting):
1) Wept 247 liters of tears
2) Used 340 boxes of Kleenex that he had bought in bulk from a warehouse shop
3) Spent 346 sleepless nights reading thousands of pages, in hundreds of books, The Consolations of Seneca, and self-help mantras by mindfulness gurus who told him to Breath…….. He was attempting to find peace from the grief that had sent a crack through his time.
It split him from each day.
4) He had implored to a gaggle of Olympian gods, who told him: Grief has five stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. But Orpheus couldn’t follow that path, I meanhe explained, I can’t erase her photos from my timeline. She’s been there for 2000 years, instead
5) He had dared to pass between the rocky gates at Tenar, and waded through the dark torrents of Styx to reach the place of the dead.
6) Here, Orpheus marched amongst 217 light shadows that had been to Weight Watchers, followed the program and gone beyond the plate. A thousand birds hid, silenced in mud green leaves, and he met three hundred ghosts whose GPS’s were broken so they lost their way.
7) Finally, he had arrived at the foot of Proserpine and Pluton’s throne decorated, they say, with gold leaf – stolen from the toilets of a dacha belonging to a Russian oligarch. Proserpine (it must be mentioned) was filing her divorce papers as Orpheus knelt and tuned his guitar. His music vibrated in the underworld. He sang:
“I wanted to be strong, to try to get along. But love is my song. If love controls your heart’s weather, let it bring us all together. I plead with you in this terrifying place, in the chaos of this space, in the silence of Night’s pace, return Eurydice to me, reconnect the threads of our love’s lace.
8) At this moment, the shadows and the manes wept for 38 minutes. Tantalus stopped following his shadow. Ixion stopped turning on his burning wheel. The flock of vultures no longer bit into Tityus’s intestines, which were spread, red and sticky, on a desert floor. They claim that even the inflexible Furies were shocked enough to shed a tear for the first time in history.
9) Together, they called to Eurydice, and she came. But Proserpine and Pluton made a deal “Orpheus, you can leave with your wife, but you must promise not to look back at her.”
10) Orpheus swore on his pinky finger, spat on the floor, promised on his grandmother’s life, to keep looking forward at the future, what was before him, where the next day would be born.
11) And before Orpheus looked back, through the silence of the vast region of shadows, the couple climbed a wonky staircase, recently renovated by a shady carpenter called Jim, who didn’t know how to use a spirit level. But by the gates of Tenar, Orpheus got itchy feet, he lost his cool, he was filled with memories of his wife, the photos on his bedside table, another snapshot of her eating a jam doughnut at the seaside, the sweet confiture a sanguine glisten on her lips. He remembered their first salty kiss outside the fish and chip shop run by the Turkish mafia, with the crispiest batter in North-West London. He recalled the sound of her voice, what he remembered of her touch like a Proust’s madeleine, the evocation of bite. When Orpheus looked back, he turned to the past, moved his gaze to the woman he had once known, to what had once been. He wanted to hold on.
12) When Orpheus looked back, Eurydice died a second time. She returned to the past, into the abyss.
13) When Orpheus looked back (he stopped counting), Eurydice raised her eyebrows as though, some claim, she had known what was coming (Proserpine had warned her, by text: These situations can get tricky). Eurydice reached into her pocket, and slipped Orpheus a piece of uneaten cake, decorated with hundreds and thousands that she’d bought from a dead Romanian baker. She showed him a screenshot on her phone, a picture she had taken of springtime trees. Everything is alive, she said. Before descending to Hades, she handed him an indelible light bulb, and between them the light shone like an infinite, vivid star.