Orpheus' Last Song Eurydice, we've grown apart. Our words mean nothing more than lies, or sighs, or dreams, or empty sounds; my dear, I've had a change of heart. Besides, I haven't time for love; for slipping into olive groves, where lying in the still-wet grass that shelter lovers best, our eyes broke barricades of black and time broke all the rest. I loved you then, but that is past. And now I shall no longer sing, nor rhyme, nor speak, nor talk of love, nor dance a faery ring with you, my sweet. You live in night, and I in a day so full of light, it cannot bear the sight of what will be, or ever was, or is a mystery.

Dublin Dirty city, city of grime, surrounded by decay and dinginess-- she is at her best in morning, when the waking gulls sweep through the sky, just washed by last night's rain-- then down to touch the water with an outstretched wing. You can almost see past Trinity if you try, or farther still, down Grafton to the Green in your mind's eye. At evening, on O'Connell Bridge, the slanting light refines the air and lends the grey stone walls a kind of virgin clarity, and all the things that seemed before too drab are now transformed to things of colour and of light. Like a bride is Dublin then, resplendent in her watery double image, which joins where river never ends nor sky begins, but both are full of spire and leaf, green domes and bridges. . . . Untellable city, of ashen grey and Phoenix green: I have walked among your streets both north and south, and found in both the painted door and broken window frame the same refrain of love and stubborn life among the shattered panes.

To Philip Levine Echoing from night into night you speak-- an older voice, a different muse, perhaps-- but still a fellow of the midnight craft, fashioning from the dust of dreams and the bones of old knowledge this poetry of silence. You are right. Not one of us is single, not one of us immune to the shock of other worlds or other words. One word is enough to set another one in motion and, like concentric circles in a pond, to propagate itself eternally beyond the reach of the originating sphere. It is enough--this word-- enough to teach; enough, though spoken by a singe voice, to stir the air in midnight's room and jar another voice to speech.

Eurydice in Hades I should have known that it would end this way: him out on the mountainside, me back in Hell, this time for good. How could have it been otherwise? Always the empiricist, he never could take anything on faith: "What you see is what you get." I thought artists were intuitive, but that's where I came in, he said: I was his inspiration. He worried if I left him he'd dry up, though before we met he never had such fears. Truth is, he was the jealous type; wouldn't let me out of sight for a minute, nosiree-- and now look where it's got us. But I miss him now, for all his faults, especially the way he used to sing to me; Pluto and Persephone are kind enough, but no one here is musical. I used to watch him at the music school, practicing Chopin until dawn, immersing me in melody so deep I nearly drowned among arpeggios and suspended chords. I could deny him nothing after that. My friends all said no good could come of it, but how could I explain-- how tell them that I'd follow him to hell and back just to hear him jangle out a tune? It's lonely here and quiet as the grave. I wish to God that he were with me now, or I back there with him. If I'd been in his shoes I never would have looked: I'd have listened for the echo of his footsteps, for the wind upon the courses of his lyre; I would have saved us both. A musician, you'd have thought, would do as much: would use his ears and not his eyes to see. But before he was musician Orpheus was man, and no man trusts the things he cannot see. Possessiveness is bad for art, he knew-- and worse for marriage, as he's since learned to his cost. If there's nothing left for me, there's even less for him now both his muse and his Eurydice are lost.