ODE Poem: The Charred Remains of an Epithalamion , by Nicholas McCarthy

Oh Attic love,
painted shadow,
born by adder and asphodel meadows
To the ghettos of the damned.
On a white, fated train,
you slipped away slowly
in veil and lace
– one eye on the tracks ahead
You danced the night before
and I swore to follow.

The path winds further within the maw,
diamonds pulsing on iron walls
are entrenched and numbered stars
that fade.
I wander forward,
bound by gnashing and gnawing,
swallowed by the crash of boots,
the weight of screams,
drawing toward I spiral
down
forward,
down and forward,
down

until stripped of thought
and thin of song
but still

one note lingers.

The grave king,
stoic knave of a forgotten choir
awaits on throne of smoke and ash.
Yet I must pluck these barbed strings,
tinny wires, and sing
but dead echoes cry:
liar, liar
in these halls of fear and fire.

One, still of some reality,
sees beauty, oh the pomegranate tomb that is Persephone,
where love once bloomed.
She finds truth among the unsung notes.

The song, a sacred plea.
To stir the heart of Persephone.
And when her cold assent has set you free
I lead you back, Eurydice

Now ambrosian beauty, trails behind
As brass bullets sweat from the bulwark walls,
follow me through broken glass
dreams, past the banks of Lethe, from the
bony grasp of the Cypress tree, we will
dance and flee
me from you,
you, my Eurydice.

Out through torrid gates of death,
open now as the waking eyes of Cerberus
yawn below. Love taken once, twice,
now, saved from vitriolic fate.
All my love can not turn back to see
the beauty, fair, of Eurydice.

Oh, sweet resistance undone!
Look,
look upon the love that tears my soul,
breaking from the borders of the abyss.
Behold, the one I’ve missed,
departing still from vile snaking corridors.
But as I turn, she fades
forever departing from me.
Oh

impassioned woe besieges me
yet senses fashion less beauty
when assaulted by ashen passing
and all my words wilt.
With all my heart I plead to be
a second more, Eurydice.

I am a ghost,
now born more
in that furnace where
bodies of dust
rain like sand in time.
This is the world
where Helicon is hell
and my verse
lines up one by one
and falls to gunfire,
where lives are interned
in the urns of inferno,
Where I,
seek to free myself
now,
from Eurydice