The Erl King

Alder wood heaves and splits in the coppice
its white wood, cut, will bleed.

The father carried his child
before him, through darkness, chest to

chest, like a shield.
And the child hears a voice within the wind,

a voice the father cannot hear.

Who travels beside them, hovering, calling?
The child sees a shape near the saddle,

a shape the father cannot see.

The father’s coat fell early and late,
the father’s sigh, soft as a rag.

The child’s death was what he could not
grasp, there beyond his own, beyond his strength.

Alder wood dropped in the peat will blacken,
the fossil begins where it ends.

The child’s death was what the father
could not fathom, there beyond

his strength, before his own.

The Vision of Er

 When a rainbow arched behind a curtain
of sun and rain, as rainbows
always do, I thought
of the soldier, Er, who was killed
in war and then awakened, rising
from his own pyre
to tell the story.
He had spent twelve days between
the living and the dead, to return
as a messenger, he said,
to men.
He told how some souls
come up from earth,
covered
in filth and dust,
and how others come
down from heaven,
gleaming. Each one had waited
a decade of centuries —
a thousand years to be
reborn.
Suffering or glad from
penances or prizes, the souls
had their stories, too:
all that they had done
on earth
was the measure
of what was doled
to them.
And the damned were
damned forever, first greeted
by terrible roaring, then
flayed and dragged by their
feet, through thorns, to the pits
and canyons of hell
where they would stay for
yet another
thousand years.
All the while,
the Fates sang the length
of each life, casting lots
for the cycle to come.
To be greeted by silence meant
peace, and a promise
of rebirth like a shooting star.
Twelve days, eleven thousand years,
penalties paid
ten times over,
seven days in the meadow and
four days for the journey
eight weights nested
within each other, ringing
the harmony of the spheres.
Then a clap of thunder at midnight
and a drink from the river of forgetting.
Everything structured and numbered, every-
thing set in its order. Each siren sang
one note while the whorling
weights rolled round, spinning
their colors, spangled
and white, yellow and red, and white
again —now brighter, now faster, now rimming
the limit of all that has
no limit.
And amid all this motion
and music, Er saw a sight
he found amusing and
surprising —each soul chose
the life to come
out of the life that had passed.
Orpheus asked to be born
a swan —tormented
by women, no woman’s womb
would bear him.
Thamyris, the punished singer,
asked to be born as a lark.
A swan asked to sing and live
as a man, and Ajax,
bowed by humiliations,
begged to become a lion.
Agamemnon, murdered by
human hands, asked to soar
like an eagle. Atalanta, wanting
to win all her races, asked to be
turned into a boy.
The lives of all the animals
lay waiting there, too,
and every form of wealth
or deprivation, of beautiful
seeming and gesture, of virtue
and evil alike.
And no one asked
to be a number or color,
distributed over the things
of this world, no one
asked to be radiance, or
an idea in the mind of another.
Experience turned out to be destiny,
imagination bound only by reversal.
Better to be your own shadow
than something you have never
dreamed. Better to be a corpse
on earth than a sack of light
hung in the sky.
When a rainbow arched
behind a curtain
of rain and sun, as rainbows
always do,
I thought of the soldier, Er,
for he described a light
binding heaven and earth as two
rainbows spindling
about the whole, or like
ropes that bind a boat
from stem to stern.
The column of light, you see, had no name,
but the spindle was called Necessity.