V

High on the battlements

of Vingaard Keep

as the wind plunged over

the snow-covered walls,

Orestes perched

in a dark cloak huddled,

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.