Eurydice       At first, I missed you more than I missed life. All the delight in running through the meadow laughing, dancing toward the waiting snake, was not the sunlight, but your sunlit smile, and not the smell and rasp of summer grass, but scratch and fragrance of your sweated hair rubbing on my chest as you hoisted me up – we spun around – the stars would spin like that, the spheres would sing with the fullness of your voice... if they knew how.  My arms encircled life and then I died.  I fell into the shadows, crossed the river, crying out to you, knowing nobody had ever walked back out. The damned were good to me: they’d come down here turning their heads toward an absent sky. The loves, the little joys – even the wounds that they had dodged and cursed once, would be sweet now that we all fed on a thin, damp smoke as flavorless and bland as tongues could taste. But one grows used to this, and learns to bear the lack of joy or sadness as a load too easily borne, that never can be put down. And when you came, and moved mute Hades to the merest sigh, which meant that you had won, the echo of a throb disturbed my heart like a wind, and left, and left me puzzled that your music died in my ear, which once had heard and gloried in its joy, rooted in love.... I stumbled slowly behind you up the slope, seeing the dull and growing swirl of light as sand that ran up into the hourglass to run back down again, to another end. I begged you silently to let me stay; something in you heard and you turned around. I fell back smiling slightly, and looked up at your tears exploding as they turned to steam, grey petals of the roses of relief.          Emily       Wherever I may find you, there you are: wider than a sea, enraged in a jar.   As spirit blooms between the rose and weed, partakes of thorn and leaf, though green and red   seem tux or gown to wear, one night on the town in rhythmic whirlpool, still what is, is grown,   a tongue of earth above dark soil, clotted with love.       2008 JB Mulligan