Psyche Said

"The wicked have tremendous staying power." Thin air surrounded orchids in the dark. There was no wind outside; the trees were as silent as booksmeasureless and mighty. Was God in possession of the missing piece or had His arch-rival stolen it, along with the clay chessboard, while He was napping? Horror is always real. The road branched. Psyche said: "I am not about choice; nor do I occupy the empty space behind the exquisite fullness; nor am I the hole in the story that emerges during the town meeting." It was a good place.

We drove to the Candy Kitchen for the morning papers and coffee to go. Large masses of fog were wrapped around the white pines that stood in the distancethey rolled across the flat, cleared fields on steely, asbestos-like threads rising in layers under their own steam, an inversion of feeling and form and weather.

It was the first of October. Most of the leaves were still pliant and green; the filtered sun was still warm upon the windshield, but there was no holding back the birds, they were heading south in their season, as if summer were nothing more than a world not cleared away. The open fields and low-lying mists painted a scene of frozen tundra. It was time to gomild autumn or not.

Psyche said: "New ideas, new shapes beckon. I love the water's skin, and the earth's untimely speeches." Stan Getz was playing "Desafinado," and Jobim's song was yet another example of perfection existing, and Getz's sax proved that even perfection could be further perfected, unlike a face where beauty is reflected on a lake, or moved by the sea.

Was Eros a latent murderer? Pure dogma splintered into religious rumblings. He preferred blood on his hands to the water's lament. A child was found under the cabbage leaves.

When Eros was mentioned, she would smile coyly, say something about his being a day late and a dollar short, and how one day he was going to hear from her. The noise of the arriving train was neither a threat nor a promise, and was soon drowned out by drums. Lightning lit the pools and shallows. Just before Psyche disappeared behind the thunder-clouds, you could hear the raindrops whisper that Eros had lost his clout. Then the train left the station.

Marc Cohen is the author of two collections of poetry from The Groundwater Press, On Maplewood time; and Mecox Road, in which this poem appears. He is Vice President of Operations for 0. Thompson Company. He lives in New York City.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Mar/Apr 1997
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