An Initiation to the Lesser Mysteries

—for G.C. Waldrep

The honey is good, the poems are good, but the mirror
doesn’t work. The honey sweet, the poems sweet,
but the mirror is a tease. Like the sun in arrears—
that’s why it’s so dark, dark as the bone inside meat,
dark as the earth inside gold, or inside a diamond, the coal.
Read the poem out loud and the honey is in your mouth
or maybe it’s the memory of honey the poem stole
as if it were its own, as if you were, even in your youth’s
deep mead, already the poem’s own dearest mirror—
you, who like the moon, on occasion, shown so bright
with light that didn’t belong to you. Not that it mattered—
matter. Not especially. Though when it did, it felt so right—
the nerves and their bliss-song, the arthritis, the charm
of walking towards the mirror so close your own breath harms

*

the fact. The face. That the sun is no good at spelling
is one of the things the moon likes to gossip about—
that god in the sky spells g-h-o-s-t as g-o-e-s-t, uttering
homonyms to the stars. What the poem was about
was honey, but in the mirror all the words were backwards.
Reading out loud makes the wrong more wrong. Tongue
in a broken bell. A dumb gong. Saying nous instead of sun. Words
don’t mind. And there was another poem, a poem about a song,
but the poem wasn’t the song, though you had to sing it,
so often the case. Honey sang the song. A variant
sang Milk. A variant sang Wine. A variant
sang The Posset of Cheese Mixed in Wine with Grain.
The baby was a bull drowned in milk. Then, initiates—
Daubed in mud that turned you white, you tore the bull apart—

*

O gods. What is the old prayer, the very oldest one?
“O you women weeping tears; o you living sieves.”
You collect the water in a jar a stone
broke the bottom of the jar. I have questions about a self.
The honey was good, the poems were good, & I ate
them both. But the mirror was undigestible.
The short, sweet parentheses of life filled with daylight.
But womb rhymes with tomb in the terrible
crystal sonnet about waking in the dark,
where night isn’t hours but a goddess combing tangles
from her infinite hair. Some voices call her mother
but she doesn’t care. Some voices call her angel.
Some voices call her bride of the sacred marriage
and this darkness is a veil covering the face

*

of bride and groom both. One voice calls her daughter
gathering flowers in the twilight, Death looking on,
rubbing the rings on one hand against the rings on the other,
sound that scares the ghosts, scares the winds,
who go and hide again in the large jars from which they came.
Honey-comb on the altar, poem in the winding sheet,
and a mirror to remember who you are. The lame
hero pushes a pebble up a mountain with his nose too late
to arrive at the party and hear the flutes and sit on a throne.
Orpheus’s head still sings to itself in the river Aorta
though the water stands almost still. You came here alone—
hands sticky with honey, poem in your mouth, the mirror
moon left behind, hanging on a wall in the bedroom
where the black dog sleeps, curled around its own doom,

*

running in a dream through green fields full of clover
and bees, where those who know the mysteries
spend eternity forgetting the letter c, lovers
now only of vowels, which live on breath, not teeth.
I came here alone—a poem sticking to my hands,
a poem about a mirror and all the mirror saw
but could not hold: a wife by day, a bride by night, and
two daughters, and a dog. A world entire. That echo of awe
that shatters the image it draws. & it was as they said—
two wells to drink cold water from. The first
makes you forget all you’ve done wrong, the second
makes you remember all you’ve done right—
No one tells you which is which. I believe in ghosts and gods.
The dog smiles. The dog smiled. I remember it. O gods—

*

the undermind, the aftergrove, the soul’s verdant green—
the couplet that comes after the closing couplet, I mean

*

that rhyme that rhymes life with time-
lessness, lessness, or moreness, the nevermind,

*

The I-don’t-mind, the eternal mud the half-initiated
Wake up in, dreaming of grass, dreaming of bees sated

*

by the dance they dance, that teaches the other bees
where to go. Psychopomp—teach me

*

to dance. I walk toward the mirror carrying the poem.
Honey said backwards sounds like, you know, You know.