The lyre is ruled by measure.
In Sagalassos’ Nymphaeum,
marble plectrums—ancient statues—
strum and tug my eyes to music—
from long-buried, weathered lives,
arriving back like tips and cues
one might have dropped in passing
in a sunset-suffused jasmine garden—
a pulse, a flow of kiss and air,
trimmed to fit yet outlasting time,
as verse entwines and overleaps it
with its snaking, labyrinthine thread,
on which notes, like ripened grapes,
grow soul’s ascent—luster, honeyed taste—
laced into beads of rose’s dew
on a silken beauty’s amicable neck.
And in the pause before the form
takes its destined, longed-for shape,
a string, a gaze, a whiff of breath
may broach, may bridge, may span
a tone, a path, a strain, a memory—
just enough to woo the aloof soul.
O Western evening, pensive breeze,
exhaled, exiled into marble frieze
with banded danseuses’ calyx hips
at the Heroon high upon the hill
by Ağlasun, where Sagalassos
still dreams its ancient dream—
how long till you recall the rhythm
you both once led and followed,
fountaining from your mountain spring
into the sound you gave to silence?
From that same welling source each word
glides and slips with leave
of trembled stillness—
in cadence with your bliss.
For every lyre, stretched too taut,
waits for its softly twining hush
to teach its strings to bend again—
even across the void of aeons.
For do you know whose thought it is
when you behold a distant star?
And isn’t the word itself, once more,
one with that light through leaves?
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