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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.
VI
HIERONYMO he called himself,
HIERONYMO when down from the battlements
he came, supplanted and nameless
entering the hall
in the wake of the wind and darkness.
Arion dreamt by the fire,
and his words were a low, shaping melody:
the tongue of the flame
inclined in the hall of his breath
and the heart of the burning
was a map in the eye of Orestes,
who crouched by the hearth
and offered his harp
to his father's slanderer,
smiling and smiling
his villainous rubric,
TEACH ME YOUR SINGING, ARION, he said,
adopting the voice and the eye
of imagined Hieronymo
deep in disguises,
and none in the court
knew Alecto's son -
TEACH ME YOUR SINGING, MEMORABLE BARD,
THE LIGHT IN THE HEART OF WINTER,
SINGER OF ORIGINS, FRAMER OF HISTORY,
DRIVE MY DEAD THOUGHTS OVER THE WINTER PLAINS
LIKE WITHERED LEAVES TO QUICKEN A NEW BIRTH!
Old Arion smiled
at the boy's supplication
at the fracture of coals,
at the bright hearth's flutter
at the nothing that swirled
at the heart of the fire:
for something had passed
in his distant imagining,
dark as a wing
on the snow-settled battlements,
a step on a grave
he could only imagine
there in the warmth of the keep
where the thoughts were of song
and of music and memory,
where something still darker
was enjoining the bard
to take on the lad
who knelt in the firelight
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