THE CONCUBINES OF HADES by Mary Ann Honaker

 

Image | Lance Reis

THE CONCUBINES OF HADES

 

I try hard to stay tucked within what is. 

Distorted branches reflect in the 

 

black glass of the endtable.  The world 

gives us surface shine.  The forest is still; 

 

the wind forgot to whisper, to speak so 

it may be seen. I keep a lamp on,  afraid 

 

of permutations of darkness, and of 

what my mind will build from them. The shadows 

 

shorten and lengthen as day passes, being of 

what is, but cast off.  Phantoms of the 

 

leaves flit over the ground.  In the full dark, 

I see only the contours of your face. 

 

*

 

Deer wait for the tip of twilight, of 

waning day.  Birds have a singular opera for the 

 

receding shine, movement of light over earth. 

Into the sentence of night's hours, I'm falling. 

 

Blackness eats the blacktop, spanning across 

the unkempt land, hiding its teeth.  The 

 

night gobbles light, lays down quiet for the moon. 

I am in my evening gown of moss.  The 

 

night opens her mouth wide.  In the dark 

the sky pulls back and exposes earth. 

 

*

 

I live directly across the street from 

Death.  We have coffee together.  Which 

 

way will the bat swerve in its flight?  We've 

learned to talk casually, me from fear sprung 

  

like a tulip from its bulb.  Lead me to 

the secret core of the stars, toward which 

 

I'm leaning in full bright hope.  What are we 

but flecks of night the sun chipped off?  I shall 

 

wear my ballgown of stained glass when I return 

to the semaphore of light's rays. I will say, What

 

language is that? Death and I conversed too long, we 

have forgotten the words the day speaks.  Do 

 

you speak in the hours' commas?  I'm not 

a widow of sunshine.  I've come to know 

 

a little of night's language, the way it lies 

across the laminated floor.  Come in,

 

eat the supper made of darkness.

 

*  

 

My eyelids are closed so often.  I'm the 

mole in the heart of the earth, a way 

 

of sleeping before sleep.  I will stay in the 

center of the moment.  It's unsayable,

 

it passes fast as light, it never rests. 

I'm at the cusp of the moon's crescent, at 

 

the back of the theater, seeing the 

movie and the watchers alike.  Back 

 

before I died, I dreamed of romance, of 

a wholeness made up of two.  Now I am the 

 

wholeness, paper of acid on night's tongue.

What you see should not be repeated, so 

 

keep the file on the desktop of your mind.  Let 

revelations slowly unravel us. 

 

I am broken, but I'm still here to sing. 

 

*

 

What do you know of the iciness of 

death?  I have gotten previews of it, 

 

and it's hard to sleep through.  I'm in for 

many years of this, invisible cell, the 

 

sentence being life as it's lived on earth. 

The sentence consumes the meaning of what is. 

 

I won't live in television light, a 

coward's escape from the secrets of the dark. 

 

The earth twirls its gown of enchanted loam,

as green stems stretch searching for the light, and 

 

I stretch in bed but fall back down into the 

dream I was living, a phantom of night. 

 

*

 

Stars millions of miles away punch through sky 

and our filmy atmosphere. I'm in an 

 

undershirt of shadow. My unfathomable 

chest, how it sends out hooks into darkness.

 

Do not snip my lines, O Fate of scissors and 

twine.  I have so few connections, and it 

 

is an endless winter night.  This is what is: 

my self, my ropes, my robes of darkness. 

 

I'm not night's only pet.  But she owns my “I.” 

I, that fiction, will stay self-less in the now. 

 

*

 

I dissolve, and my lips crack with praise. 

Night's path is long, unwilling pilgrim. The 

 

minute hand is only a sound. Dark 

laps time up, hollows it out.  Am I at 

 

even the first milestone?  I forgot, the 

darkness has no measurements, exact

  

or estimated, but it has a center.

I will wait in the center of night, of 

 

unknowing.  O moon flower, star the 

the earth, draw close the hungry eye! 

 

I am promised nothing by the wild dark.

Door of the fleeting moment, let me in! 

 

*

 

Blanket of night, wrap me.  I am tired. The 

midnight hour slips sleekly in, cat-like.  A bell's 

 

mouth opens, tongue of starlight, while the small 

hours wait.  They emerge from their secret cave.

 

The deep well of night offers up the 

black pearl water of sleep.  It is secret; 

 

you won't remember songs from its cavity 

of black holes and twin stars, of novas, of 

 

the corridors of your own mind.  The 

night keeps it in her fist, tight as a nucleus. 

 

*

 

Night is the first goddess, fertile.  When the 

world was her egg, smaller than a quark,

 

it cracked and Love fluttered out. The how 

of the universe will always be hidden. 

 

I want to stay in the now, in what is, 

but it erupts with questions.  Now is the 

 

cruelty of nations, now is the sacred, 

now is the first kicks of the quickening 

 

of tomorrow.  I invented the gown in 

which I meet the day, gown of stained glass. The 

 

ones who hear Death speak stay in the dark. 

I ate the pomegranate seeds, behind 

  

the veil of earth and its waters.  The 

concubines of Hades aren't visible. 

 

I must have broken a pact with the world.

This poem is a golden shovel using lines from Danusha Lameris's “O Darkness” from Bonfire Opera.

© Mary Ann Honaker

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019), and Whichever Way the Moon (Main Street Rag, 2023).  Her poems have appeared in Bear Review, JMWW, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Rattle.com, Solstice, Sweet Tree Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

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