Olympus and the End of Winter
       

The palace, if you could call those shafts
of stone, bare rock face with its swirling
clouds, a royal home—but still, the figure's
ancient and adheres—had grown
drafty, things fallen
from its walls allowed to lie
just where they fell, the alabaster
cups were cracked, leaked nectar
that had dried to saffron crust, the murals
crumbled at a touch, stone floors unswept
by anything but wind that crept in
through a thousand clefts
and chilled them to the bone.

Immortals, man had called them; their rule
assured his own. Now they were shadow
loosely tied to bone. Psyche's eyes
wore cataracts of cloud, though now and then
they flickered with an old suspicion, the lamp
whose dropping oil had blistered love.
Like the leaves of an unwatered plant, the wings
of Eros drooped, as if some vital muscle
that had anchored flight to flesh
had finally overstretched.

Of all the Everlasting Ones, only these two
remained: Psyche, her mind a herd
of straying thoughts she couldn't lead
to sense, Eros slumped beside her,
aching shoulders, useless wings
that once had carried her
beyond decaying things. She who had been
last to join the deathless gods
had reason now to envy
the centaur Chiron who gave his place to her
desiring death as sweet release
from a wound that would not heal.
Those peaks to her had seemed a refuge
then, from time, this island stranded
in the sky, whose only constant had become
the cold, the clouds, and the diminished light.

Once they had a daughter, the infant Joy,
but long ago she'd grown and left
for the lands below; with her departure
they knew that what had dreamed them
had no blood left to feed their fading image,
they felt the rains of spring pass
through them, and then they felt no more.
On the plains of Thessaly
where the wheat had begun again
its season, soft in green and bathed
in sunlight, no one mourned. Though someone
might have noticed how a fresh wind tore
the clouds from high Olympus and the sun
picked out the peak and kindled it—
the naked rock a perfect
mirror to catch the warming light.

But that was just a change in weather,
it was spring. The horses grazing
in the fields looked up with liquid
eyes as fathomless as dreams
and though we'll never know,
it was as if they might have thought
of Chiron, wounded by his half that was
the human, and understood his case,
looked down and gone on grazing.
Of Joy, no end is given.

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Copyright © 2021 Eleanor Wilner All rights reserved
from Gone to Earth
Crooked Hearts Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission