There were altars all around and the priestess with hair streaming called with a voice of thunder upon three hundred gods, Erebus, Chaos, triple Hecate, and virgin Diana of the three faces. She had also sprinkled water to represent the spring of Lake Avernus. She also sought out potent herbs with a milk of black poison in their rich stems and harvested them by moonlight with a bronze sickle. She found, too, a love charm, torn from the forehead of a new-born foal before the mare could bite it off. Dido herself took meal in her hands and worshipped, standing by the altars with one foot freed from all fastenings and her dress unbound, calling before she died to gods and stars to be witnesses to her fate and praying to whatever just and mindful power there is that watches over lovers who have been betrayed.

We bear within us the seeds of all the gods,
the gene of death and the gene of love—
who separated them, the words and things,
who blended them, the torments
and the place where they come to an end…

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

to bow before death

In this hour I was the white son in my father’s death. In blue showers
the night wind came from the hill; the dark lament of the mother.

Sick of the gods and their fires
I lived without the law
in the deepest part of the valley of Hinnom.
Gone were my old companions,
the balance of heaven and earth;
only the ram was true,
his festering lameness dragged across the stars.
Under his horns of stone,
their smokeless glimmering, I slept at night,
fired urns each day
that I’d smash to pieces on the rocks
in the evening sun.
I never saw the twilight, a cat in the cedars,
or the birds take wing,
the water’s splendour
as it ran across my arms,
while I mixed the vats of clay.
The smell of death made me blind.

fear death by water

What waits this moment with me still? The word,
in which my birth, as in a cradle, sways,
in which, as in a coffin of plain pine,
I lie, and tell my first and last days.

What waits when I have disappeared? The word.
And my green roots explore the dark to learn
the language of the earth that utters me.
Born of the earth, to earth I shall return.

the mouth of the abyss

cut the cord of death