First Told the Myth of Orpheus

 My school book left out the pursuitthat led Eurydice’s ankle to the snake.Virgil wrote it: Aristaeus,the beekeeper, out to rape her.Her death brought the deathof all his bees.My school book constructed a newdeath for Orpheus himself—drowned him. In the picture,a lion crying by the lake.Three Thracian women tore himlimb from limb.Some say the women lustedand that Orpheus turnedfrom them.Others don’t explain it.One poet, Phanocles, wroteanother love of Orpheus: Calais,young boy, winged, sonof the North Wind.The truth: the story I was taughtkept the two alone,Orpheus and Eurydice.Through that meadow and then…But I became the dramatic womananyway, and Aristaeus was forgiven,and those muses collectingthe arms and legs of Orpheus—I am collecting, too. I collect them. ____Sarah Blake is the author of Mr. West, an unauthorized lyric biography of Kanye West, out with Wesleyan University Press. Her poems have appeared, or will soon, in The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Threepenny Review. She was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship for poetry in 2013. She is Editor at Saturnalia Books and co-founder of Submittrs.