Solstice As Demon Lover Poem by Reginald Shepherd

You disappear again, December sun
turns light to ice, fracture
of frozen stars responsible for months
of snow. Now that you're gone it's winter:
I can sleep, but don't. Cold bright

guided me to you: save me
some fragment of its linger. Poured
over glacier meal's cracked
maps, I stumbled through mist's
occlusions: now recognize

the face never turned to me, myriad myths
of you. Of course there was a portal
you led through, underworld of
wind-twisted trees. The preoccupation
with endings breaks open, two equal

-ly irregular shreds of cloud: white sky falls
from the rent defining them. Who turns
in this version, fixes me to either side
of mourning? Your heliotrope gaze
turns and I am caught adjusting my sorrow,

among spilled waves and crashing
particles, breaking open the day
to see what it contains. (Look at me
now I'm losing you.) Light-footed
gods traverse the light between the living

and the too-loved dead like echoes
or reflections: the body breaks in two
but walks away. (I pissed my name,
Orpheus, with doubtful penmanship
into the white. I had to

scar it somehow, undo its clean efficiency.
The frost will fecundate another crop
of ghosts.) Cold bells
of breath second the snow, the winter
you became. (Wind again: there is

no sound. You must have a
winter's mind.) I walked out
of cold hell, mourned well
when you disappeared from view:
same voice, no face, rubbed clean

by renown. I need some music now.