If by the cruelest of cruel ironies
you should leave my side to journey afar
across that dark and unchartable plain
to the cloud-wreathed hinterlands of the dead,
by what tranquil pool, in what hemlock grove,
by what portal into the underworld
shall I stand my vigil, awaiting your ghost?
In dream, you answer ... and so it shall be ...
and since in dream neither passage of time
nor geographical measure hold sway,
I shall somehow track your still-beating heart
to the site of its rightful burial
some six or seven millenia past,
to an inconceivably distant land
between the Aral and Caspian seas
on the shimmering steppes of Central Asia,
for there, among fierce Sarmatian tribes,
your slender, unblemished body adorned
with white of pulverized shells from the sea
and clothed in a cloud-like bodice of beads,
they will honor you with all sacred rites
befitting their youngest and fairest queens.
And there, amid pasturelands high and cool,
pasturelands like unto paradise,
they will place you within a kurgan’s vault,
a high earthen mound, encircled by all
your most prized possessions: an amulet
of the softest doeskin about your neck
containing a small obsidian point,
a bronze-backed mirror, a jeweled blade,
a necklace of glistening coral and glass,
earrings of turquoise, a quiver and bow
with a bundle of iron-tipped arrows
and, there beside you, the muscular form,
not of husband, or son, nor of any man,
but your one true steed laid to rest by you
for purpose of bearing you through the vale
of tremulous shadow beyond the grave.


And this being dream, where no barrier
between day and nightfall is absolute,
I find that, even as you and your steed
wend slowly, reverently, on your way
through the dim cathedral hush of the grove,
I have intermittent glimpses of you,
a white-clad figure with dappled stallion
drifting like silvery mist through deepening
hollows of hemlock shade. And I ponder,
how best, after such a transformation
as you have known, after such a crossing
between wholly incommensurate realms,
how best to announce my presence to you
without spurring you into sudden flight
or attracting a deadly shaft my way
from your unslung bow. And as I consider
whether silently to steal up behind,
or boldly to call out your name from afar,
I come to perceive a soft aureole,
a nimbus of pale luminosity
enclosing your horse and you together,
entwining you both till you move as one,
a single delicate drifting of light
through darkening groves and, growing aware
of this rare and exquisite harmony
which my presence, however respectful,
can only mar, I see nothing remains
but to slip away.... I forsake the path,
ascending the face of a tall outcrop
from which, for another minute or two,
I watch you, woman and steed together,
trailing a cloud of faint luminescence
as you vanish into the deeper vales.