i. What the Mermaid Counseled 

You will be a poet someday
if you learn to control your compass
and guard your gills from drowning.

It will never be easy, this course 
you have chosen, but you may yet 
learn to be mate to your fate.

What is set forth is a laborious 
pain not many of your sex can know.
You will suffer and bear sorrow as a woman.

But you will also know the intense 
pleasures that only those of Circe’s order 
can ever be privileged to feel in this world.

Wisdom will be your constant companion,
eventually, if you can keep the madness at bay.
To know this mystery you must submit entirely.

You must trust the flow and embrace 
oceanic depths, immersion in eternity.
You must never take yourself too seriously.

ii. The Man to the Mermaid (An Orphic Interlude)

I, being born a man, feel
myself a fish out of water.
I have drunk, freely, of the cup

administered in service to the sea.
The poison has primed me, infused my
blood and brain with fantastic, delicious 

designs. I have beheld the Knossian
temples, the bared breasts and hieroglyphic
serpents. I have seen the Sphinx’s eyes.

More than once, I nearly lost my mind.
I thought myself a tempest transmuted.
I dreamed I was a butterfly dreaming a dragon, dreaming a man.

The goddess appeared nightly in my wanderings 
through Stygian shades. Eurydice, I am sure,
she was. Or so I wished to believe. Enraptured

and intoxicated with unworldly desires, I wanted 
so badly to remain in the dream. To wake was
anguished afterbirth. Sleep, divine.

Mermaid, I see at last 
the horned gate through Hades’ gloom. The lady I love
will follow my feet, but regard not my grasping gaze.

Steady through the shadows! Earth above,
and sea beyond. The sky, the moon and stars,
Eurydice in hand: Orpheus as opera, as poet and man.

iii. The Mermaid’s Coda

Master of the lyre, your words
stir my heart and lighten 
my maiden scales.

Eurydice will stay
provided you respect the sea,
accommodate the gales.

One point last I see 
you need to be advised:
Orpheus must learn to look

through Eurydice’s eyes.

[Christopher Greiner’s poetry, fiction, and book reviews have appeared previously in Eternal Haunted Summer. He has also published articles, reviews, and poetry in Indie Shaman and IK: Other Ways of Knowing, including two articles on Sámi poetics and cultural ecology. Long fascinated by the power of myth and magic to inform a sense of the sacred, his work can be seen as a kind of creative alchemy in which the natural and supernatural find convergence and the mystical and mundane achieve, if not agreement, exactly, hopefully something like a balance.]