Psyche at the Tomb

By Olivia Marstall

Weeping, weeping, weeping, and feet in iron shod,
she wanders through the mountain range, in hand an iron rod.
His mother gave them both to her, the shoes and iron staff:
Lovely Venus, full of grace, who set her on her path,
to labor, seeking her beloved, the god of holy hills,
never to behold his face until her tasks fulfilled.
At night she lays down in the grass and dreams his presence still
(they coronated him with crowns when they lead him to be killed).
She feels the memory of his hands, she recollects the night
she brought her perfume, treasured oil, and shattered it despite
the protestations of his men—Judas’ the loudest cry—
and washed his feet with heavy scent and with her hair wiped dry.
She hadn’t dared to meet his eyes, till shivering at the brush
of fingertips across her cheek, the soft but kingly touch,
her lover’s hand chaliced her face and lifted up her chin—
“Psyche, yours the house and yours the feast—go boldly there within.”
Too bright he seemed, too glory rich, like rippling noonday light
that shadow seems when glimpsed and burned to spots in human sight.
She wakes. The moon is mottled, like a stone, in which a lumpy face
winks viciously and warps itself in cold, entropic space.

She dreams a thousand crawling ants, like monstrous armies spread,
marching like an infantry, battalion beside her head.
The streams of insects, scuttling things, a nightmare grown too real—
and as the soldiers swarm her skin, a no man’s land surreal,
she feels herself dissolve to dust, a heap of corn and chaff,
a disembodied dissolution unraveling in half.
The ants are tearing her apart, their mandibles like saws,
dissecting pieces of her soul, discarding what they gnaw,
Psyche sorted into pieces, fragments stored in piles,
shored up to safeguard all the insects from their winter trials.

These visions she has seen before, these sights and sounds bizarre;
she’s lived her life entrapped in dreams, suspended in a jar,
unraveled to the brink of death, unbending into earth—
save for a single moment’s silence, the still point of rebirth.

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Olivia Marstall is an Anglican writer, grown in the Midwest and transplanted to Nashville. She writes familiar essays that seek the highest things through attentiveness to the ordinary. Research interests include medieval literature, Platonic metaphysics, virtue ethics, and Romantic theology.

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