I know that we will meet again my dear,
Sweet Hyacinthus. I will sing a song
Forever, and the world will lend an ear;
To hear how Fate has done a fellow wrong.
   They'll hear I taught you every skill and art;
   Your favorite, which you had surpassed me in,
   Was music. And your singing was the start,
   The cycle of your songs the springtime's din.
Those songs resound no longer. You are dead,
And only I am left to turn the wheel.
It wasn't fair, I need you, but the tread
Of overwriting time brings death to heel.
   Myth shall restore you in your season then;
   To Hyperborea we'll go again.

He came to me beneath the harvest rains,
Most beautiful and most afflicted face;
When his enchantingness was not constrained
By frost a moment more, my day had place.
   The sunlight found its truest warmth in him,
   And in our season flourished love and song.
   But now the days are shorter, cold, and dim;
   I shrink away, and all creation longs.
I'll never see his face again, will I?
Beyond the realm of life my love's been snatched;
No godly healing arts did I not try,
But death among all things is never matched.
   If only I could nevermore return,
   Instead I will remember, wane, and yearn. 

These hands that wrought the lyre, that serpents fear,
What twisted work have you now wrought today?
They made that discus, now must make the bier;
My prince of flowers on the clearing lay.
   My victories dissolved on horror's floor,
   Is this defeat beneath the master, Fate?
   In contrapposto for a second more,
   His temple shattered by a searing plate.
Watch this, he said, but then it ricocheted.
The blood ejaculated from the wound.
Gore painting flowers, he could not be saved.
I felt a desperate death-lust in the swoon.
   My being obsoleted by a toss,
   Why ever live if live to feel this loss?

Two youths enjoying mutual desire,
Exemplifying mortal mysteries
Of passion, the encumbrance of entire
Millennia of solemn histories.
   The first resplendent with a godlike touch,
   The warmth creation radiates distilled
   Into the one supernal artist, such
   That when they joined all art was love fulfilled.
The other: blossom boy and objet d'art,
Himself alive in the idyllic scheme
Of man and beauty yet to be apart.
A fragile visitor that made gods keen.
   The flower's beauty–that which knows and crowns 
   Its elegance must also lay it down.

Pure beauty was the love of that young boy,
For fine-tuned song, an orison of grace,
The seasons' several blooms, the sense, the joy
Of man in subjects that hold beauty's trace.
   Naïvely and innately did he taste
   The latent miracles creation births
   And praised them with his care and earnest faith,
   Perceiving everything's partaking worth.
His supple limbs untouched by doubt or age,
How many days we sported head to head
Or arm in arm made love and song, a sage
Embodied in a kritios's bed.
   The Feminine divine throughout his way;
   The Masculine refined without decay.

It was Apollo Hyacinthus loved,
And never happier was he than when
Before his horses carried him above,
They sang together in the dewy glen.
   His chariot and circling fire were great,
   Yet for the sacrifice he made it seemed
   There wasn't anything to obligate
   Him, loving naturally as he dreamed.
And in his day the boy knew love from him,
That product Beauty stoops to proffer men.
Their joy was effortless, was grace and whim;
If man could be love he had learned it then.
   He must have had what many die to find.
   Poor Hyacinthus! Down the disk declined.

In poppies sleeps the bard eternally.
Now what remains? Can we then estimate?
His incantations still are heard, and see,
Believing souls in these still conflagrate!
   The tender fierceness of a passion fleshed
   In loving, conquering, confusing need;
   He sang of sticky heats of love where threshed
   Are youthful souls by evanescent deeds.
The lovers crossed and crossing on their way
Who always say goodbye are with him there:
We transients. We see undone the play
Of prisoners we are, dissolved in care.
   He sleeps in poppies, carried on the wind;
   I ride with them atop Oblivion.

If only some conviction could ignite my core,
Some goal or trial I could grasp or could maintain.
A quest or burning question making me explore
And seek some oracle's illumining domain.
Would action seize me, restless, bored, and unenthused;
How passionless my torpid day-to-day untwines.
My petty wants and needs encircle to accuse
My enervated soul of perilous decline.
Ambition holds so little power over me,
Could oracles with all their secrets even find
The cosmic station where my swaying soul can be?
No search for truth invigorates my tired mind,
All mysteries as real as they are false can seem,
But disabused of falsehood still I'm wandering
The flattened plain of motivationless ennui;
Despite experience or knowledge squandering
That precious resource time: inert, unoccupied,
A paralytic mind concerned but locked aside.

I can't tell you why Florida has this temperament,
The sky won't belie its designs quite so easily
To me. Air once hot, humid all through the firmament
Then shifts, reappears crisp and cold, as if teasing me

And says: try as you might, my tropic desires hold sway;
Not old stars nor dates seasons change can tell me the clime.
So dress light til cold fronts appear on a random day.
And though Winter sang Summer well for some days, in time

The night ushered in frigid mornings more often. Chill
And frost hung around floors at dawn, and the light was clear
With pale, slightly pearlesque allure, and was softer still
In cost here than up north; invited a thought my dear

Of you and of me–lonely beds in a frozen place,
But soon there will be only warmth in our shared embrace.