How it Began: Eurydice

Strange how no one asks
who I was, when I was
among the living,
whether I fed wild horses at dawn
or climbed mountains
to hear brooks light on stones.
Orpheus was the singer, always.
His the wanted song,
he the desired one.
No matter now.
I will whisper how listening
is another kind of song.
(And perhaps he shall hear.)

Temple Cone is the author of five chapbooks of poetry- Eurydice & Orpheus (Finishing Line, forthcoming) Radiolaria (Pudding House, 2007), Quandary Farm (Pudding House, 2007), A Father's Story (Pudding House, 2007), and Considerations of Earth and Sky (Parallel Press, 2005). He has received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Poetry, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and the John Lehman Award in Poetry from Wisconsin Academy Review, and was an Open Contest Winner in Best New Poets 2005. An assistant professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, he lives in Annapolis, Maryland with his wife and daughter.