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	Advanced Search > ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Kelly Born in Brooklyn in 1935, Robert Kelly is the author of more than fifty collections of poems, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 and Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News, which received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award in 1980... More > FURTHER READING Related Poems Orfeo by Jack Spicer Poems About Anniversaries Couple Sharing a Peach by Molly Peacock Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri by Mona Van Duyn Francesco and Clare by David St. John I Married You by Linda Pastan Man and Wife by Robert Lowell My Wife by Robert Louis Stevenson The Anniversary by John Donne The Elephant is Slow to Mate by D.H. Lawrence The Storm by Theodore Roethke To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet Adopt a Poet | Add to Notebook | E-mail to Friend | Print Orpheus   by Robert Kelly Orpheus can never look back at the real woman trailing behind him out of hell, the woman that anybody could see with ordinary eyes. Orpheus must keep his eyes firmly fixed on the imaginal Eurydice before him, towards whom he has struggled all his life. She is not imaginary, not at all, but realer than any mere apparency, than any momentary act of seeing. He must move always towards that perfect image of his wife, and so sustain himself and his song. If ever he turns back, that is, regresses into seeing his wife as an ordinary woman, she is lost. And he is lost.
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