Ode to Psyche Oh, sepia Psyche, hanging on my study wall, box cradled in your hands as if to part the horse’s mane, Cerberus barking, barking, barking at your gossamer-gowned side, how could I for so many years think you Pandora? The box, of course, the box was what I fixed on, Even though it is unopened, and I needed to ignore the wings that are more dragon than butter fly. Your wide-eyed gaze, straight at me, contradicts the content of your box—not all the bad things, as I thought, or, as you thought, a dose of beauty, but the sleep from hell, so morning can’t unclose our gloom-pleased eyes. When Pandora’s story is sung in Greek, she unstops an earthen vessel, probably half-buried in the ground, not unlids a box, I must confess that years ago we bought you for the frame you are contained in, an antique walnut frame, its narrow sculpted edge of faded gold surprisingly intact. But your picture grew on us, like a weed not weedy enough to pull; that and lethargy have meant decades later you are still with us, still leaving behind the shadowed boatman I never noticed till I learned your name. Your picture is a monochrome print of an oil painting of an oil painting, perhaps less about ancient Greece and Rome than about late 19th century Paris, where Curzon painted you, and Jenny Delony from Arkansas painted after Curzon. The print is of Delony’s; the way the box is painted makes that clear. But her painted gown drapes more dramatically on you than his, and one rogue wrinkle points to your pudenda, smoothed over in my print as if ashamed of what she’d done. You, returning eternally from the subconscious world, have not opened yet the box and fallen yet asleep, nor will you. You will neither marry Eros nor not marry him, like the unkissing lovers on Keats’ unravished urn. Keats erected in his ode to you your temple in the neural forest, but whatever the romantics claim, your story warns us that in the dark night, bedmate Eros, embracing you, breathes gently on the glowing intimation that love makes us immortal, though neither of you ever really were.