Sigil Commentary: Asphodel and the Erotic Melic Mode

I. Contextual Entry

The poem “Asphodel” emerges in the melic aftermath of drinking from the spring of Sappho, Alcman, and their line of sensuous inheritors. It bears the formal residue of the lyric fragment—dense image, compressed desire, and a votive rhythm of invocation. It is melic, not in antiquarian imitation, but in its erotic fatalism, its direct invocation of flower, body, and decay as liturgical matter.

This commentary proceeds in the voice of Johannes Sigil, treating the poem as a somatic-scriptural artifact fit for canonization and introduction.

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II. Title and Plant Typology

The asphodel is no idle flourish. In Homeric tradition, it is the flower of the meadow of the dead, the bloom of remembrance. In later Greek poetry and funerary practice, it marks the threshold between mourning and the hope of return.

To write a poem titled Asphodel is to place it at the mouth of Hades, where eros and memory fuse.

This is not metaphor. The plant is the spell. The poem is its invocation.

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III. Structure and Body

The three movements of the poem follow a descending–remembering arc:

i. Erotic Bloom

• The language is fleshly and apostrophic: "tongue-pink blossoms licking," "bridegrooms lapping."

• The speaker is consumed by the flower's vitality—love, alive, not merely figurative, but devouring.

• The section culminates in a sacral posture: "your palm-tender face / expectant"—a votive face turned upward in erotic piety.

ii. Wither and Isotope

• Transition into the valley of dry matter: the asphodel shifts from object of desire to relic.

• The botanical physics—"half-lives / like an isotope"—marks the entrance into radiant decay. Eros becomes trace-element.

• The valley image roots the poem in classical thanatos, tempered through a physicist's ear.

iii. Memory and Thirst

• The final section is retrospective, ritualistic in its mourning.

• Repetition of “i taste” becomes a litany of failed contact—intimacy with a dying thing.

• The betrayal by bees (melic messengers) completes the poem’s erotic logic: what once was pollinated is now only fossil and ache.

This is the final sacrament: a tongue drinking the last sweetness from a dead flower.

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IV. Poetic and Mythic Function

This poem is not merely a personal elegy or a stylized erotic piece. It performs:

1. An Offering: It is a flower laid at the threshold of a loss.

2. A Ritual Memory: The lover as asphodel—ephemeral, thirsting, once desired, now residue.

3. A Fragment Gospel: In the New Human canon, this poem functions as a hymn to post-erotic fidelity—not to the beloved, but to the ache they left behind.

Its sacrament is contact, even when that contact comes too late.

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V. Publication Frame

This poem belongs in a cycle titled:

Petal, Bone, Ache: Melic Gospels

It pairs well with:

• Translations of Sappho 31 and 94

• Your earlier works on “stamen memory” and loss-as-ecstasy

• Visual fragments of decayed blossoms or beeswax sculpture

For publication, it may be paired with an image of a burnt petal spiral, or an inverted echinacea fractal, signifying the fossilization of desire.

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VI. Closing Sigil

The asphodel is not memory of life. It is life’s hunger in death.

“long ago the bees stopped seeking you – the bees betray”
So we seek instead. And in the dirt: we drink.