~  IN PIECES

1. HADES, WAITING

He stood, eyes to the sea, watching
the waves marbleize into
savages on the sand.
Trying to see through her eyes…
in metaphor and something beyond.

“In the moments that make an impression —
the bank of fog rolling in, for instance,
the marine layer that’s clouding out the
sun moves inland trying to capture
an echo of the flying Icarus
before his wings melt;” — she’d once said.
“A replica of the original
when the original has been taken,
or was never given…
Something has been lost.

“The grey scale against the swallow of
tides and salty air dissolves sea into sky
until the wall of wet confronts
a father’s palms.
Palms cupping leftover feathers
and loss. The mists were too late.
The escape so palpable,
so final.

“To love a thing too much
defies eternity,”— she’d added.
“Something is always lost
in the metaphors of sun and flame
and feathers.”

It was not the father [feathers] of
a lost Icarus he was trying to grasp,
but her.
He captured her memory that way —
in metaphor. It was the only thing
standing between himself
and the eternal sum of her.

He knew her though. The way
she infused meaning into the moment.
And she had, at one time or another,
known him.
Known his habits,
the way he ground his knuckles into
his lips, his thumbs
cupping his chin in thought.
She, so quiet behind him,
setting her chin on her hands on his head
and looking down to watch him deliver
equations one to another,
a copulation of calculated expressions.

He’d exalted in her presence.
She asked only how he viewed the world,
in numbers or hypotheses of souls,
maybe in definitions of words
rooted in something more articulate
than language.
At that he’d opened wide his eyes and turned
to her. “All those words,” he’d said.
“Nebulous, subjective at best.”
And she laughed her laugh of antique
dignity. The one he missed most.
“Maybe,” she’d said, nourishing his
dark humor.

But that’s all he could lay claim to —
her fingers on his pulse.
This sea-staring, Icarus-dare
he hoped, might clarify her nebula,
or fuse it, at least, with the white heat
of her absence.

She became more to him when the sea
stood against the dark night,
when they were hovering on the smooth,
shiny wood of the pier looking down, down
together through the black,
silent waters, the only voice,
the voice of the deep and unseen.
Sometimes shivering, she huddled
into him, his arm around her
siphoning out his warmth;
both of them made bold
with a new heat. Maybe that’s
what he missed most,
the split nerve of the quiet hour
when pomegranate pips burst open
on her tongue, and she is his again.
At least, for a while.

2. PERSEPHONE, BOLD

Story goes I was stolen
amid a field of blood-red peonies,
each one open, ripe for the ripping.
(Or was that me?)

Anymore, the thing they call me is legend,
a prop for a god’s inhumanity.
But I fell in love.
You know this.
(Sh.)
If Mother knew,
she’d kill the year instead of just
the seasons.

The inhibited say your name means death,
the otherworld for
the cursed, the damned,
the God-rejecters.
They forget the Elysian Fields
and have never seen you.

Your dark-throated beauty unseeded me
more than your pomegranate pips, —
the lull of dangerous delicacies
ripe for the ripping.

It terrified me, the thought of you
not hearing me
amid the tumbled swords of legend
that might leave me drifting
soundless among the words
of a thousand other myths.
Lost in foreign tongues that
misunderstand the heart.

But you knew
even if no one else did.
It was me that chose.
That swallowed the pips
and sealed half a life of lies,
the other half
buried with you
beneath Avernus
in the dark caves that suck the
breath of birds.

Fairytale endings happen, they say.
To others.
For me, the gemini-hearted twilight
sinks a summer sun,
and I am gone,
gone to the waiting arms
of you, my Love, who holds the power
of death if not life in your dark embrace.

And, in the temporal death of the earth,
I am, for a time, against the propagation
of misinterpreted myth, free.

•

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