You don’t know of the courting beforehand. Sea-fields of grass warm in drunken sun. She and her lover bathing and flowered from eyelash to toe and soft linen for summer. Burning lamps in cold stone halls were not—she left her father and mother and their callused sons for warm bones warm skin. Helenus not; Helenus was kind, Helenus was good. She spoke to him. They spoke in tongues, whispers of Apollo and his snakes wrapped around their ankles.
Was there trust in that temple? Was there faith in the open air, no roof to the sky, no cut of the rays. She and her lover spent hours there, priestesses with tongues and lips burning as midday. Gazing with Pallas Athena eyes, trusting with the faith of those whose lips can give shape to the coming.
Too fast, too far, it does no good to excel. Wild Kassandra with her spark-brown eyes and the throat of a siren. What is a priestess to a god; the sun touches what it wants. There is no shade in a slim hand thrown out as a shield. The fear of sweet freckles and the deep reddening of skin, a gift unasked and granted. A lover left behind as a bumblebee in a field of clarion heather, there gay Kassandra and immortal Apollo, and all the anger and shattering that follows.
All beautiful things look like this; an orange glow on the belly of a seagull at sunrise. The pink hour of a Sunday morning washing cement and wooden posts. White houses being turned to seafoam green and peach.
There is a smokestack on the horizon, there was a halfmoon of fire there last night. There is a blanket of clouds ready to swallow up the newsun.
The sea behind me is denimjacket grey, and the man with his dog is gone.
All beautiful things look like this; Kailua-Kona sunset on a New Hampshire beach’s morning. Héloïse eyes—mouth empty smile. The flare of your lighter a tangerine spirit thrown into cold air.
All are beautiful things in this: and why not?
I would love to stroke wet sand where the gold touches it, would love to unhinge my jaw and swallow whole that ribbon of light laid up to the sun—color sea and all. I take to driftwood in a storm and shriek at the rocks. You, sun-fled—soft sleeper and hard awaken. As the man in the house watches me from his window, you stir coffee with your thumb. I lick sand from the green sprouts on the beach. Did you know I was mad when you first met me-
No you did not.
Even so we don’t speak of it: The ever growing sea strand. The pull of the tide from its shore. The tsunami and the crash of wooden buildings. Would you prefer it if I collapsed to your chest and wailed? The beachfront is devastated and the tsunami, having eaten its fill, dies.