Tears ladder wetness to her mouth. She unsalts the trickle with her tonguetip, backhands her shining cheeks.
Honey gleams in grass, secreted with a slug’s soft silver, snot generously honeyed. Snail, once seen, now eyes discover the many, the complex necklace of black shell. Salt stings trembling lips.
Luna shrieks down, night crisscrossed with seabirds. Nocturnal loves animate ambrosial skin, the blood ruled by a crazed female tide.
Daphnis!
A burst rose liquids her mouth with that name.
Totems, words, drift upon gray water like feluccas, glide over rheumy waters, upended fleet of dun debris. Gull feces bright on wet rocks.
Competitive with passion’s agony, and as conversational, her prayer depends towards the pool’s sandy bottom, unlatched necklace of flame.
At dawn, through tattered dark. Seaside chateau: sea, flesh, bone. Mute convergence, lovers in an unfurnished room.
(Beyond the hills? Under moonless sky?)
East, Arabian waters shelter the drowned, the morning sun’s sudden shocked ascent out of marina’s soundlessness.
**********
[Lykanion]A spotted sundance frames the tamarind, and the group of young girls shaded round its trunk. Among them, Lykanion. They share a birthday, an insect’s traced blemish above their left knee. One shared summer night of warm summer wind.
-Lykanion!
-Chloe!
-Lykanion!
-Chloe!
Girls scamper on a distant beach, torchlit by the cliffside homes, calling to them. And through water rippled, blown, they came upon a boy asleep on a rock. His hair lifted by a breeze, his face revealed. In that boy’s body and face Chloe saw herself in love.
Recognized by firelight in a large and moving crowd on a feast night, far from the cries, his face obscured her strength, her friends, whose cries did she hear? And like a shell turned silently upon the floor of a pool his eyes opened and looked into hers, frightened, diving. She dove beneath the beaten surface of the pool.
All night the water carried her, beyond pools, beaches, mountains, the foaming hunt of stars, a fetus scored and vulnerable in night’s thin atmosphere. A morning wave blinded her, thrust into Lykanion’s arms, embracing laughter. She sat on the beach with her knees drawn up, her hair hanging down in the white sunlight. And Chloe knew his name. Not ‘Daphnis’, or the others he is called, no, she knew his name.
**********
[Interlude]Under wind, a tree’s purple and orange flowers, fruit-heavy and ready to fall. Naked swimmers play a game of winds-and-arrows, flaking and blistering the water. A line of swimmers passes a jutted rock, out towards the light of the sky. The sea, gemmed and blue with cicadas of light. Chloe, self-conscious of her skin color, of snow, sand.
The door of her house is open but she is not home, she sits under a fruit tree. In a chilly shade her people sit or lie talking, the hum of birds petting their mouths with soft fire. The dance begins.
Warm air blows from beyond the grove, in a shiver of light a flamingo east above a hurtling lake, in another world.
Heat upon breasts and necks, shaded laps and hands, the wing of a girl spinning slowly, in the center of a grove, in a circle of chalk.
Tanaquil dances The Moon, (who is he, Chloe? … who do you talk to? … the distant figure whose shadow fills your room at noon) her arms, lilies sleeves in orange-tinctured linen, stretch towards some falling amber star.
La Jacinthe, a sister of Daphnis, flutters her hair in loose sequence with two other girls. She dances The River, the reeds and peacocks of her gown a moving rainy garden over her buttocks and back.
Chloe presses her temples, the wind sucks her chill breath. Across the grove (sea is heard, out of sight) Lykanion dances from beside burning Chloe, fingers of water and smoke. Lykanion (the sea … sun … white worm in the waves …) impales the tremored light; she dances The Violated Girl, she is the shadow of the demon; a red band winds round her waist and falls twinned to her knees, her white bodice tight across her breasts, her armpits bare. (The waves do not glint, rosed and dull, the sun does not blind the foreigner, stealing through to shore, prow risen under storm, foamed beaches, deaf and silent sands. The foreigner who comes under a tattoed sky, broaching shallow waters.)
Daphnis falls upon his violet shadow … an embryo of sweetness springs to dissolution in her brain. Chloe’s ankle grasped, the bitters of her empty mouth.
Daphnis touches the earth with his teeth, he grasps Chloe’s ankle … unrobed, yielding, frail day expires, inspires successive night. Torn desire descending to this, a child’s encounter beside the fecund sea. Chloe’s fingers soak up the blush from Daphnis’ sleeping cheek.
*********
[The Foreigner]I have slept at sea. I have guided my ship along a spinal wave and known that miles distant, palms crack in the black night, flung round with female limbs.
(A bound kerchief locks my tongue, let it lock hers.)
I have slept upon the sea, woken by stars I have risen to lighten my own course while the stars peep through my masts, bewitch my sleeping canvas, throwing rods of blackness across my eyelids of skin so that sometimes there was only my mind to tell me I had opened my eyes … having slept at sea, in utter loneliness.
*********
[Abduction]At the foot
of the dark mast,
still the deed is with me.
In the heart
of the paralyzed
city,
silver tower of
the lighthouse
hidden away.
No one sees
its flare
shower across
sudden waves,
noising shifted depths.
In the heart
of the paralyzed
city,
at the base
of the dark tamarind
a beacon
in a sheet
of moony rain
bursts,
head full of light,
flared like a
slit of fire
in the darkness,
its appearances regulated,
calculated, by the rhythms
of clattering wind.
The skin
hides a rich
delta of blood,
canals of desert
habitation, lush
islands like
a kiss.
Paralysis denies
itself hold,
knowing the feuds
and jealousies
of the body,
provisional flame
of a spirit
baffled by possession,
the swollen tongue
finds its rule,
its silence,
beyond any method
of love …
any but that
of the temple
that, dark and
swimming with terror,
bruises a midnight
city.
Smoldering fires
narrow with heat
(my will is that
of a foreigner,
by nature I am
apart, disengaged).
Sleeping flower
who I myself compose.
… Diana,
my cold fingers
upon the arc
of her mouth
-sleep …
La Jacinthe,
lashes like crystal,
the bird
of a dream
breaks glassy
in her throat,
what gentle echo? …
what fleshless light? …
nothing, none …
-sleep …
Chloe’s mirror,
Lykanion,
ant of blood
upon her knee,
Lykanion,
a single straw
lingers to her armpit,
the twisted ends
of her band
spread undone …
Tanaquil,
half beneath
her blanket
dreams in
delicate contortion …
dawn blows sweet and chill
but it is black …
Lykanion …
Tanaquil …
sleep
Chloe.
A tree stretches.
Nightbird cry.
Golden is it the day?
The dark tree sways,
knocks rootless to the ground,
like a suspended sea of hair.
Chloe sleeps
among her sisters’
perpetuated dreams.
Her arms full
of dormant night,
under my fingers
her wrists dissolve
like water …
I am ravishing
my sleeplessness tonight,
my swift kerchief
knots against her nape,
the ice behind her
pupils will melt
with the roll
of the tides
and my running feet find their way down to the shore.
*********
[Daybreak]These ancient legends will outlive her. Circles of water descend and rise, a shadow moves its bull-like form, its horns whiten into coral. These seas create myths: the horror of a dream Medusa (sunken, carnivorous eyes), long pale worms of hair to brush some sleeping sailor’s shoulder with a living sigh.
Does Chloe want to know them? Not from the shore, but from this floating deadly world. Oh!
But Daphnis …
Once, a virgin, by some demigod forced, threw herself into these waters, trailing yellow flowers like her hair that sank in silence out of sight. Today there is no wind. Windless dawn upon the clouded green-gray water. Soft surge of a turning fin, flowers swirl in the dark water, the surface branches swayed and hollow over the noiseless crashing of scudded tents of water, blue over gray over changeling green. This gray breaking increases Chloe’s thirst, her avid tongue and fingers drink the opening day, her memory of lies, dreams like jewelry, darkness softly stealing away. Hairbands and tunic fall away. Even the sky is not so pure, nor the echo of a sudden cry.
And has she been wounded?
…. Bitterly …
The waters will heal, their silence another ravishing.
Messenger waters, swept with her broken past. She washes her hands and feet in her new blood, washes her face with this morning’s rising wind, these desires that shade her eyes … o …. her fingers blush at some memory she cannot invoke. This gifted day, herself begotten, perfumed and lightly fleeced, and even the blue sky not so utterly naked.
*********
[Pantomime]That morning, whose cries did she hear?
Her nearly ancient mind swung like a necklace of bare brilliance and shattered. Her breakage was sufficient to pare the universe, probing its pregnant skin. Her mind, if now nearly ancient, sustained a separate and fellow death and yet the fold was still that of a child.
Like a shell
turned silently
upon the floor of a pool
his eyes opened
and looked upon my
frightened and closing eyes.
I fell like a dream
upon my bed,
under a swimming night
with his hand
upon my brow.
That night I drank
from a broken cup,
something rapped on the rattling window,
who’s there?
… but rap rap
just rap rap.
Petals fell
on the stream,
when the vine sprang loose
snow
flowered the sills.
Rain
from the mountains
blew over the sea,
slowly mounting
to white the bruised
and running combers
breaking onshore.
Torches
were lit
every hour.
Moths, bell-like moths, phalene, white fingers attendant on her words, calypsed her stained gown, the burst violet of her wounded mouth, under her tongue the tasted cream, perfumed descent to silver, her breasts moving as she breathed. The blond hair spoke, impotent, unnoticed on a pillow, gold pinnacle of filet, severed living self.
Raped moon … brilliant sun. The python’s skin split white, bone lake, split ashen.
What shade sought, the eyeless yews rolled their green hair, shaded a shame. She was there to greet the strange marina, turned and saw, waited on the beach to say Daphnis wed me, who began to tell another who went out with the tides as in a dream she had of shells in the lap of honor, statuette’s mercurial eyes, as taken from her home and flower and given something she could not fathom, its ends seen everywhere but its center nowhere to be seen. Her temples pressed in like a house in a storm. The smooth run of all her years die down and die away.
In deepening twilight Daphnis stares at silent Chloe.
**********
[Sea Journey / Spellbound]How softly the sea breathes.
What, fondled, is she? Never touching her glassy essence, her silence strips her invisible. How softly does her love seem? She cries blind and mute of a smoking city but they pass on. Pillars of smoke rise bleeding through the flock’s net panic. This is not their inheritance, yellow eyelids burning with disease or death’s heads that echo stuttering tongues ….
She cries blind -not for you no not for you, you’ve gone to bed with the sun …
Her voice like a soft crying wound slipping backwards up the sky.
Chloe is not looking in the mode of that look he knows so well, the nerveless, strangled, sexual look. He has not got that look and cannot, will not cultivate it.
A quarry long gone, dead of old age on someone’s shaded patio, the hunters still tensed in their blind. Recurrent ennui of approaching such a thing that would seem to breathe, to move with ease from one heart to the next, and yet remaining forever untouchable. When distant, what is now sordid, is simply distant. Daphnis is dependent on the fictions others tell him, not on the fictions he himself perceives, so he horrors his conjuring in a sweat, a nightmare of the socket filled with blood, an infinity of children and the promise, carried from an evil city like a plague, of death and unending birth.
-Spit out this disease, Chloe! Spit into my mouth! Look …
What great flock roars beneath the water’s surface? Eyes spun black like polished fire, pierced notes from reeded throats and sudden spilt blue of wings sliding through the quick eroding waves.
Rust spots the loose bracelet and onshore, with time, a sweeter grip.
*********
[Noces]Blood flows in dreamers’ beds.
A kiss sweetens on dreamers’ mouths.
The bridegroom dresses and goes out upon the steps.
The street either way is gray and wrapped in the silence
when hours are stopped. Sleepers do not hear the early winds
that flow among the gray trees.
Dark words, empty phrases garland their waiting hearts
where healing, hand with the rending nails, comes wrapped in night.
Wounds dull in the gray light where hours are stopped,
and memory vanishes or is changed, vanished.
The bridegroom shivers like a cat,
his hand pressed between his back and the closed door,
his wakefulness dissolving, like a star, under the softened murmur of the winds,
the sea.
**********
[Sleep]The girl dives under his Chloe-calling tongue, in the smoke of a wave she bids a final goodnight, arranges her pillow of hair. In a warm wave she spreads her wings from east to west, his heart beats against the opaque rose of her mouth. Flowered wave among the wind-touched waters, shadow kisses, the reverie of her lips. She breaks the papery skin, the dormant universe and tender barricade, and drawing from his body’s slender throat a note of pleasure that twists her own, receives the womb’s gift that spills and runs in limpid fingers, golden to her sleeping heart. A petal clings to his wet hip, a drop falls from his flank onto the earth. Nacreous beaded desert, in an orange garden petals cream thin circles on the water. Daphnis’ sleeping mouth effaces Chloe’s rose in the still and lightening room, beneath the veiled shroud of a slow and turning wave.
*********
[Fragments of a song]A fair and fatal king, in a wasteland sets his crown beneath
a tree
and exiled, seeks a virgin lap.
* * *
Pyramids in a scorpion’s garden are the bones of a sphinx,
where a mutilated god has passed, returning.