Ondine
“Listen! listen! it’s me, it’s Ondine who’s flicking these droplets of water at your window panes, pale hollows lit with the moon’s anemic light, and here, do you see her? the lady of the castle in her silk gown, contemplating from her balcony, the starladen night above the sleeping lake.
Each wavecrest is a nymph who swims the current, each current a watery path snaking towards my palace, my palace so fluidly built upon the bottom of the lake, in the triangle of fire, earth, and air.
Listen! listen! – my father thrashes the frog-voiced water with a branch of green alder, and my sisters caress with their foaming limbs the little floating islands of wild grass, water-lilies and gladiola, and tease the willow, swarthy and bearded, fishing with hook and line.”
Her song murmured softly away, and she begged for my finger to fill her ring, to be the husband of Ondine, to swim with her down to her palace, there to be the king of the lakes.
And when she heard me answer that I loved another, a mortal, she sulked and pouted, shed a few tears, then burst out laughing and dissolved in showery spray, spilling herself in white streams down my blue window panes.
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The Gallows
What is it I hear, the squeak of a nocturnal kiss, or the hanged man, sighing softly on his sinister wooden fork?
Could that be some cricket who sings, hidden in the moss and dying ivy which creeps down the wood in its pity?
Could it be some fly on the hunt, sounding its horn, its fanfare and hurrah all around those deaf ears?
Might it be a beetle, erratic in its flight, weighed down by a blood-tipped hair, borne upon its own bald skull?
It is the clock which tolls within the walls of a city over the horizon, and the carcass of a hanged man which blushes the setting sun.
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Scarbo
Oh, how many times have I heard and seen him, that Scarbo, when towards midnight the moon beacons in the sky like a silver coin on an azure banner, seamed with golden bees.
How often have I heard the droning of his laughter in the shadows of my study, the sound of his fingernails sliding over the silk canopy of my bed.
How many times have I seen him drop from the ceiling, pirouette on one foot and somersault across the room like a spindle knocked from a witch’s loom.
And when I imagined him evaporated, the dwarf would loom between the moon and me like the belfry of a Gothic cathedral, tiny golden bell tinkling on the tip of his pointed hat.
But soon enough his body would begin to shade with blue, translucent as candle wax, his face turning pale as a night-light – and just as sudden, he would fade away.