a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
E
ach golden dust of pollen catching in the sunlight spearing through the clouds makes Danaë feel like a unicorn materializing. When the pollen gathers on her nose she feels like both the hive and the flower hungry to devour up tilled earth. The mist rolling in from the distant sea makes her feel like a root watered and unfurling deep into the belly of the earth. Sunlight, when it gatherers like golden and silver fire in her horn, turns her into something more corporeal than a ghost. She feels alive, and wanting, and more than a shard of the dead waiting to be put back together and swallowed up by life. And it feels dangerous, so very dangerous, to be a furiously alive unicorn instead of one with a black and rotten noose around her horn.
Life is still coursing violently, cruelly, through this materialized version of her when he finds her again. The sound of his voice sparks a memory, a reminder, and a soft warning tap of hunger against the insides of her ribs. But she is not the same unicorn who saw beauty in the eyes of gone-to-war marble horses today.
Today she is in the sunlight. Her horn is a telescope of brightness and all she can see is light, light, light across the rotten tulips that mark where her sister has wandered once more out of reach. And maybe, just maybe, she feels a little like Isolt who wants the whole world when she turns her pollen dusted hive and bloom nose towards him.
She does not tell him that she is never alone. Only boys, things not yet materialized ask such things of her. Are you alone? Are you art? Are you lost, lost, lost? All their words are nothing more than more particles of mist rolling in from the sea to water the flowers (forgotten but for the way a bloom uses them to make beauty).
The black rot whispers at her hooves like Isolt might and tries to hurry her along. But she is too full of life not to linger here, with him and a voice too princely for her to care for it. “I can only grow flowers from the death of yours.” Her voice is an echo of that desert in the night voice, the one he had used with her that night, and a hint of her own whisper of birch on birch in the wind.
When she cleaves off the heads of the last of his tulips this far from the planted rows of them, and digs up the new-grass so only the charred winter grass remains, her mouth curls in an echo of his when a garden starts to grow.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
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