a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
B
etween the earth and the creatures of the earth (those made from it) there is an intimacy that no cloud, no star, no rainbow that fades to nothing across the horizon, can understand. It lives between the root and flower, the dirt and the hoof inch deep in it. In each breath of the earth when the wind howls through the too-tall pines there is a new deepness that forms in that intimacy. Danaë, as she watches his feathers shine like diamonds in the sunlight, knows that Aenas’s blood (deeper than the cells) is too light-as-air to understand the weight of every stone, every mountain, every root-system more alive than all their mortal cities. And when she smiles her secret smile as she shapes the one he had worn into something too heavy to fly on her lips, knows that he can’t hold that either.
Her eyes sting when she looks at the corpses of the flowers. “They were not dead when you picked them. Your flowers were in agony but not dead, not until me.” Nothing in her body strains towards him. Instead she steps deeper into the roses, and bone-white tulips, and daffodils blooming from the winter grass that had ached below the spring grass. Each petal whispers against her legs with stories of the meadowlark and the red fox waiting just below their shadows. There is not a single flower that whispers to her of boys with stardust in their eyes and blackholes in their chests.
The earth is not concerned with those sorts of birds.
A forest does not live in him and so when she lifts her head from the beauty of the blooming dead-grass, she does not expect him to understand when she says, “Tell me which of us is the killer and which of us is mercy.” And it is a mercy when she tilts her horn to the sun instead of to that fragile bottom of his eye.
A black rose grows higher than the others as it reaches for all the cosmic energy in his blood. It tries to touch him where Danaë is too in love with the earth to think of it.
“When you know the answer to that you’ll know better than to ask me if my magic makes me sad.” The meadowlark sings through her throat and the clever fox watches him through her eyes. In between their broken chests a seed spore starts to grow tiny, and too frail to break through the soil.
And Danaë feels the agony of that spore too, as it struggles to stay far, far from the peace of death.
“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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