a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
D
anaë finds herself caught between pegasus and sea so tightly that for a moment, an inhale and exhale of the forests in her lungs, she cannot tell where the shoreline and featherline divide. She cannot tell the gilded gold of a tine from the gilded gold of a frothing wave dusted in the sunrise. In her dreaming she had not felt like the thing divining difference but like a thing that is divine-- divine and nothing else. The distance between them turns to bird-wing and she cocks her head like the brother gull as she counts the spaces between the girl’s ribs. Perhaps, she thinks, she had been too eager to be sorrow instead of hunger. Perhaps she had been as hasty as a gull with a pearl in her throat. “Oh.” She says with a trace of the forest in her voice, a shiver of a wind through a tall pine just starting to lean. “I had been dreaming of the sea.” And it’s to the sea that she moves, opening up a bird-wing to a dragon-wing.
Against her hooves the sea feels cold as tears and just as cold as the war in her mother’s steps when she walks through the gardens. She can feel the seaweeds trying to plant themselves into her marrow like she is more shoreline than unicorn. And she wonders, when she looks at the girl over her shoulder, if the salt in the waves is to heal the wound in the dark deep of it or to make it ache, and sting, and fester.
It feels like a silly thing, a mortal thing, to smile and so she only keeps that dead-look softness on her lips. Wind whistles through the curls of her horn, a sonnet of some horizon’s rage below the whispering pine of her voice. “I think I was the sea. But my crown was not the sunrise and my tide was not low enough to give back all the ship skeletons and whale skulls.” She blinks, slow as a risen when it learns that it must walk before running and that its rosebud lips know no language but bumblebees. “What do you think it meant?” She asks. But she does not need to, not when her tongue feels sweet as a rosebud against her teeth.
Danaë already knows what the dream-sea was trying to tell her. Just as she already knows she will try not to listen again.
And again. And again. And again.
“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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