a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
The
wildness in her father, that glimmer in his eyes that has long lost the shine of mortality, whispers to her as the forest whispers to the wolves. She can hear the echo of him, of the black shadows beneath his words, in the places where her soul is only a leaf trapped in a thunderstorm. He has never needed to tell her what his soul feels for each piece of her is a newborn echo of his. Each seed, each root, each rotten thing upon which a flower-head grows, is a dull and poisoned reflection of his. She has enough of her mother in her, enough of rot and death and magic, to know that she can never be quite as holy or as bones-of-the-earth as he is. And perhaps, when he weaves those bloody and black flowers (death colors, she thinks, for the dead queen), she realizes that she does not have to be bright, be holy, be softer, to be something to the court.
He touches her brow and his kiss, his petal-soft kiss, is all it takes for her to unfold as a bear from a den in spring.
“The forest is not gentle in the dawn.” Her bloody eyes look out past the music, past the castle, past her city to the looming monster of the dark woods. When she brushes her shoulder to her father’s, and the gates crack around them like ribs in one of her sister’s slain, she smiles. “I will not be a meadow dusted in dew or a vine gilded in frost.” Perhaps there is a little bit of the desert in her too, when her voice turns to the moan of a sand-storm just rising against the horizon to blot out the noon.
She does not ask the morning to make a forest of her. No unicorn knows how to ask even though a daughter should.
The music rises around them and there are no doves, no golden crown waiting for her on the other side of her city, no precious metal throne waiting in the belly of the castle. All she has, all she needs, are the flowers woven in her horn by a new-god (her father-god). All she needs are the color of life-blood and death reflecting in her eyes when she looks up and traces the gilded horizon with her horn like it’s a map line.
Her eyes are ablaze with those ever present dregs of sorrow, and hunger left behind by Isolt in the womb, and a glimmer of a dead-leaf fragile with death that she’ll never grow out of. It is perhaps the first time, the very first time, she has looked at her father with the eyes of something more than a promise. This, this look of hers that reflects his war-colored flowers upon her mother’s horn, is a pledge.
It is a unicorn that dips her head to Ipomoea and not a daughter.
The gates crack closed as they pass through and all she can think of is the way it sounds like Isolt’s horn running through a jawbone. There is still that unicorn look in her eyes when she stutters her steps like a frail heart so they are side-by-side. “I do not think we will ever be beautiful in the way a garden is. I don’t think we know how.” Because even here, shoulder to shoulder, she is not an I. Danaë, even lost as a buried blue jay, will always be a we.
Danaë is a pack of wolves running through the dirt and roots. Danaë is a wendigo howling for a hunt in the belly of the birches. Danaë is a bramblebear with wisteria eyes whittling down the innards of a mountain lion into wood learning to be art. Danaë is every owl-feather shed from a wing like a star shed from the sky.
Danaë is every grotesque thing in the forest that only a unicorn, only a father, would call beautiful.
“I dream,” and the way she says dream seems more like vow than anything living in the darkness, “that every time you come back to the morning there is something new for you to wonder at. I dream that the gardens will all bloom in the eyes of the forest creatures because dirt alone could not hold the beauty of the flowers. I dream that the forest will grow legs, and horns, and run through the city like a pack of wolves.” And this time, when she lays her ear against her father’s cheek she can hear every dune in the desert begging to become something new. She wonders how she never heard it before.
The garden gate towers in their wake like a tree line made of steel and ahead of them, as she waits for her father to lead her towards the dream, the crowd turns their head like stags, and rabbits, and owls, and trees arching before a howling wind.
“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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