Early Valentine's Day Writing

A Horse and Her Boy

                We were formed from the earth by the hands of some God, form made flesh, for the sole purpose of inhabiting one another. This, despite the fact that we are distinct, separate, she was born in the hills—lark songs, aspen and evergreens shedding needles like soft bits of rain, hillsides clothed in bluebells—splashes of color above the heather and the electric green. I grew up in the valley, in a small house made of thatch and mud. In the evenings we clapped the metatarsals of sheep together to pass the time beneath the stars.

My parents are against the match, as all parents throughout history have been against matches that are neither profitable nor useful for attaining land or nobility. In the evening, I sit before the fire and confess my love of her. My mother stares through a hole in the thatch to a sliver of sky, gilded by stars and sighs, “It would be fine,” she says, knitting her fingers together and looking skyward again, “If you were not a boy, and she was not a horse,” as if such things mattered between those who love.

Yesterday, the hills were veiled in fog, and I wandered up the muddy path to meet her. We wandered together, she nickering, and I listening intently, into a field littered with every color imaginable—avenas, cloudberry, campions, and gorse. To live in a world comprised of such beauty is a gift that we cannot repay.

My father was silent for a time, and then he spoke, gravely, “You know that she’ll die well before you,” he said, his eyes now wandering into the fire to make out shapes or nothing. I tell him that I know that it’s true, but that I’m ready for it, for to have lived, even a short time, with just such a love, is enough to keep me filled for a lifetime.

We are Composed of Water

Olive light

Sea grass floating

On the dunes

Laughter, as if from far away

A crossing of elbows,

navel, kissed intently

Sand, cold and wet

A division of clothes

Spoils of many a war

Waves keeping time

As they did in Troy and will do eternally

Sand, purpled in light

Sea gulls low on low horizons

An attempt at a joining,

 a gasp and a cry

all to understand the movement

Between bodies of water

A Love Affair

The young girl, being young, having once bestowed her love, attributed to the man on which she’d given her love, all the perfections, that she, without consciously knowing why, ascribed to love. She did not know yet, as many older people do, that love itself is flawed—a diamond cut through with imperfections.

Her lover was imperfect, though she suspected that this feeling of love that she carried within her, monstrous and all-consuming was incapable of faults. For his part, the beloved was a drunkard, who on certain nights preferred her to other women. Most nights, in fact I’m speaking of those nights when he drank deeply and intensely, which was quite often, he preferred other women, who laughed more frequently, or spoke more eloquently, or invited him to their bed more readily. Though really, to be quite honest, what he preferred to all of this was the idea of himself as an individual, a lost seafarer on the swift seas of life. This mystery figure was only really present when he was deep in drink and isolation.

One evening, made pleasant by a warm breeze brought inland that had a faint scent of jasmine, so rare in this city by the seas, he made an offhand remark about preferring the hair of a woman they’d had dinner with the night before, an opera singer, black haired and pale skinned. This remark, though fairly innocuous, for some unknown and unknowable reason, as I’m sure you’re familiar with as a living and breathing entity upon this strange earth, shattered the crystalline dream of love that she’d been carrying around—a fragile globe in her mind. And up in its place something new grew, stiffer and stronger, like the bark of an aged tree.

In two months he’d be in the hospital for his liver and she’d have sailed on to Ireland, where she’d become a nanny, a school teacher, a poet, and a politician before she settled back down for her declining years in that city by the sea. All the while recalling in memory when he said he’d preferred the hair of another lady, and everything changed.