a close reading of sonnet 116

Paris had kissed her again, on that beach--her mouth warm and her hand at Rory's waist. It was a languid kiss, alcohol-slow and nice, unexpected, unexpecting.

You're my best friend, you know, Paris had said when she pulled away. She had been very serious and Rory couldn't help laughing, because it seemed funny--Paris there, with the whole ocean reflected in her eyes and saying things like you're my best friend. 

Paris had looked hurt, until Rory fell back against the sand, still giggling, and said, I know, Paris. I know. You're my friend too.

They didn't talk about it, and Rory never told anyone. She was still shaking sand from her hair, a week later.

.

(Remember when we hated each other? they say sometimes, like those were other people, in another country. Characters from the yellowed diaries of distant relatives--Paris, brittle and belligerent, all armor and teeth; Rory, uncertain and reserved, so careful not to transgress. Strangers, wearing their faces.

Other times, Rory has to remind herself that she had a whole life before Chilton, a full cast of characters and rich plot, and absolutely no Paris-shaped hole in her story. She hadn't been some princess asleep in a glass coffin, waiting for a short blonde knight to ride up and shout at her until she woke up, and took the reins of her own life.

Because Rory just forgets, sometimes, a little.)

ten things Lancelot never said to Arthur

I. 
Whatever the poets say, he did not love Guinevere at first seeing her. 

II.
(That had come later, when he was keeping vigil at Bors’ bedside after a hunt gone terribly wrong—she was still his queen then, known only distantly through the veils of polite deference. But still Guinevere came, and sat with Lancelot at his cousin’s beside.

He could not remember what they spoke of, in whispers, what bent their heads together, only the way the candlelight touched her mouth, and he had loved her, after.)

III.
Their first kiss had been a startled, shy thing, stolen behind a tourney tent. It had not felt like treason.

He had lost every bout that day, still trembling.

IV. 
He’d pretended, that night. To be a little more unsteady on his feet than he was, to slur his words more thickly. Arthur’s arm had been too warm, too heavy where it rested across Lancelot’s shoulders (to keep you from straying, Arthur had laughed, and Lancelot had forced himself to laugh too, and not tremble.) It had been too easy to stay, to watch the others retire from the hall, until it was just a king and his knight beside the dying fire, talking of nothing especially.

Arthur’s arm was still warm and heavy at Lancelot’s shoulders.

The firelight had burnished Arthur’s eyelashes red-gold, and Lancelot had not been able to keep himself from leaning forward and kissing the corner of Arthur’s mouth. (That had not felt like treason either.)

Arthur had smiled a slow, languorous smile, and patted his cheek. You are very drunk, my friend, he said. You should to bed.

And Lancelot had gone, alone.

Cassandra (Greek Mythology)

α. Apollo is there when she wakes, crouched down beside her in the sand of an unfamiliar shore. Her throat aches from where Clytemnestra drew the knife across it, though she does not know that then—only the ache when she breathes. (It is the one scar that will never heal; the blade went too deep, the hand the wielded it struck too true.)

I was dead, she says to the god, who is watching her with eyes like the unforgiving sun. 

No, he answers. You will never die. I’m sorry.

They are both lying, of course. (It is an old game.) Still, Apollo helps her to her feet, and she feels his eyes on her as she walks away, down the sand.

.

β. The centuries wax and wane, she dies. She is never dead. The Sibyls pity and shelter her, until there are no more Sibyls. Then she is alone.

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γ. She takes holy vows, pledging herself to the upstart god who swallowed her pantheons and spit out ruins, calling them empty. But the sisterhood of holy women is the same as it was in Ilion’s bright temple, and she clings to that, murmuring idolatrous prayers during vespers.

She writes hymns to a god who burns forever those who deny him, and she can hear echoes of her native tongue in her sisters’ praise—ekstasis, they say, and mustikos.

Her prophecies of death and destruction, unheeded, turn to ash on Viking pyres, along with her sisters. (She does not know their nameless god—not as she knows Athena, who revenged her against Ajax, or Apollo, whose immortal curse she wears. But she prays to the Christian god for their sake, that he might look after his dead as kindly Hades did.)

She goes north. Above her, the sun is bright, and shameless.

.

δ. They burn her as a witch in the 17th century, in Trier. She wonders, as the flames flay her skin from her bones, if this is what it would have felt like to lie with a god who was also the sun. 

The smoke from her own flesh chokes her, but she can still see him in the crowd, golden and smirking.

I was raised to gather courage

I. 
There will be other children, Finduilas reassures Denethor, as he brushes his fingertips through the soft, dark hair on his daughter’s pate. We will have sons. I have dreamed of sons.

II.
Her childhood is a litany of be still and be quiet—her nurse claims she must have orch blood, for no daughter of Men would run wild through Minas Tirith, tearing her skirts and tracking mud through Merethrond. It becomes a common sight, the Steward’s granddaughter with her dark hair coming loose of its plaits, a long-suffering guard trailing half the corridor behind.

You should have called her Haleth, Ecthelion told Denethor once, when she had to be pulled off the cook’s son. (She had found him harrying one of the palace’s old mousers with a sharpened stick, and when he would not stop at her word, she had given him another reason.) She may be of the House of Húrin, but that girl is reckless and wild as a chieftain of the first age.

She does not remember when their indulgence began to run cold, when be still and be quiet became expected, inviolable. She does not remember when she chose to surrender to it. Only that she woke, and found herself drowning.

III.
She does not weep, when her lady mother is laid to rest in that grey house on the silent street. Faramir’s hand is small and hot in hers, and Father will not turn his gaze on them, not even when Faramir begins screaming and has to be taken away by his nurse. But she is the lady of Minas Tirith now, she cannot scream and beat her fists for her mother, shut up forever in lightless stone. 

She wanted to rest by the sea, she tells her uncle Imrahil, who rode all day and night to sit by his sister’s deathbed and hold her cold, limp hand. He has not wept either. She wasn’t—she wanted to sea. It made her sick, wanting the sea.

Her uncle looks at her for a long moment, before touching her cheek gently and saying, You have her eyes.

(They will say she is a hard-hearted girl, after. She did not weep for her mother, her heart is a stone.)

there's this girl

there’s this girl.

.

you remember the daughters of men who enticed your brothers to fall, in those early days of mankind. They had been beautiful—women of salt and rain, of little vanity and no hesitation. The daughters of men were born with horizons in their eyes and hearts that sang; they wove the priestly garment without needle, learned Sarai’s laughter. (and the fruit of the tree was pleasing to the eye…)

your brothers had forsaken everything for them, in the end.

and you had pitied them.

.

she will be fourteen, all coltish limbs and half-tamed hair, when she kisses you—a swift, daring thing, her lips pressed to your lion’s maw. (she had asked you to kneel, down and down again, and she had gone up onto her toes, and somewhere between the rising and the falling…)

she leaves behind a faint slick of strawberry lipbalm and something older, sweeter, like crushed apples.

oh, child, you breathe.

I wanted to know, she says, and there is defiance in the set of her shoulders. okay? I wanted to know.

she grabs her backpack from where she left it on the concrete and takes flight, her sneakers hitting the pavement like an afterthought of wings.

psyche/eros

there’s a god in the dark and he’s got a hand between your thighs,
the snare of his teeth around a breath, as though it might stir
the dry and moveless air of temples. He calls you Leda
sometimes, or Danae, Europa—Ganymede, when he is drunk—
it runs in the family, you think, but then

what accounts for the sweetness of human beings, that wild
self-directed longing that makes even divinity
kneel, and press its ear to our chests, trying to hear
some note half-forgotten, a yes so brief. Or maybe

the sound of the sea in that cavernous space, tumultuous
breathless; waves coming and going on the lure of an eye,
a lip. Being so caught up,
                                      in the press of his fingers that you
forget shrine and grove and oracle, the pale poet, dreaming;
you are threaded through his mouth, and every time he opens it
your name will come spilling out with the lamp-light.