Persephone

Abstract

Persephone BRIAN SNEEDEN Again she goes aground, seeking love in the mouths of the little fish nibbling the vein-blue toes of the shipwrecked. Death being male marries the body. Her white hand dripping on the oar as the ferryman, whistling Dixie, remarks, but hasn’t she come here before? Enough times perhaps to memorize the iridescent sky of the underground, or how the last breath repeats into the back of the throat, moth-winged, or the pivot the blood makes to interfere with the act, as if his memory were a thing, like a spearhead, the body could dislodge. Now she sees it appear on the water: the tower made of ash and teeth: the crowning minarets positioned above stately double doors, and the nearly perceptible stillness beneath. arion 22.1 spring/summer 2014 Yet having these, the decomposing wealth of the aeons he summons her from the gaze of heaven, tasked with the impossible: to be a wife in the place where nothing lives. Death being male marries the body, but only to mine is he faithful. For the first thousand years she watches his breathing in the night and feels something, not love, a sort of grief that hardens into a body and becomes hers, sneaking out to the libraries in order to learn the language of the earthworms, to become, if nothing else less a tourist. But all they said was My Lady, not My Lady, when did you realize that you would never be free? For five thousand years she wore his body so well that she saw it in all things: stars, moon, persephone 104 their reflection on the iridescent sky, and pretended that the beauty of her sorrow was enough. Now she enters the widening hall of her home, descending the stairs past the multiple colored layers with her just-pubescent feet vanishing on the marble as far above the ocean a gate of winds opens, hinges smooth as the first winter, and I toss awake to a chill in the bed sheets and the howling of some distant dog. Brian Sneeden 105 ...