Courting the flames you seek over water
SK Grout
“Where are you going? You will bring conflagration back with you. How great the flames
are that you are seeking over these waters, you do not know.”
(Cassandra to Paris. Ovid, Heroides 16,120).
Helen:
I arrive under the protection of a man
newly minted in his bronzed armour and
white-night hubris. I glide through vaulted rooms
on the apostatizing smiles and salutations of
new supplicants, words like red garnets rolling
from their mouths. I am their greatest crown;
but, like all infallible, sparkling gifts,
I am filled with the blood of others. I am
a siren call, a battle, a journey across
the white-crested waves. A serpent-tongued
future yet to be determined; for now, just
night’s fingers stirring my prayerful ones from sleep’s
pretence. Into midnight, only she stares lit awake.
Only she meets me halfway in the darkness.
Cassandra:
Only she meets me halfway in the darkness,
my brother’s weapon, my brother’s wife.
The face of beauty that I dare to find
ill-favoured, the radiant brilliance when I see
shade, and yet, and yet, she stirs a tremble
in my heart that I never before fathomed,
stark and different from the blood, falling
down the walls like fishes’ tails serrated, when
I close my eyes, when I speak my mind. We
draw lines toward each other like a
perfect parallelogram forever opposite
and opposing; but, because there is night, what
has always been will point to one end and
we kiss, not in dreams, or future, but in present.
30
Cauldron Anthology