The Beauty and the Beast

I hope we can reach an accord.

A day unfinished.  Yet below that rice paper sky, the golden lava unfurled behind tangled silhouettes, and bled down.  Then, as inexplicable and vivid as a dream, all was glossed over by darkling velvet.  My breathing wrecked crisp bronze armadas of fallen leaves, sucked air from brittle ribcages of bracken; battered every veteran oaken spirit, drove meadows with shapeless oxen, while your step, a sprite’s footfall, less, fractured the smallest of twigs.  The tread, enchanting and ravenous as along a spider’s thread, popped in the woods as deadly and irrevocably as upon a snail’s shell. 

A simple beast.

You had lost your way in the rings and straights of tarmac you use that intersect these deep woods.  Cones of electric light and an industrial thrum caused a mischief in the canopy.  Bravely, for you, you crossed the bridge and knocked.  I had no map of course.  You entered my hunter’s lodge; happy to sit at the hearth of slate. 

You said it was my eyes.  First, rings of luminescent green.   Then, husky blue.  A permanent eclipse of pupil.  The eyes made you stay and drink tea after you got your phone out.  The eyes that made you spill your guts you later told me.  It was the woods that were enchanted.  More beautiful than any stained glass you had ever seen, fireworks that peeled in bronze and gold, hung by magic.  I never saw yours till they danced quickly off the herbs in the rafters and the hung fowl.  Only then you looked into my brute’s face, beard like knotted roots. 

You said there was a dappled tree with leaves of butter and crimson so it looked like a glowing ember.  I calmly smoked my pipe and watched this lithe, sophisticated creature, I saw mercurial intent lent by your kind of beauty that men die over.  Reaching me in height as you stood you wondered if you could come back and buy some pheasant.  Another day, stroking my face.  Retrospectively, the cruelest gesture, after invoking romance through noting the tounge-pink fairy chandeliers of Fuchsia.  The rotted mulch of the bridge stopped even the clip of your heels.  A sudden, lingering absence.

I knew already in my woods were no fireworks, artisan glass, bouncing dappled things.  The landscape was a butcher’s window of hung organs.  Here, the marmalade throat of red grouse, there the peanut and chocolate of the woodcock.  And those spurts of arterial red high into the air.  The fallen leaves as futile as out dated love letters.  From the cracked inner whorl of shell wind howled furiously through the darkness after you.

The next day the woods were fraught with the wild yip of a hunting animal.  Something large and powerful stalked silently through the undergrowth on stilted legs.  A horn had snapped against boughs the size of castle towers, where confused symbols were rutted into the bark with anguish.  Coming back, you told me it was my vulnerability that set you free.  In the back of the hut you sucked old wounds, willed hands around your throat.  The noblest creatures cry in blood.  By vulnerable you meant savage and thoughtless.        

By now you know not to trust my words; as mercenary as my teeth of carving knives; I just need more time. 

I went swimming in the marshes.  In clear, skull gnawingly cold and clear rapids.  Pale green dying tentacles of water crowfoot, lime locks of water butter cup that unfolded like underwater theatre.  Gleefully I swam, otter-slick, in decadent rivers I might have passed underneath Ophelia; eyes open, upstream like Rasputin.

The intensity of it scares me.                

As though, after meeting a needle faced pike, thigh thick, with a head as savage as a mace that I sank my teeth into, I could kick my flippers and infiltrate your city house through the dripping tap that keeps you on edge.  Or, like pawns, position the trees in your landscaped garden an inch closer night by night.                    

I wonder what our children will be like?  You would make such a good father.

Was the last thing you ever said to me.  And now, imprisoned in the delicate web of affection, close as night, shivering and squirming, like a trapped creature I devour the parts of me that blossomed under your touch. 

Forgiveness is such a bloody business.