Artemis

Artemis hangs her hand off the bed and traces a vine on my wall.  It pries itself from the paper in little spasms and creeps to the ceiling where it flowers.  She buys cigarettes to light and let lie; she says she likes the smell of humans.  A linear callus stretches from the crook in her arm to the bones at her wrist; it is the print of her bow.  There is a hunter in my bed.

I sing to Artemis because she already has everything but my voice.  She brings my harvest.  Some nights I find leaves in her hair and I laugh as I pull them out and am jealous for the way she knows the forest.  I know the season by the smell of her skin.  I know the anger or contentment of the moon by the way she drops her quiver, the quickness with which she stows her knife when she comes home to me.  Some nights she remains alone on our screen porch, face to the night's glow, a hand rested ready atop arrow and blade on our little coffee table.  There are darkly shrouded corners in her that I have not turned yet.

During our first night together I glimpsed miles of earth, blooming with life, just inside her eyes, a race across a planet, blue-canopied fields of wheat, and gardens hanging over mountain lakes which pulse and glow as her breaths gain weight. I saw the wild in her and chased it.  Once her eyes close, and together we bring sounds from her chest, I smell the history of the prairie on her breath, hear stories of the greatest lightning that land can remember.  When she claws my back, she kicks up the cool dust of summer grasslands under gentle rain, our bones rattle in the thunder and we shout in awe of it all.  I want to show her that a man can go with her to those clouds.

We are both restless.  She is fierce and impatient.  She jumps to defend the frail bodies of her domain, the delicate fingers of the grasses and reeds and young trees.  I withdraw to the mountaintops, where her wilderness ends, where her crops cannot go, where the earth balds and where men and gods look into one another equally.  It is there I remind myself not to chase even goddesses without pause.  Artemis and I tremble often in our bed.  We have unearthed an existence, we fully believe, whose majesty deserves moans of pleasure, and tears of gratitude, and the trembling of minds that finally see.  We are the harvest, she tells me, we are the wild.

2 comments:

  1. There is such ambience to your writing. I would like to see what you'd white about me...

    ReplyDelete
  2. god this is good. I want to hear you read it aloud.

    ReplyDelete