by Tegan Blackwood
Summers were when I saw you often and alone.
For long you feared to enter me, and would walk beside me only,
Always with an emptiness in the heart of your smile,
Some knot in you that would not yield to my teasing.
And long I wooed you,
Calling you back and back from your high towers
To see the gleam of me under the sun and the moon,
The golden sand suspended on my curving silhouette.
You knew me in laughter and in quiet repose
According to your need, not mine.
I let my native power fall away and haunt the depths to which you would not reach,
So that you might find me fair, and clear as glass.
I sang to you of my warmth, and how I might caress you,
How you could slip within me and feel me fit your every crook
As if made in your mold, for your vessel.
Yet still you sighed and looked from me,
Still you heard the other song, that echoed by night from your stony chambers,
Of the height of your imposing towers, and how
They rested not to feel the moon on them, but climbed and reached to meet it.
Finally you came, in a summer twilight, quiet as was your way,
Though I always perceived you—
Came near against the edge of me and felt me moving there,
And let me take you.
You were naked, and the sun’s last rays
Glinted from my belly and your shoulder as I bore you
Through the rippling valleys and steep white peaks of love,
And laid you soft upon its other shore.
Then I sang, from my own heart, and joy burst hot and careless from within.
When morning rose, I thought you slept, and laid myself beside you:
I exhaled, and flung out my opalescent body on the sand.
Now I fear that I am scorned.
I think you do not care anymore for the play of the light on my soft strands.
While I slept in the sun,
You slipped from me and went away without a sound,
Beyond where I may follow.
Now I think you have gone back to your tall towers, and will not look on me again.
Tell me how I wronged you,
For I meant always to take the greatest care.
When you came to me, I never would let any tooth graze your smallest toe,
Or any passions of mine disturb your troubled reveries.
I was content to hold you.
If my embrace was too strong, I would have loosed you,
Knowing you were never mine to keep.
But look now:
My gentleness is spent, wasted and dead.
I churn and boil with the fury of my grief.
Madly I whip myself and howl so that even the sun fears to fall on me,
And if you would only look, you would wonder,
Although it is your doing, how one who loved you once could be so changed,
Her soft shapes torn to jagged, lancing tongues.
You did not know what force I held from you;
Still less, that I had the force to hold it, and so well. Look!
My wrath has rent my walls of stone
As I would rend yours, you keepers of towers, if you were not too much in fear
To place them in my grasp!–
And I have gnawed the witless men who dare trespass upon me,
And spewed their bleaching bones before your door,
But still you do not darken it.
Among your great shouldered pillars you do not hear me anymore.
You will not come forth even to taste the salt of my tears.
But come, love.
You have known me when I was not as I am.
There is nothing in me for you, of all, to fear.
Tell me how I have wronged you, or berate me as you want,
Only walk beside me as you did,
And I will make my face fair and clear again.
I will not sing when you yearn for silence,
And if I yearn, myself, to feel you in me once more,
My voice will never speak it.
I will leave your knot undone.
Only sit with me, sit still with me one night,
And let the soft moon shine on both as one,
Or leave me, barren, to swallow my tears alone.
It is as you will.
Tegan Blackwood lives in Indianapolis, IN, with her fiance, three cats, and two children. Her poetry has appeared in The Hamilton Stone Review, The Write Launch, Revolute, and Sky Island Journal. In 2020, she received Sequestrum’s New Writer Award for Poetry.