Art and Loneliness - and Vacation

I was recently pondering the pop cultural connection between art and madness: The concept of the mad (usually starving) artist has its corollary in the neat mapping out of various psychological diagnoses onto long dead artists: Emily Dickinson was depressed, and Dostoevsky may have suffered from schizophrenia…the list goes on.

This seems to be paralleled by a pop-cultural connection between prophecy and madness: Cassandra's prophecies were seen as madness, where in the Bible, prophets are constantly being taken for crazy people, and thus, their words go unheeded.

This seems to have continued in the Middle Ages, when there was a connection between seizures, fits of madness, and prophecy/religious truth. This phenomena has been documented by Foucault, and, as a college professor taught me, adds an interesting dimension to Dostoevsky's "The Idiot". Even in the Bible, in the book of Samuel 1, Saul is seized by a sort of fit that causes him to prophecy*.

I think that in popular imagination, the madness of the artist, who has replaced the prophet in the modern, secular world, is deeply tied to unhappiness. The malady most attributed to artists is depression, and the image of them is one of lonely starvation in an attic.

Recently, I wondered: If I were 100% satisfied in every area of my life, would I still be able to write? That question scared me. Was I merely buying in to pop culture? And did the answer matter - after all, I plan on continuing to pursue optimal satisfaction in my life no matter what. I realized however, that the answer may be that humans can never be 100% satisfied - even if you achieve something, you will always strive for the next level - it is part of our nature, and it what keeps us going. Of course, from an evolutionary perspective, this means we have a strong drive for survival, which is good for the spreading of our genes. From a religious perspective however, the Rav Soliveitchik saw this aspect of human nature as part of man's divine mission, which he outlined in "Lonely Man of Faith".

Loneliness and art seem also to be related; perhaps because to create art, you must recede inside of yourself, at least while you are creating. On the other hand, the act of creation can make you feel more deeply connected - to yourself, to God, to others.**

I keep thinking of this line from Lev Grossman's "The Magicians". I do not have the book on me, so I will have to paraphrase: A student asks his teacher why the students of the school develop the ability to do magic, and the teacher replies that it is loneliness. To me, at least, magic in the book is a metaphor for art, but especially for the art of writing, and this scene resonated with me more than I care to admit.

On an unrelated note, I will be traveling, God willing, from May 24 through July 5th, and may not update the blog during that time. Thank you for reading, and I hope to update when I get back. Have a marvelous summer, full of beauty and adventures.

* See verse 10: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt08a10.htm
** Hence part of my hesitations about blogging, or rather, about creating for a blog: How much can you be inside your interior world when you are conscious of the cyber gaze?

Menage a Trois

The opera curtain's red matched the velvet of her dress, and I could not help but admire the pearls that sat demurely by the nape of her neck, where her hair was gathered into some sort of bun-thing that she had a fancy name for.

Never had the soprano's voice sounded so fine, as Violetta sang of parties and passion, spilling her notes like fine wine, and I felt like the evening was a merlot that I was sipping, slowly, one stolen caress at a time, facing the repudiating glances of the people sitting next to us, as my fingers crawled up her thigh, while Violetta continued to bemoan the fate of one in love, and I pondered which bar we would go to afterward, and pictured her fallng, naked, into the silken sheets of our hotel - even better, falling naked with Violetta, played tonight by a sumptious blonde - an unconventional choice, I am sure, though I don't know much about opera.

That was always Debra's passion, not mine. Debra had many passions - poetry, art, human rights - or were they hobbies? The lines seemed to blur, as Sunday afternoons became taken up with rallies and poetry readings. "Don't you have anything you care about?", she had asked, me, shortly after our second date, but I didn't - or at least, not the way she did, her head thrown back, hair bobbing up and down her neck as she shook her head with excitement, eyes glistening, looking the way skin does when its covered in after-sex sweat. "You have enough passion for both of us", I often said, but she would just shake her head and go back to making French toast or folding the laundry.

That night, on the way out of the opera, hands entwined, standing on a maroon carpet beneath a chandelier that glittered like the moonlight, I felt a palm on the back of my shoulder. I turned around, only to feel a blonde girl with green eyes wedge herself in the space between us, to see her kiss my girlfriend passionately on the lips, and I was close enough to touch her thighs.

"Carry, darling! It's been ages - you must join Mitch and me for drinks. It's ok Mitch, isn't it?" I was too shocked to say no, really, even as I saw the naked silk sheets dream being delayed, right in front of me. Debra had never mentioned a lesbian past. As she and Carry chatted like a pair to teenage girls, I numbly followed, trying to recollect - ah, she had mentioned a college friend, Carry. Of course, I had made out with some of my college friends - but they had all been of the opposite gender.

The bar was dark, and reminded me of the speak-easys from old movies. I half-expected to be served by men in white tuxedos, with finely polished shoes. Instead, the waiters seemed to be bored college students, trying to get by. That's what happens when you go to a bar near NYU, I suppose.

Somewhere near the second round of vodka martinis, I stopped trying to follow the conversation. I was vaguely aware of laughing, and could see Debra's hair falling loose around her face. "Kiss me", she said, and I did.

I must have been pretty drunk by the time the three of us ended up in our hotel room. I remember seeing them, arm against arm, breast against breast, followed by a vague impression of bodies hauling up against my own.

When I woke up the next morning, I was on my own. I stumbled to the dresser, trying to ignore the pounding headache that was taking over my body. I squinted at the note: "Breakfast with Carry. You're very drunk. Order coffee. Love, Deb."

So I did, and sipped my way back into sanity, followed by a shower that was refreshing in that special way that only hotel showers can be - maybe because you know each second of water is part of the hundred dollars you are paying for a room. Humans value things that they are told are valued - and what other way to tell you your shower is valued than to make you pay a hundred dollars night for it?

I was still lying in bed, naked, watching some TV, when Debra came back. "Good morning darling", she said brightly. I grumbled. She came to me and kissed me on the cheek. "Why are you so cross? It's what you wanted, isn't it - you've been fantasizing about it for ages." I shrugged. She shrugged. "I am going to change. Then I thought maybe we could go out for lunch and do some shopping - I want to blow my next paycheck at Bloomingdale's." I could hear her rumbling around in the closet-cum-changing room that seemed to be a bourgeois hotel staple, and wondered if once this ingenious invention had operated to protect the privacy of chaste women, or whether it had once been used by prostitutes unwilling to show their post-coital breasts to the shopkeeper who didn't have the extra cash.

"What happened to Carry?" I asked. "Oh, she went back to work." I could hear the comb stubbornly making its way down her brown curls. "How come you never told me you had a girlfriend?" "Oh, you know." "No, I don't." "Well, I didn't want you to think I was gay." She stepped out of the closet, looking like a cut-out from a fashion magazine, in a zig-zag striped tunic thrown over black leggings with studded high-heel boots. Her hair was artfully thrown over one side of her face, and she wore dangly earrings. "God, you're beautiful", I said. "I might be beautiful, but I'm not God." She giggled. "What do you say we ditch the afternoon shopping?" I asked, stretching out lazily on the bed. She pouted. "But we're in New York only for the weekend, and sex - sex is something you can do anywhere." I frowned. "That is the worst attitude towards sex I've ever heard", I said, "in that case, why have sex anywhere? There is always something unique about the place you're in the you could be doing instead." She sighed. "God Mitchie, sometimes you're so provincial." "I hate it when you call me that. I've told you - my mother calls me Mitchie." She rolled her eyes. "Let's just can this discussion, ok?' she asked, but I shook my head. "No, I'm tired of canning things - I don't beleive in throwing problems in relationships down the metaphorical toilet", I said. She laughed. "Oh, so now our relationship has problems, does it?" "Why does everything have to be so melodramatic?" I asked. "Well, I am going shopping. If you feel like apologizing, you know where to find me", she said, as she stormed out, cluthing her Coach handbag.

For a second, I considered going after her. Then I realized it wasn't worth the effort of getting dressed. I turned the TV on and tried to catch some football. Maybe that is what I should have answered long ago - "Don't you have anything you care about?". "Yes, sex and football.". So I sipped the game like a fine wine, to take off the taste of last night's merlot that had turned into vinegar.

Whore

Sometimes I think that in another life I would have been a whore, my crinolines crinkling against men in wainscotted jackets, whiskeys competing with cigars between their fingers. We would have laughed; maybe even discussed politics, and I would have smoked just to show that I was a man, comfortable in the world of newspapers and shoe-shine. Afterwards, I would go to bed with them in creaking beds with faded sheets, on top of wooden floors that vibrated from the sound of the downstairs piano.

Syphillis would have taken a few, leaving me lonely, with less money to spend on silk, as the diseases of sex and dissatisfaction ravaged my face the way men ravaged my thighs. I probably would have wound up a haggard, grey-clad woman, jumping off an arched marble bridge that overlooked a river wound in willows, sometime afte dawn, as men drove by on their carriages, to return to the wives they were afraid to kiss.

But still, what fun we would have had, the slow unbottoning of my dresses, the corsets untying between your fingers, and your body against mine. Standing there, on that river, I do not think I would regret the nights when drunken hands caressed my face like a broken flower; I think I would have smiled at the thought of your palm against my shoulder, and your kisses beading my neck like silver, a color matched in my reflection in the sulky waters, waiting gently, like a bed or a lover, to embrace my dying body.

Meal Time

The poster is crooked, men with smiling teeth slanting down, towards the brown carpet that was once pink.

One day, you told me the bread had grown moldy, and I was silent, waiting for you to force my lips against the brown crusts before you tossed them into a pile of refuse.

"Our love has grown moldy, like the moon."

"The moon can't grow moldy" you said, your fingers reaching for the nape of my neck.

"It's a metaphor", I replied, trying not to feel the gray fuzz that grazed my lips as the loaf of bread came towards me.

"How does it taste?" you asked.

"It tastes of you", I said.

Your tears were not beautiful: They were salt-rivers flooding red cheeks, and I thought you looked raw, like a peice of meat.

The crooked poster's women are not smiling. They hold hands, waiting.

What are they waiting for?

Magnets

"Men have feelings too", I said.

"Do you ever feel alone, just beautifully and spectacularly alone?"

The night breathed down our thighs.

A tangle of white cotton sheets.

Rustling.

Silence.

"Magnets repel, then attract."

"Attract, then repel".

You would say these same words to me, on the night when you split us like the sea, singing songs of redemption in a language I had long forgotten.

Freedom tastes of bitter herbs and lonely nights, when memories mingled with moonlight shine down on my body, shrouded in freshly laundered sheets.

Rustling.

Silence.

Breakup

"I am sick of writing about romance", she said. The blankets were pulled back, and she was curled up with her laptop. I was trying to get in an afternoon nap. Sunlight drifted in through the windows, and winter afternoon sunlight is the best kind for sleeping in, or so I always maintained. She maintained that the only people who slept during daylight were vampires. I was never quite sure what to do with that, especially in the post-Twighlight vampire fetish world.

"So write about something else", I yawned. She shot me a look that almost made me jealous of those people who get eaten by Volturri or whatever the heck they're called in the world of Stephanie Meyers. Things were not going well, and I suspected that my saying the obvious wasn't helping matters. It occurred to me vaguely that I probably was supposed to put my arm around her, tell her she was brilliant and would find many other things to write about, and start sticking my tongue into her mouth. It occured to me concretely that such a course of action was very likely to result in sex.

Sex - I guess that was the one part of our relationship that was working. Not a bad part, if you had to choose, but I had learned long ago that sex does not to keep something going indefinitely. Especially if said "thing" involves sympathy and cuddling.

"If we broke up, I could write about the breakup", she said brightly, as if she had just suggested going out for a cup of tea.

There was silence.

"When mother died, I thought: Now I'll have a death poem. That was unforgivable."

She looked at me blankly. "For God's sake Sheila, you're a writer!".

"Of romance novels, not of poetry."

"It's by Stephen Dunn."

"Oh."

Beat.

"I'm going to make myself coffee. Want some?"

"No thanks. I'm going to try to get back to sleep."

As I watched her walk toward the door, her bare legs weaving in and out of air, I thought how never had I been so turned on by a pair of unshod feet.

Remembering

"That makes sense", you said, after I told you. I don't know why I remembered it today, five years later, trying not to focus on the couple that was kissing by the fountain. Maybe it is because the man had your eyes, but more likely, it is because memories happen sometimes, in the seeming randomness of this world, to appear at uncalled for moments, like migraines.

Murphy's Law, they call it, and start spewing facts about umbrellas. I remember the time I threw up on your shirt, and you cried, and afterwards, I could never understand how you still wanted me - not till years later, lying in bed and listening to my boyfriend pee.

He peed fast, and afterwards his hands were crawling down my neck, and I could not breathe. I wondered if it would have been like this, with you, if we had tried. I thanked God that we never did.

I thanked God for many things, like flower-petals beaded with rain, and the grey of morning right after sunrise, on cold days. I used to thank God for giving me you. Now I have slid you over, into the asking part of prayers, a silent whisper that the hurt will unglue itself from the crevices beween me, but then, would I dissasemble into fragments: opal-studded clay next to peices of pictures of naked statues, cracks that jut against your fingers when you try to hold the shards?

Is it better to be broken than to be wholly alone?

About Samarra

Today, a teacher of mine brought in an excerpt from an Arabic lexicon, about the word "samarra", to help clarify the Hebrew passage "leil shemurim", night of watching, which can be found in chapter 12 of Exodus. I wrote down the different definitions of the word, and sample sentences, and expanded on them to make them into a poem. I tried to use every definition and sample sentence. I am letting the work simmer, but suspect I may return to it at a certain point, and free it from the rigidities of my self-imposed assignment (ie the need to try to use every definition/sample sentence.)

For the Biblical text: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0212.htm

See verse 42.

Samarra

On a moonless night, in a place of nocturnal confabulation:

He held a conversation, or discourse, by night. He waked, continued awake; he did not sleep. He drank wine.

The cattle pastured by night without a pasture, or dispersed themselves by night.

Verily our camels pastured by night, the whole of its ebony lustre, when your hands held mine beneath the brown sand. We became tawny, brownish, dusky - the color of camels -fast, firm, strong, the beatings of hooves in the night, and a rush of sand against our thighs.

"Sammara", you said, and I asked, "Do you mean me or the camel?", Samarra - swift, excellent, light-footed. Samarra - partner in night-time conversation. Language steals meaning from our kisses.

They passed their night drinking wine.

The cattle pastured upon the herbage, pastured upon herbage by night. He made their milk thin with water. He shot his arrow. He swore by the darkness and by the moon.

"Sammara".

He conversed with him by day. He discoursed with him by night:

Conversation, or discourse, held by night, sipped like tea, curled between your teeth, and your hands are curled over my fingers, which bury into grains finer than the sound of your voice, calling the cattle, lowing, lowing, and a dance I do not understand.

"I will not do it as long as men hold conversation or discourse by nights that shine moonlight on bearded whiskers."

"Sammara."

"As long as the moonless night allows the holding of conversation or discourse in it."

"An unlimited time, or time without end."

But such a one is with, at the abode of forever, always.

The night and the day, (your finger and my thigh), but I will not come to you, ever, while night and day alternate (your body and mine).

The Sammara tree bears small leaves, short thorns, and yellow fruit. Samarra wood covers the houses in the villages of the valley, and once the prince addressed them "Oh people of the Sammara trees", he said, before he blinded his eye with a hot iron. You blinded me with your smile.

He let the camels go, left them to pasture by themselves, by night. Sammara also means to let go of a female slave, and to allow a ship out to sea, as well as daybreak and moonlight. Like a woman, the word has learned to adapt to meanings not its own.

"I will not do it when the moon does not rise nor when it does rise."

"Sammara".

You wrapped me in crimson blankets, and we continued to not sleep. Our lips percussed like the trotting of camels pasturing by night, and our bodies became ships.

On a moonless night, in a place of nocturnal confabulation:

He held a conversation, or discourse, by night. He waked, continued awake; he did not sleep. He drank wine.

The cattle pastured by night without a pasture, or dispersed themselves by night.

Verily our camels pastured by night, the whole of its ebony lustre, when your hands held mine beneath the brown sand. We became tawny, brownish, dusky - the color of camels -fast, firm, strong, the beatings of hooves in the night, and a rush of sand against our thighs.

At a gathering of tale-weavers, in the silence before daybreak, I left them there, engaged in winding conversations.

Party

"You look like a painting", she said, tracing her fingers on the red cotton that clung to my navel. I could feel your eyes tracing my lines. You pressed your fingers into her back. I could see her cleavage slightly when she bent over to feel the cloth against my thighs. Her brown curls bounced between us. "Please don't let them kiss", I thought, "Please don't let them kiss", but she continued to trace me - clinically almost, as if she were scientifically examining romantic roadkill.

I tried to laugh, but the sound was not mine. "Are you ok?" you asked, and I hated you then.

Later, grinding between you, I could feel your thighs, and her legs were curving into mine. The basement was dark, and smelled of sweat mingled with beer - a typical college smell, I guess. The songs were ones I did not know, and the alcohol tasted strange on my tongue.

You came after me when I ran out. "We'll walk you home", you said, and I hated you even more then.

I was a picture framed between your bodies, on a side-street in a crime-filled city, on a night when stars were too afraid to shine.

You will call him tonight and tell him of idiots, and imagine his skin against your skin, caramel and milk melding into each other like your thighs. He will think of your lips, his hands crawling down his pants, fingers moist, his laugh too guttural to be real.

I will sit on sheets of polka-dotted red, pens grating against my fingers, sweat staining my hair, and in my arms, the smell of cinammon, like in those buns I baked him last Friday. "These are delicious", he said, his crumb-filled lips searching for my cheek.

My name will come up in your conversation - casually, of course. A whispered breath in between two sighs. He will respond casually as well - no mention of the mingling of our thighs. Which words will you use to berate me, to poison him a little against me, just a drop of laudanum to the fever you suspect he bears me inside?

But the penicillin of distance has cured our malady. Why do you rely on his rosy cheeks to infect your own? Don't you know that his love for you, like his love for me, will wind up a dirty tissue on a bathroom floor, white stains peeking out from carpets that are shielded by an ever-shutting door.

Leila

"Your poems are too sexual", Leila said, her fingers crawling like spiders up my back. I could feel her nails through my gray flannel shirt. She called it my Harry Potter shirt, because the word "flannel" reminded her of Nicholas Flammel. "I am a big believer in straight people's right to wear flannel", she said, and the words hung like a thread between us, or maybe a necklace - a ruby necklace, her favorite color - red, the color of blood. "It is a feminine color", she said, "not because it has been foisted upon us by a patriarchal society, but because it is the color of the liquid that monthly oozes between our thighs." "That oozes between our thighs monthly", I said, and for a second, I feared that in her anger she would rebutton her starched white shirt, depriving me of the sight of her breasts.

The night she left me I was wearing a chemise of black silk. I waited for her to tell me I was beautiful. "You look so...female", she said, "in the way that those models look female - more like statues than real bodies. I didn't expect you to buy into the patriarchy." "It's not buying into the patriarchy if you're dressing up for a woman". "So you'd let me objectify you?". The silence was thicker than her golden hair. "I am leaving you", she said, and her shadow fell across the sheets of my bed. My hand was on her shadow's back, but her hands were already on her handbag, fishing for my keys.

Whenever I pictured the end, I imagined it like those soap operas on TV: "Carmen, te quero, pero no puedo vivir con tigo mi amor", or something of that sort, followed by incredible breakup sex - most of all I imagined the breakup sex. But here there was only silence. Her hand brushed up against mine when she placed my spare set of keys on the bed, and I could feel her eyes trace the shiver that ran up my spine. "Goodbye." she said softly, and, by a pause at the door, "You've been good to me. Thanks for that."

I listened to the closing of my bedroom door, the opening and closing of my apartment door, the fading echoes of her stilletoed footsteps on my marble hallway - who was she to lecture me about the patriarchy, this woman who waxed every week and wore eyeliner? I felt my anger crawl up my sides. I shrouded myself in my sheets, trying to savor the feel of the cotton against my skin, but all I felt was rage, and that is an emotion that is hard to savor, but even harder to let go of. Like when you know that potato chips will make you sick, but somehow you can't stop yourself from finishing the bag, because there is something so satisfying about their strange saltiness melting in between your teeth.

Potato chips were her favorite food. My new girlfriend, Cary, does not understand why I have banned them from my apartment - she thinks its a health issue. I wonder, if Leila's absence is always present in the form of the lack of potato chips in my cabinet, does that make my relationship with Cary a threesome, or a sham? How do you define monogamy? Isn't it all a holdover from marriage - the hetero-normative paradigm? Marx believed that common property applied to women - because women of course, were property. But here I stand, a common capitalist, wishing for - what, exactly? Not this shared utopian ideal - no, like a good capitalist, I wish for two women I could call mine.

Thinking about Ezekiel 16 and Listening to Regina Spektor

Your legs were marble columns supporting the arch of my back,

the curves of the spaces between our thighs formed diamond shapes on satin sheets;

you picked the sand grains from my cheeks like a virgin picking dandelions in spring,

and the blood stained our bodies, a crimson warmth seeping from my body,

your arms enveloped me like clouds - soft and insubstantial.

I broke the china cooking our first breakfast - an omelette of rotting eggs,

the scent of zahatar invading our nostrils, shards got stuck between my toes,

and I sensed the anger peeking out from between your laughing teeth.

You were younger then, but your beard was still flecked with grey,

whereas his was the color of the sand that sprinkled our first night together;

when I woke up, my golden nose-ring was gone.

But his lips were softer than your satin sheets,

and my thighs were marble pillars to his granite statue,

finely chiseled fingers invading the chasms between me,

and soon my nose-ring was joined by onyx bells and marble earrings.

Your palms left red marks on my cheeks that reminded me of berry-stains, or blood.

"You will soon feel blood", you said, in between mouthfuls of oregano omelette,

sipping from our new set of crystal glasses. I sprinkled flowers on our bed,

but you never came. I could hear you shining your sword.

The nights are colder now; roses have begun to fade in the garden,

and my statue is now a permanent fixture in the museum of a woman

who is studded with diamonds: She has mounted him on the pedestal of a silken bed.

I touch my cheeks, savoring the places where I once felt your fingers,

colder than winter soil, harder than the stones that line the pathway to the garden,

wishing that, like china or crystal, I had the power to shatter,

rather than remain silently whole on satin sheets, where my skin burns

in the absence of your shadow.

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1216.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p62rfWxs6a8

Vashti

I piss on pots scented with lillies, drink from pomegranate nectar from golden goblets bejeweled with saphires, and shit in alabaster basins. I dip my fingers in marble fountains, sleep on silk sheets strewn with roses and blankets of crimson wool.

During summer afternoons, pheasants sun themselves by the cedars, as peacocks prey among the palms.

During winter nights, your hands slither like snakes up my thighs. Your lips are drier than desert winds. Your eyes pale besides the jewels of your crown. I count the sapphires, waiting for your body to disentangle from mine.

During summer mornings, her back is arched like white marble across your linen sheets. Your lips graze in the thickets of flax that hang from her shoulders.

At breakfast, you read over dispatches from the province while I sip my coffee. My crown reflects the sun. You complain the light bothers your eyes.

"Where are you going?", you ask, when I flounce my skirts on the way to my garden. The peacocks have ornamented their flightless wings with pride, but I have only the golden bracelets that my father gave me on my wedding day.

"I am having a party", you say to me, that evening, during a dinner of stuffed pheasant and fresh figs. "I shall have one too" I reply, thinking of the blue of the peacock's feathers when you open your mouth in surprise. "You have bird hanging from your teeth", I say, and your lips bang shut like a prison gate.

I have not seen you since that evening. I heard that you have since replaced the blonde with a brunette. I considered going once, to consult you about my choice of wines (you're quite an expert on that!), but my eunuch advised me against it. "A bottle of bad white", he said, "is not worth the risk of his chopping off your head". "It depends how bad the wine is", I replied, but in the end, I felt that blood would make a poor complement to my hair's hazelnut tresses.

The women came, in gowns of crimson silk fringed with golden linen. They were bejeweled in pearls and diamonds, yet none of their necklaces matched the light of your eyes, which still paled beneath the sheen of your crown. The marble fountains were filled with wine; the cedars strewn with lanterns. The harps echoed the birds trills.

"Vashti, you look lovely!", they all said, but I had heard the words of too many lying men to trust drunken eyes. I was just starting to get bored, really, when the summons came from your court. I remembered in the days of our wedding feast, when summons would come to the ladies' court borne on the flutes of singing messengers, and you compared my eyes to opals, my hands to cinnamon - your favorite spice. I used to rub it in my hair before coming to bed. I still keep some by my nightstand, sometimes.

But these summons are all wrong. I would cut off half my father's kingdom for one night between your thighs, one more chance to crown your head with my kisses. But to you I have become another crystal vase to parade before visitors. Did you ever think that crystal vases, like people, can shatter? Did you ever ponder that you might get pricked from the shards? Or did you assume that your eunuchs would sweep me off your floor?

I do not bother to formulate the words for a polite reply. With all the queenly grace I can muster, I hand the messenger my crown. I tell my eunuchs to pack my fifty best dresses and my favorite bottles of myrrh, and I go to sit by the fountain, only to discover it is a pool of wine; bathing women splash around in the basin, their breasts dripping when they stand up to dance in the moonlight. Their voices are shrill; even the harpists have become dissonant with their inebriation.

I go back to my chamber and lie down on my bed. I inhale the jasmine-scented sheets. I try not to cry - I fail.

The king sneaks out to say goodbye. Beneath the waning moon, we hold hands for the last time. He is still slightly intoxicated; his kiss tastes of white wine. He slithers away like a snake; the king of Persia has the power to do anything, except for going unnoticed at his own party - what impotence. I can do better. I can marry a weaver, or a baker, a man who can be killed and no one would notice; the king's servants would not risk soiling their robes by stepping on the mud-filled streets for an investigation. We will toast each other from pewter mugs, and make love beneath thatched roof speckled with starlight.


Do my tears glisten brighter than your eyes that pale beneath the jewels in your golden crown?