The 1002nd Night

Ever After Knmgest Brother, swan's wing where one arm should be, yours the shirt of nettles short a sleeve and me with no time left to finish— I didn't mend you all the way back into man though I managed for your brothers; they flit again from court to playing­courts to courting while you station yourself, wing folded from sight, avian eye to the outside, no rebuke meant but love's. Was it better then, the living on water, the taking to air? I envied you. When a king out hunting stumbled on me in the nettle bed, I hid my blistered hands, already promised to silence, to knitting us back into family sting by sting. Against his mime of marriage, mine of no room for him was translated as a tear­flooded dollhouse by our parents, wept into his eddy of infatuation, nothing left but for me to go to him, bearing as trousseau the work cut out into silence and your shirts. I went gloved, and after dark, and lay by him, still, hearing alongside his breath something like wings far off. So I told myself, and tried to recall my voice as the nights shortened, warming to summer. By day a pair of swans claimed the moat, dipping and preening, the cob rolling onto the pen's back, pinning her neck with his beak, all too quickly over to drown her: my fear the first time I saw it, no martyr losing her footing down a bank, just seamstress pricked by her own hand, soothed by mud's dispassionate touch. I suffered no unkindness—what then can I say to him that I didn't more eloquently sign? I envy you even the wing that maims you, giving me, before you remember it, a crippling half­hug. The swans' mute mating until death, loss beaten to rage strong enough to drag a sheep into water and hold it under—how little I've plumbed the nature of happily. [18.191.216.163] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 16:43 GMT) ...