Myth

MYTH "Some thought it mounted to the lunar sphere Since all things lost on earth are treasured there." Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock

Fictive sun, concealed then unveiled, never whole through the leaves, caressed me high in the tree, fresh-cut grass below, goldfinch tearing air above. The crotch I clung to was so far up, I saw across the hedge to a yard like mine but for a jeweled, deep pool and Diana slipping into water, slender bud into vase, that summer we were twelve, the gesturing leaves green. No doubt she glimpsed my watching once or always but never whole: a face, a shoulder hidden a moment in the wild language the tree described as wind passed. Doubt, yes, memory: on the water, the reach of her hair a radial glimmer in light, the sun fragmented a thousandfold in ripples. Someone was calling but I never again went home. Winter that year, pale Diana on the couch draped ribbons of blonde in abandon on my shoulder and I opened a book, emptied for her the names of planets (ice-ringed Saturn, red wound of Jupiter, jaded Venus) as she fell asleep. Outside the window, branches blackly shattered the rising limbus of that mirror, that moon. Joseph Allgren ©2009