We walk. A long
walk. A slim talk. Our bodies direct our words and our words
distort our bodies.
You don’t know how to love unless you know how to mourn.
"But did the Ancient Greeks mourn before they loved or loved
before they mourned?" Euphrosyne
wonders.
"I didn’t think of the ruined Greeks; isn’t that funny? I‘d have to make an exception for them."
"And so Clytemnestra mourned
Agamemnon after she killed him," she
adds.
"Yes. And Medea? She mourned the loss of Jason’s love before
she mourned the slaughter of her beloved children!"
Another bright day of such discussion!
of mourning and loving,
of losing and lacking.
And so we depart
from our inherited
enthusiasm.
We split our walk after
digesting the
disgust
with which these sort of
stories once
filled us
as children listening
to our Greek
ancestors
spit these
tragedies out.
As I sit on a park’s bench
with my thighs apart and my elbows resting on my bent knees, Euphrosyne’s
branched hair blowing away into distant trees, behind me I hear a
retired voice slur:
"I lost my wife on a summer's day. Now my winter days are more than
those humid summer evenings of walking with her."
"But there will be some
unexpected warm nights in the winter", I felt like saying, but didn’t.
I thought. He’s mourning the loss of someone
he loved!
"Did you mourn before your
wife died?" I wanted to ask, but didn’t.
Instead, I look after
Euphrosyne’s footprints in the park.
Did I mistake Medusa for
Eros?
All those times when her hair
stroked me,
I was being kissed by snakes!
And each time my body had
turned to stare at her,
vibrating,
it turned to stone.
Those
sultry eyes,
waxing
lyrical about
our
Amazonian walk,
Love
to stare back
when
summer sweat sticks to
supple skin,
smells of spiced orange
peel and dried clove.
"Have
I mourned her?"
"Should
I tell her that
I loved her but never
mourned her?"
