5.

Sometimes, every time, as I put the tip in or cup your breasts and say to you, the weather’s been beautiful lately; a cloudy day is good for the mind; the mind loves grayness, that the gray is a penumbral solution through which thoughts spread their filaments and feelers. As I say these things, a few loose strands of your hair catch on my lips and stick to my tongue, and your ear lobe is warm and pink against the gray abandonment of hours and minutes, when the coursing blood which makes our bodies animate subdues the will to evaporate, our skins, dry and calcitrant, oh the abandonment of ourselves. As my lips grip your ear lobe like two wet fingers, and I breathe, I think of Europa’s abduction, her pale skin and the adamantwhite bull she straddles. From here they are, together, a gleaming speck on the dark windtossing Aegean. The gray sky above and brackish sea below must, at times, offer Europa the puzzles she needs to feel whole. The bull’s wreathe of golden bells entwined with laurel boughs, a dirge of lightening in the distance, no sight of land, no sounds or merriment or homecoming celebrations.

Here Europa builds futures for herself and from within those mercurial and half absent vestiges of being, she feels the wet gown on her thighs and is charmed by the appearance of her breasts under linen. Mixing her perception of these beauties with that of the bull’s golden bells, the greatest explosion of joy flickers in her light blue eyes and settles her mood. She is like Venus now, fingering the laurels, decorating a fantastic chapel or two, or many, for herself as they appear singularly or in golden labyrinths. Ignorant of the Aegean’s homogeny, she cannot remove her eyes from the warm glow which her solemnity has manifested in her soul. From that place no particular thoughts come but those that wrought the tenderness and satisfaction of her open heart, without love, just convalescence.

She draws nearer to her warmth. It mingles with the strong bull between her legs and the briny waters pregnant with themselves between her toes. She imagines her ambivalent, honest beast is a god. Together they are upright, even holy, among the waters. The great concentrism of meaning she subtly feels most often but can never clearly see coalesces with the bull’s laurel boughs and taught musculature, and these things, arranged in her mind, compose a greater understanding of the globe, the human condition, of motherhood. She watches the holy empathy that connects every soul to every other rush in a great pictographic caravan through her mind’s eye and breathes with relief at having concluded, for a time, the search which drives her brain to the precipice of thought. The battered children, the housedrunk wives – suffering without end – are acceptable in this moment. A great needle pops her inflated hopes and sincerity, revealing, under a membrane of charitable fantasy, the tangible ellipses of wisdom as strong as tempered steal, as weighty and meaningful as the chains which crucified her lord, and around these, she builds her cathedral.

A city emerges like a great fish from the water, stanchions of gold and ivory, walls built of glass forged by lightening on the beaches of her distant memories. No more forgetting. Fountains that rise and rise and never arch. The bronze forms of sleeping infants swaddled in crystalline robes of pure benevolence who never age or die. The gods give her all. She strokes the bull’s neck as he pushes through the waves and sea foam. She leans close to whisper the cathedrals of her dreams into his ear. Her breasts brush against his strong neck. The bull stops and listens. Below the water, his hooves churn the salty sea; his penis emerges and grows erect. What a perfect angel, he thinks. She will be immortal hereafter, and as I take your hair from my mouth, placing my hand gently on your throat, I remember, lost among all these meaningful strands, the price dear Europa paid for eternity.