Tongue Lyre

Disguised, Athena Says . . .

43 Disguised, Athena Says . . . Hey, I wish these jeans would zip. That woman cups her daughter’s rosy pear shoulder and pulls the girl under a tacked-up sheet, the cornflowers on the curtain dividing our stalls of stiff carpet. I love this thrift store. The girl is gone again—there she goes, tumbling, her head wrapped in a T-shirt wrinkling pink sparkled letters. I am tired of following my owl along the river in these boots—and look what parking lots did to the heels, from walking and walking, so my bed even smells like the heap of dirt I scooped from a hole by the porch for that new birch, or was it a blue pine? The girl’s foot kicks the curtain and she hangs a banana-sized slipper from her toes. The thing is soulless, looks infectious. Where have those slippers been? The gardener also asked this in the Red Fairy Book while the sisters slept all day in their row of beds having lined up their slippers, the toes damp from sneaking out and running through silver forests. The leaves were hammered scraps of metal. The gardener saw, concealed by a cloak in a raft: 44 the violins, finger cymbals, light and hips and incense ghosting the muslin castle curtains where the women danced. In the tired morning, he dug a hole under their window, filling the dirt with a fern or a sweet-pea. He knew what he was doing, hiding in his clothes. One morning my brother’s friend wore my sneaker—he shoved his huge foot into the black leather, his other foot in his own shoe, tripping and awkward on the sidewalk past the corner where the three temples are. I saw him. When he returned to Olympos, dumping his books by the door, he kicked both shoes off—mine was the one gold with dust. It was mine: the woods, the falls. As someone would write about me, she bound upon her feet the fair sandals, gold and immortal, that carried her over the water. ...