Animal Eye

Possibilities in Love

14 Possibilities in love I am so used to not clearly looking that even the little ink drawing on the wall of this restaurant is a negation: the old king standing watch over two young lovers, only height marking one the hero, the other his beloved. While the dream etched inside her headpiece opens like a window onto an owl in winter, giving away her name, Guinevere, the white wing of shadow. The king has an absence in his breast. It is a window, too, which looks out onto a blue field with a girl on a swing, not moving but watching, solemnly, her entire world a keyhole of green leading up to the tiny mansion in which she must live. The king’s bone arm has been denuded of flesh, fallen half into death as the romance works itself slowly to dust: his cool green eyes stare at his wife, her lover, but cannot see into each one’s dream: hers, the snow-white owl; his, the hummingbird of vivid green feeding at a trumpet flower. While under their wild, marvelous heads, they too are bones and bones: skeletons speckled with rich inks, dappled white and pink like the carapaces of the crabs I’ve found littered on shore all week, the white sea pounding the stone beach, white clouds, white horizon that grows and swells only 15 so that it can later recede. Possibilities in Love, the title reads, and it is perhaps because of all these weeks of white I suddenly want it: the details so fantastic with its colors that don’t dissolve, the too-pink flesh, the too-green greenery, that though this is not the first time I have seen it, it is the first time I have chosen to admire it, feeling how it’s been changed in me: this patient accrual of detail that’s become a measure of belief if not beauty; that makes borders and enframements where the horizon only slips away. I have walked all week among houses built against and on top of the bones of other houses, one era rewriting the next, and seen kelp tangled in the broken shells of clams and mussels, huge trees stripped and rolled to shore, bits of Styrofoam and sea-worn glass, strips of tire, a sheen of oil, and once even the half-eaten body of a seal. All of it evidence that the sea, in its relentless working, makes equivalent. But here, in this painting, the lovers who lock themselves into the same gaze—faces bridged by an iron clasp literally pinning them by the chin—reveal their differences: there is no transience, even in this romance I keep imagining in which a king gives away his wife to a man too afraid to keep on wanting her. Here, each figure wears an expression of refusal in desire: he does not want to see the confession 16 of his wife. She can’t unlock herself from the gaze of her timid lover. At the most, they want to formulate a dream that might explain what it is they will not, cannot be. I have been sitting for hours inside this restaurant, watching the sea outside break and recede in white waves where fishermen shout from the docks, cautiously navigating the cranes that swing their cargo over ship railings, each one the same size and color and shape, as the men, too, in their upturned hoods soften and blur, turn into the same man, waving and waving. A ferry turns its sleek side suddenly to the east. As it starts to dock, the noon sun glazes out its windows, one by one, changing each from black to white, and then bright gold, blanking out the passengers’ faces with light, blanking out the flagpole and metal railings until I have to shield my eyes by raising up a palm, until to see the thing at all I have to stop looking. ...