When the Grail is a Sword: Guinevere's Song You turned into the mountain highway, flashed the lights twice, and were gone. I unwound my road ahead of me, away from you, my way, dark as the minstrel blood striping my thigh, unexpectedly enmazing me again in the cycle of ebb and flow, I thought had gone, too. Once, we paused window to window, your smile in the night almost enough to warm me home, your lights again in my rearview sight closing like eyes in sleep, my return like the outer curve of an inner labyrinth, I hoped would lead me to you once more. In daylight, I pass the isles of our meetings, camelots, avalons, circles of stone, more enduring than our minutes together. Maybe you were only a coalescing of the mountain mist, a "tear of the sun" that looked like you, who for a moment was dawn flesh, dew that I laved in, licked from my forearm, lapped like any deer or calf at a saltblock, milking the time, constellating a universe from a second-sighting of you, where I was seeded, sword cupped in my craving to be land's end of your merlin flight, where I prayed in those talons, to be held so close that I might hold new life. At the very least I'd be the jess for your eyes so you might not see the sun and go again. MaryAnn Bennett Rosberg |