Helen

The walls are yellow. The window is open.
There is a spider dangling from the ceiling and
I am in love. The girl in the room downstairs
named Helen. Like Helen of Troy, but Troy sunk
into the earth years ago and we are still digging it
up. Last night it rained so hard the whole world
turned damp. No rot. Just water pearling on doorsteps
and lips. Lips closing around teeth. I stood in the
supermarket dizzy with fluorescent lights. I felt my
tongue recoil despite my eyes and the way they were
dry and open. I have touched the surface of the ocean;
which was sacred, which was too alive to dip into,
but I dipped anyway. I have floated face up in the
water,  in the rain, pearling. Troy is in ruins.
But once, it was loved enough to be named.
Years ago Helen watched the world split.
There were ships and armies, everything tearing.
O the red, red fields. The blank stalemate.
The beautiful woman and her life without
openness. Only her body and the men who
held it unknowing that as they did,
the body was a bird, a cool pebble, anything that
could be thrown, that could be pulled down
to the the heavy earth without breaking.

Helen #2

The sky boils. I lay on the park bench, lake flat and in front of me. Justin to the left. We stare at the blue. I am in love. First sight. Eyes meet lake, handshake. No need to introduce myself to this new, cold body. I turn my head. Flat land kissing flat lake, shells washed up on the shoreline. Justin laughs at a seagull. Laughs at the fish the seagull dropped: a scaly creature wriggling and frantic and falling. Justin’s body shakes with the force of his laughter, and then he is quiet. Helen of Troy was so beautiful war was waged. From that war: Rome. A city. Which is not a city, but a lake: weary at the sight of fire. The sky is pink now. I close my eyes, long blink. I still want this man, but the desire is rotten and soft. If he kissed me now, I would be beautiful and know it. Helen watches, angry. She witnesses two bodies in love but not with each other, and still beside each other. She cannot touch us so she touches the sand, the rocks, the bench. The land is blank and alive. What happened to Troy? It burned. And Rome? It burned. The lake is afraid of dying so I cannot call heat a form of mercy. Mercy does not claim to be a prayer. Mercy singes the flesh of everything it encounters. Justin is quiet and the lake is quiet. I cried and walked away so I could cry without feeling as if I was only crying so Justin would ask what was wrong. I still felt guilty in my solitude. The sky: kissing the ocean. The sky: dark now.  Helen watches this and is tired now. Sinks back to her own dead earth. This landscape will not stay with me no matter how much I love it.