"Actaeon"
Artemis more lovely than Venus, rising from the spring
Shook off the droplets from her hair and feet, began to sing
From where I'd stood unseen I rose, entranced by Nature's art
And took her then, knowing I'd be torn apart.
Tearing up every cabinet in this ill-begotten house looking for a treaty of my father's, I find instead this bit of my own schoolboy verse. Which originally bore the title "On My Sister, Arising From Her Bath", but said sister demanded I change it to better reflect the classical allusion. Not that she ever wrote verse. She embroidered instead, like Philomel. Fear had cut her tongue out—the only real difference between us. Even at that age I knew I preferred the classical gods, with their gay escapades, to the Christian one forever sitting in judgment upon us. But it was not until I walked among the Africans and learned their ways that I truly began to experience the divine power. You will as well, soon. Because you long for it. I see it. I see inside your head, my love, I know. Always afraid, always fleeing from my kisses, until it was night and we could get away from the house. You used to walk those woods like a cat, tall and proud and fearing nothing, yet alert to the slightest sound. And demanding, so demanding of your pleasure. It was true what I wrote back then, about being torn apart. Felt like that sometimes, by you, those hungry teeth and nails, my wildcat Zilpha. Do not allow yourself the comfort of thinking for one moment that I have forgotten. I remember it all, I do. The pleasure and the danger. Father would tear us apart, if he ever caught us together. Did. For ten years. If the East India had had their way it would have been forever, they did not want me to come back. Did you? Tell the truth. You can, I'm not your husband nor your confessor. It was blasphemy what we did. That was why no one wanted us to do it. I did it, I dared. Took your sacred body down onto the forest floor and fucked you until you screamed so loud I thought surely they'd hear it from the house. I knew then I should put my hand over your mouth but did not. Instead I drove into you harder. It was then that I felt the first drops of the Christian poison leaving my body. Africa took the last.
And you, whose spirit screamed at me through all those long nights under alien stars, all the nights of my training, when did you succumb? At what point did the Christian poison take over your soul and throw its funeral shroud over the sister I knew and possessed? Tell the truth now...