a/n: this is what happens when you're stuck for three hours in french class on a friday evening :)
.
le soleil et la pluie
(rose/dominique)
.
pour dominique.
.
the stale brittle air
on a saturday morning
with too much time
and longing and lust
.
there is a silver-haired beauty
with a tinge of
SUN.
i ask her to teach me french.
.
because love is french, the smart girl said,
the tiny girl, skinny girl,
lean, lithe,
with the mind of a genius
and the heart of a wolf.
.
"what's lily luna in french?"
i ask my tutor one day.
names cannot be translated
wholly, i know, they will still retain
a bit of this and a part of that
and their grammar will never be quite
agréable or magnifique
but i still find my lungs yearning
for the scent of fleur de lis lune:
everything of lily,
except the harsh reality
of she does not love me.
.
my tutor does not bear that scent.
the life in her eyes is more reserved
but her skin stretches like valleys do,
with the glow of opalescent waters
.
(and whether it be love
or amour, i don't know what it is
so if i just hold her, would it be
enough?)
.
we are the sun and the rain,
she whispers in my ear once
on acrid bedsheets that hiss
of lies and bad and wrong.
.
"le soleil et la pluie. they are
beautiful," she says, "iridescent.
radiant. people focus more on
le soleil et la lune- the sun
and the moon- but we know better,
don't we?"
.
don't we?
.
oh but dominique, darling,
here is a truth,
submerged in the letters
i will never send you:
the sun and the moon,
they dance the dance
of a slender cuckoo,
fleeting,
to a song of eternal
evanescence,
to the beat of shrouded enigma.
.
but le soleil et la pluie-
the sun, which peeks out
from a curtain of gloom
and the rain that placates
a suffoquant fever,
whose english cousin,
suffocating, lacks the same lustre-
that understand each other
with a comprehension greater
than humanity, yes,
the sun and the moon,
they can only be friends.
.
it is a truth to be wailed about,
melodramatically, genuinely,
in an act of splayed limbs and
tragedy, oh, travesty-
("stop all the clocks," auden said.
"i love you," dom said.
"i don't know," my heart said.)
.
and love? love?
eleven-year-olds do not know about love- not even
eleven-year-olds with heart faces and
genius minds and wolf hearts
but the world is ten times more beautiful in french.
.
amicalement,
ton amie, ou le soleil
.
a/n: i do not own funeral blues by wh auden but oh my goodness isn't auden amazing musee des beaux arts and o where are you going /squeesqueeesqueeeeee
yayyy