The Myth of Innocence

One summer she goes into the field as usual

stopping for a bit at the pool where she often

looks at herself, to see

if she detects any changes. She sees

the same person, the horrible mantle

of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.

That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—

everything in nature is in some way her relative.

I am never alone, she thinks,

turning the thought into a prayer.

Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore

how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.

Also that he embraced her, right there,

with her uncle watching. She remembers

sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.

Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,

the chilling insight that from this moment

she couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool

will never return. A woman will return,

looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,

I was abducted, but it sounds

wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.

Then she says, I was not abducted.

Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted

to escape my body. Even, sometimes,

I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance

wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns—

she says them in rotation.

Death, husband, god, stranger.

Everything sounds so simple, so conventional.

I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can't remember herself as that person

but she keeps thinking the pool will remember

and explain to her the meaning of her prayer

so she can understand

whether it was answered or not.