Sisyphus

I.

She told him that when she laughed her ears

turned to the color of apple peels, before stammering

that apples were sometimes yellow or green,

but that she had meant that her ears turned the color

of the peels of red apples, though perhaps that didn't matter either.

Arkady laughed and said, “Do not worry. I assure you

that there are more unpleasant ways to point out that a person is blind.”

They drank four bottles of wine and the lamps of the night faded to blue.

Her hair was the color that all things were

and the skin below her clavicle was crisp like apple peels were

sometimes. Six years passed with the dew and every star burned,

fury flooding across ancient seas that such a love was denied

to the flickering of dying candles and all the other gods.

One morning the sky was shaded like flame bitten trees

and she whispered to him as he sat clay-stained in a chair,

“You must not follow. Tomorrow morning, hanging from the mailbox

there will be a necklace. When the sun's wheel is hidden it will be gone.

Until a day comes that these two things happen differently,

you shall not see me again.”

II.

For twenty years, Arkady woke during mornings and walked

to a box he had never seen so that a chain of silver could be tarnished.

At night he wept like the roots below killing fields when his

frantic hands touched no surface save the cursed tin box-shell or walnut post.

He had stopped speaking to anyone except his village priest

until this recourse was denied him after a particularly virulent

hemorrhagic fever decimated the rural population and it was then

that hushed stories of the blind potter emerged. It was said

that he could craft wine-bowls that would disintegrate if the drinker

was a liar. It was said that he had fallen in love with a wraith. It was said

that he was an immortal who had sacrificed his first eye for the knowledge

of all things and who had later placed his second upon the altar in order to forget.

III.

It was a day in May and Arkady was forty-six years old. The path

clung to his sandals with the mud of three-day rains and he pressed the links

of the necklace to the curve of his jaw. After a moment he sat on the ground.

“Grandfather,” they said (his beard made lions surge with envy and it was

white with clay). “Grandfather, can something be done?” He sat silent.

He wrapped the necklace around his craftsman's wrist.

Arkady did not move and the next morning they said again, “Grandfather,

can something be done?” The next morning they pleaded with him (his skin sallow,

his urine dark brown and dribbling from his pants, the slim silver of her token

metallic in his mouth) to drink water from a spring, but he shook his head in reply.

On the third morning of his vigil he began to break his teeth in his madness. Before

night his heart broke entirely. They buried him in a simple coffin beneath

an apple tree high on a hill. Next to the headstone of Arkady, shaper of clay,

a monument pierced its way into the dungeons of the clouds. A bronze setting

proclaimed the name of the Tsarina Alexandra,

dead these twenty years from an outbreak of plague.