Kelp Fever

I liked her hair best after the sea had handled it,
after the wind slapped it cold against her throat,
after the salt made it less lovely and more mine
to think about in the ruined way I did.

Then it ceased to be hair in any innocent sense.
All that long blonde length, once bright as spoil,
went darker at the roots, heavier at the nape,
and fell over her shoulders in wet ropes of blasphemy,
as though the tide had laid its hands on her
and left behind something altered,
fibrous and shining and not entirely human.

It clung to her throat with the intimacy of kelp,
trailed her collarbone like a net drawn in at dusk,
and where it touched skin
it seemed to take instruction from the body,
to darken, to slicken,
to become less adornment than aftermath.

I could not look at it without thinking of desecration,
of gold unmade by water,
of beauty lowered into its rank and tidal life.
The sea had stripped from it whatever manners dryness gave,
whatever halo light had tried to fix there,
and left in their place something stranger,
more devoutly obscene.

The pale spill of it smelling faintly of salt,
of weed torn loose from rock,
of the cold clean mouth of the world
speaking in a language made for ruin.

And God, how it suited her,
that marine wreck of blondness,
that long wet drag of it over the broad weather of her shoulders,
as if the water had known exactly what to do
with the softest thing about her, turning it to a sacrilege.

What undid me was not its beauty,
though it was beautiful in the way wreckage is,
glittering and half-spoiled at the tide line.
It was the way it refused to stay legible,
passing from hair to kelp to rope
to some unnameable filament
drawn taut between desire and disgust.

A strand would plaster itself to her lower lip,
another lie dark and shining at her throat,
and I would feel the fever lift its head again,
that lush and shameful wanting,
as if every wet strand were an article of faith
in a religion too bodily to survive daylight.

I wanted the part of it the salt had touched longest.
Wanted the darkened roots,
the cold drag of it against her neck,
the slick weight of it gathering at her chest
like something alive enough to choose where it would cling.

It was only blonde before the sea took hold of it.
Afterward it became tidal,
a drowned silk, a harbor weed,
a relic lifted dripping from the mouth of the water.

And I loved it then with a seriousness that felt almost liturgical,
with the private fervor one brings to blasphemy,
because it seemed the sea had not merely wet it
but translated it…

Transformed all that gold into
a rougher language,
until I could no longer tell
whether I was looking at her
or at what the sea, in its hunger,
had made of her.

DEDICATION

For all the blondes I have ever gone a little strange over, especially the weird, literate ones.

And for my best friend Sarah, who, when I finally informed her, three years post-coming-out, that I have a thing for blondes, reacted with the breathtaking restraint of a woman with functioning eyes and said, “no shit,” and who will still read this damp little heap of prose on command because her allyship is both patient and deeply overqualified. I am also, regrettably, sorry I could not make it work with the blonde you had such high hopes for.