Kelp Knotted in Silk

I liked the way her blonde hair entered mine,
after the sea had handled it,
after the wind had slapped it cold against her throat,
after the salt had made it rougher than beauty,
less like hair than something the tide
had worried loose from innocence.

It came to me darkened at the roots,
heavier at the nape,
and fell over my own long brunette lengths
with the grave intimacy of kelp laid over silk,
as if the whole marine body of it
had crossed into the darker province of me
for the pleasure of being changed there.

My hair was no harmless thing either.
It had its own lushness,
its own dark feminine weather,
that long brunette spill
warm as candle-smoke,
glossed like wet satin,
falling over shoulder and breast
with a softness that had never once meant mercy.

If hers belonged to tide and wreckage,
mine belonged to shadow,
to rooms gone amber at the edges,
to the slow devotional dark
in which the body becomes more body,
and every loosened thing
takes on the glamour of confession.

And God, how they suited one another,
that marine wreck of blondness
and this darker silk of mine.

Her pale rough strands would catch low against my collarbone,
cling damply at my neck,
or drag themselves across my mouth
with a coldness that felt almost chosen,
while my own hair, warmed by skin,
lay over her shoulder and down her chest
like some nocturnal fabric
taking instruction from the broad weather of her body.

I could not look at them together
without thinking of desecration,
of gold lowered into dark water,
of silk made less lovely and more alive
by the touch of something tidal.

It was not only the contrast that undid me,
though there was pleasure enough in that,
the blonde made brighter by my brown,
the brunette made richer by her pale assault.

It was the way they altered one another in contact.

How her hair, all kelp and rope and salt-heavy ruin,
grew intimate among my softer lengths,
and mine, for all its gloss and feminine ceremony,
grew stranger for having taken in her sea.

A strand of hers would plaster itself to my lower lip,
another lie shining in the hollow of my throat,
while my dark hair crossed her clavicle,
trailed the upper swell of her chest,
and gathered there with such slow obedience
it seemed to know exactly
what part of her it wished to keep.

Together they ceased to be hair
in any innocent sense.

They became a tangle,
pale and dark,
rough and shining,
drawn over pillow and breastbone,
caught beneath wrist and shoulder,
threaded between us
like evidence of some private rite
too bodily to survive daylight.

What lay across us afterward
looked less like beauty than aftermath,
less like adornment than the lush record
of where one woman had entered
the weather of another.

I wanted the places where they were hardest to separate.

Wanted the wet drag of her blonde through my darker silk,
the points where salt had gotten into me,
where my own warm gloss had softened her
into something less marine and more intimate.

Wanted the strand of hers left against my throat,
the one of mine caught beneath her hand,
the whole dark-and-gold confusion of it
low on the chest,
near the mouth,
where neither color kept its original meaning.

Mine was not merely silk then.
Hers was not merely kelp.

Both had passed into a rougher language,
until I could no longer tell
whether I was looking at our hair
or at what desire,
in its feminine cunning,
had made of us.