by Cole Swensen
What did you lose . . . is the sound of the sea. And why from a tower does an ocean seem to stumble, to fall on its knees and bleed a pure thin salt that could have stained a cheek had she been inclined, but not she, who decided, after all, to go with him. That’s what grief is, an accompaniment.
Death ends the story, as it always seems to. He died at sea, as he often does, and the sea goes on. Life handed him a lemon and the sea made sand. Hero and Leander were like every other pair of lovers: one died.
Hero and Leandro is an inverse ekphrasis: literature turned to a painting. Our basic story: a woman in a tower and her lover swimming nightly across the Hellespont guided by her lantern; he drowns as soon as the weather turns.
And drowns of it: water is the perfect metaphor for love—formless, it will be shaped by outside forces and, knowing this, becomes a wanderer upon the earth, in search of embrace, as was Leander, as is anyone in love.
from Poetry Foundation Online Journal
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