Icarus In Verse

The winter sun is a vice (the queer algebra of Remus's brain says, the variables will be a and r. of the sins: avarice.) It cuts into them, brightly off the snow, and minds dull easily under its relentless diamond shine. Still, they cannot give it up.

Sunbathing, says Sirius as he falls back into the snowdrifts. Going to get a tan.

The only colour to his skin is the proud red of his proud nose, the rest nipped white by the cold. He cannot keep his eyes open, his lids weighed down by eyelashes lathed with flakes and flecks of snow, a precious crystal jewelry that melts soon enough away.

There will, Remus knows, never be this moment's equal.

Here: is where the world begins.

The fumbling of kisses, skin that glows with heat through cotton, the slide and stick when the cotton's gone, the spin, the break, warmth that gets into the bones.

Remus: I could love you as dry roots love rain.

Sirius: Plonker.

Remus: It's Sandburg.

Sirius: Liked it better when it was you.

And then their lips collide.

Oh dear Christ, James says. You two are shameless, James says. I'm trying to eat my toast, James says.

Moony tastes like butter and jam, Sirius says. (Raspberry. The salty tang of wolf spit. Wild woods.)

A symphony of groans and Sirius goes to class with jam on his face, as well as eggs, cinnamon, porridge, everything else that was handy to be thrown. He won't let Remus wipe it off. Unless you're going to lick me, he says. Remus declines. Should have known you'd find a way to make this lustful too, James gripes.

Sirius tastes like he hasn't brushed his teeth.

Remus brandishes petals as branches in the wind. Which is to say: tightly. Which is to say: he does not sleep on Sirius's chest, in Sirius's arms.

He stares at nothing and memorizes the intricacies of heart beats until he knows these ones from any others no matter their rhymth

Beat

Beat

And breathes with them in the dark.

The last day of school it rains the warm water of summer. Waiting for the hour that will bring the train they dance on the wet grass, the four of them together, a slip-sliding waltz.

Nothing has to change, right. Not with us, says James.

No, they tell him. No, no.

But Remus knows then that it does. James's fear tells him so. James who is never afraid. James's fear oracular, the answer in the question.

(Remus: Dry roots love rain.

Sirius: is a fool star.)

He is no Seer but he sees.

When they look at him, the slight cataract of suspicion over once-bright eyes. The infinitesimal fade of a smile. The stuttering stop of speech. When they look at him.

What can he do but go quietly away?

Here: is where the world ends.

The kisses do not fumble. They are expert. They play each other's bodies like some stringed instruments, with sure touches and no words. Like those instruments too they are slightly out of tune. A and B together, perhaps, one flat and one sharp, they are C D E Falling apart.

Remus: Where are you going?

Sirius: What was that?

Remus: Where are you?

But his throat is too raw with raw harmonies. And maybe he already knows.

These are the things he does not do when Dumbledore tells him: Rage. Cry. Shred photographs between aching fingers. Scream curses into the night. Mourn. Bend. Break.

Go home again

(if only because home is not anywhere.)

Years can be like moments if you make the effort to forget them. He does. He attends his revolving-door of jobs and thinks only of not thinking. Blesses the moon, his own form of lunacy

(luna-see, and what he sees is nothing; a quaint conceit, he thinks,)

And when he wakes, cradled in nothing, he thinks,

Two suicides, the family wolves, hours of Blackness, some hard stars,

Plath.

He does not notice the word he's gotten wrong.

The barrier reminds him of Bluebeard. The door one shouldn't open. The corpses steaming inside.

Still, he has promised, and he is a man of his word. Through it he goes. On the other side he finds nothing but the whistle of the train

the children who once were them.

When the Dementor

(Dementor: Demon. Tore. An apt description,)

wakes him and he sees who he's saved from its kiss, once again he does not break. One more time, as always.

Here: is where the world begins.

A name on a map in black ink. An ink Black.

Remus: Forgive me for speaking so soon.

Coming back together is a crash of an embrace that folds the world in upon itself. Inside of it they are held safe, cradled in each other, whole again. And never mind what the children see.

Soon enough, they point their wands together, they rush into the night, they change and buck and break apart again.

But first, eavesdropping:

Sirius: I love you as.

Remus: Sandburg?

Sirius: You.

There will never be this moment's equal.