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I heard a voice on the wind
(was it mine)
Turn the key, let it in
(was it kind)
It was mine, and unkind
Or too kind to be mine
That’s the way, the way of the wind
He has thought of burning it. The unwieldy thing, strapped to the back of the sturdiest packhorse, wrapped in oilcloth and unstrung, has survived longer than—
Hope, and everything else.
Now, with their wagons, he can let Curufin drive. Curufin wants to, very badly, and Maglor has his own unspoken reasons for distracting him. With someone else at the reins, Maglor sits under the stretched canvas, rocking with the wheels, settling the familiar bulk between his arms and legs.
Athair paid the finest craftsman in the country—according to Athair—to make the claírseach. He was a man with only one eye; the other had been bayoneted in the second war, the war during which Athair had been a boy, and Grandfather Finwe had been a hero.
Lucky, Athair said angrily. They take half a man’s sight, and ask him to count his blessings.
Maglor rests his forehead against the smooth wood. It is polished; uncracked, unburnt. Grandfather Finwe had a voice like the lowest string.
Grandfather Finwe is now in heaven. Maglor is still getting used to the idea of being damned.
(Are we?
This, to Maedhros, two nights ago, when he was tired enough to speak like a child again.
Damned? Maedhros lifted an eyebrow. It made him look like Athair, but with Mother’s tired mouth. Go to sleep, Maglor. I’ll worry about hell for the both of us.)
why poetry
why not a litany
of all the dreadful deeds
and the aching needs
that have stabbed their way through me?
why not in prose
an essay, I suppose
a string of words to firmly close
the space between the bruises and the blows
why listen hard
for sentences already come apart
and secrets under guard
why save your breath?
you’ll find you need it not at all, in death.
“What in God’s name is that about?”
“I think you know.” Maglor glares at Celegorm, who is plucking a pheasant beside the fire-pit. “Someone has to remember it.”
“Right, because we’re all in so much danger of forgetting.” Celegorm scratches his nose with a scarlet hand. “You’ve got to go and write a shit song about it, because you think you’re better than the rest of us.”
Maglor wants to punch him, but he doesn’t. His hands tighten around the hidebound journal in his lap. This, Mother brought with the harp-strings. “When you kill a man”—two—“You can decide how much better you feel.”
Celegorm spits in the dust.
Maglor hopes Curufin isn’t eavesdropping. Maedhros was—he’s napping close by beneath one of the wagons, or pretending to—but they didn’t say anything that Maedhros doesn’t already know.
sometimes I think we were made for greed
all the mentioned men, and the way they bleed
and last long call of a fighting chance
this is war in a word, in a canted glance
this is weariness, in a stooping spine…
“Would it kill you to make it a sea shanty? Something to dance to?” Maedhros’s voice is so dark and bitter that Maglor bites deep into his lip, choking back—something.
“I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Well.” A muffled sigh. “You were singing. We are sleeping in the same wagon, cano.”
“I have to confess it to…someone.” Even the night air will do. Even the wind that is not wind after all.
Maedhros kicks away his bedding as if he’s been trapped by it, suffocating. “Confess it to me, then. Damn it all, Maglor, you can’t live like this.”
“Then maybe I can’t live.”
He said the same about leaving Annabella. He is always like this—a flood of feeling, cheapened by his own heart. Does he even make a farce of death? Death, at his hands?
Maedhros drags himself up and leans against the closed hatch. “Sing me to sleep, then,” he says. He sounds a little too much like Mother for Maglor’s comfort, and in the dark, the angles of his face look very young. “Give me the worst you’ve got.”
except we stand, with one hand
on the century’s latch
and we dearly love to command
pain and our heroes to match.
He keeps expecting—keeps wanting, if only so that someone will punish him—Athair to appear, noiseless and absolute.
Perhaps Athair will strike him, knocking him into this infernal Kansas dust. Perhaps Athair will break his harp, melt his tin-whistle, burning the remnants of Maglor’s regret.
In fact, it is Curufin who finds him first, and Maglor has to wrestle him to the ground, while Curufin—looking nothing at all like a child—hisses, “Stop! Stop singing!”
family is a burden, gilded
faith is just a compass, tilted
(He scratches that one out as soon as he writes it down.)
pride seems like such a swell of polished steel
a breastplate for the heart, real and unreal
but really it is just another shield
and will not, to a sword-point, gladly yield
even in point of truth
I think we’re always wasted on our youth
“We should pray for their souls.”
The sky is very blue. Maedhros’s hair flames bright against his pale cheeks.
“Maglor,” Maedhros says carefully, so carefully that Maglor will consider the subject closed forever afterwards, “I did not even know their names. I saw only eyes to shoot for.”
we might begin in blood
change the ending, and it’s love
let it remain the best it ever was
look at me and tell me it’s enough
I wonder if you know what I am speaking of
Athair is standing beside him. Maglor thought he wanted this, but he isn’t Maedhros. He’s a coward, and so he easily stands aside.
(Yet it wasn’t you, who did—)
“Athair, I…”
“You sing of our hurts,” Athair says. His eyes are keen, as they always are, here or there or yesterday, but his voice is softer than Maglor has heard it in months. “You sing beautifully.”
we are so much the sadder kind of souls
the kind who riddle love with loveless holes
and we have need of you and of your charm
and of the way you arm with light, and so disarm
Fingon plays too. The harp. The fiddle. Fingon is rather wondrous at the fiddle.
Maglor misses him, and it hurts. What must that mean for Maedhros?
We have all spent some time on the brink of greatness
Wax hands, stone hearts, edged with lateness
Come to find a time
Run to time unwind
We have all swallowed blood and believed it holy
All run aground with our secrets only
Cast like stars above
Ruined like our love
There will not be a name for the things we left there
We will not be the same as the ones we see where
Our eyes meet the dark
And our hands come apart
With a fingertip in the wrong position
Folding joints in a grave’s contrition
Water, and a stone
Blink, and we’re alone.
With this, he considers it confessed.