In Her Inexperience

"That girl's eyes loved gazing into water, in her doubly delightful vision, but he was still learning the liquid language, and there's danger and there's damage, there's envy and derision, when you love the ocean's daughter. So he told this girl that of course he had been in love once, but that girl had turned out to be a mermaid and he couldn't swim or even go overboard and sink down to where her eggs were lying like multitudinous, enticing pearls slowly drifting away on the luminous white sand at the bottom of the blue lagoon... He didn't really like the water very much, I guess... so anyway what this girl told me was that after that he always, ironically, had the blues, like a deep glinting reflection in his eyes, like the distant echo of a soprano saxophone in his ears... The first time this girl met him, apparently, he turned to her and said, "What did you say?" and forced a smile politely to his lips, his lips that would never kiss an earth-woman or taste the flower-sweet air that floats through her, although she may have any number of his wistful, wondering children clinging to her skirts while her tears flow endlessly back to the sea."