Circe (n.); cf. circen (v.)

"It was with Circe, though, that things really started to go to pot ..." he declared. I bit my lip: it was years since I'd thought about Circe, except on the rare days that, by chance, I thought about something else. She had been in my thoughts so constantly and so long that she seemed a second form of sight.

In my dreams that night I saw her again as the eternally winding path, as an unheralded granary of trees. I saw her as *my Circe* on the other side of herself, like a shopfront outshone by a puddle. I saw her as the drag-footed, life-wild, mud-wretched study of her reflection, and the indifferent world before which, as if sick for lack of speech, she simultaneously cried herself forth and dried herself away to nothing by way of self-expression.