Myths of Origin (15 page)

And, oh, I am under him again, the Stone with the Inquisitor’s cragandjag face, and he with the rack under me, bending (as though for a shield) my spine into a circle, diameter twice radius, π2, numbers marching like ants up and down my bleached bones, the queen and her thousand daughters perched upon black and white ladders and staircases that smell of opium, velvet slant of plush-lipped opiates, slant, slant, slant, slant of perpendicular bones, the geometry of bruises and burst lips. His marble mouth next to my ear, words like grave worms, like winged insects, like mocking plague rats. The Stone torments me:

Go ahead, Darlinggold, precious. Scream in the sunlight and scream in the moonlight and scream in the starlight and lakelight and cloudlight and fishlight and gooselight and rowanlight and dawn’s rosy fingers, Rosicrucian dawn, Templar aurora, Maltese cross blazing across the sky like the outline of a corpse: In this sign thou shalt conquer . . . To the gold dust of the desert, to the streets of the Maze, feel the cool stucco on your burning back, feel the lick and tickle of the flames while we burn you, burn you, burn you, witch in the Holy Land, cat-woman, you smell like the sage-garden and didn’t we see you dancing naked with the devil in the orange groves last midnight Thursday? Can’t deny, can’t deny, but my did the oranges taste nice, my didn’t their juice taste cold and sweet, my didn’t he make music on that drum, didn’t he make you a percussion/tympani, beat on the copper bellied skin of your back, songs to wake the stones, blow into your bones and out came symphonies?

(—They cannot finde that path, which firste was showne,

But wander too and fro in wayes unknowne—)

How can you deny your possession, your Assassination, with all those jabbering voices in your head, pretty young thing? Aren’t you the devil’s pan-flute, woman? Confess, confess, confess and we will merely strangle you, and the hooded executioner will hide his erection from the crowd, the excitement from seeing your lips burst open like sea amenones, eyes go wide as though in the throes of orgasm, his hands intimate on your lily throat, oh and he’ll turn aside at the last minute so no one will see. Confess and be saved. Or we’ll we’ll hang you from the hawthorn tree, burn you at the stake like venison and eat your pretty limbs at a banquet attended by twelve Kings and no less, twelve Queens to drink your blood from teacups, for I say unto you that the body of a witch mortified and vanquished in the name of God is yea verily as sacred as the body of Christ, and it shall melt on our tongues like unto the very Communion wafer, and we shall feast upon it as on the tender breasts of doves, and suck the holy marrow from her bones. Our hounds will gnaw the severed feet and be blessed in the hunt. the children will suck your knuckles like cherry candy. A burning is always cause for celebration: the village eats for a week. Quick as a spring hare you won’t escape, we know all the best hiding places.

(—Furthest from end then, when they nearest weene

That makes them doubt, their wits be not their owne—)

Oh, ho! Indeed, you are far from salvation, from rescue and release. I am the Path that pierces you, my body gores you like a matador, and how I burn inside you as though you were a censer with all your pretty gold finish. Never think there is anything else but you and I alone in the dark.

Oh you Salome-witch, with the blood of that glass-bellied Queen on your painted fingers, dance here in the Dungeon as you danced in your heathen grove, and we will merely crush your skull with a stone. We will take a sliver of flesh from your dancing heels and plant the wisteria with them, and oh! How purple they shall grow in the spring! Walked you on the desert Road like the shadow of a hawk, but you can never, never escape it, it trails you like squid ink, trails you like a credit report, chases you like wolves after caribou, clings to you like jellyfish. We knew you when you came, we knew the moment your black foot touched Holy Ground. Perhaps we will only drown you, drowning in the Sea will salt the meat, and your lungs will fill up with scrolls before you die, the parchment will choke your cilia, papyrus in your ivory nostrils, (and tell us, tell us how nice the oranges tasted!) Aramaic letters smearing on the Walls of your esophagus; oh, how pure you’ll be! HOLY, CLEAN, PURE, white the color of divinity, and you all stained RED, RED, RED, blackberry juice on pricked fingers, pricked like that famous beauty’s finger, only you weren’t ever a beauty, were you? Oh no, not with that dress, not with those shoes, not with that ratty hair!

Oh, you though you could charm even with that dreadful time-release skin moldering into all sorts of decayed shades, your stupid mewling mouth gibbering with black vomit on your lips, the vomit of your sickness, your unclean brain, cramped and filthy, and yes, oh, yes, precious, aren’t you the Monster after all, deformed and grotesque, commedia dell arte devil with bells for horns, weak but ugly, oh isn’t that you in the proverbial nutshell! Isn’t that JUST PEACHY? Your little piglet haunches all scrunched up in your dank corner picking at the lice eggs of true reality and how they GROW on you like fruit!

Oh don’t cry, little bird, don’t cry. Aren’t you a NICE GIRL after all with your lolling eyes and your mouth full of smoke and your sloppy eye-make up, aren’t you really a NICE GIRL at heart, oh yes, of course, precious, we know, we know.

And we’ll crust you in salt like a diamond dress, how pretty and NICE you’ll be for the feast! All dressed up. With three fingers (for the Trinity, of course) we will scoop the mound of salt from your contorted mouth and remove your teeth to play dice with, and scrape it from your cheeks as though from a fat side of salmon. In the afterglow of your ascension we will dance and dance.

(—That path they take, that beaten seemed most bare—)

Oh, you foolish girl. I am beyond everything that you are. You should not have come, not have come, to the walls of the Labyrinth with its mosaics and cisterns like the vaults of heaven. So becoming with your clear eyes. Yet you could not see the Way. Come and dance for us, Jezebel-witch, Delilah-daemon, show us the calves famed in Gaul and Britannia Ultima, show us the white-armed dervish of the orange groves.

(—This is the wandring wood, this the Errours den—)

This is the end. You know nothing. Do not pretend. You are mine, my very own.

And in my dream, in my sacred madness I see his face how like a stalactite lit by the light of bat’s eyes. The callow face of the Stone, cutting me like an obsidian arrowhead, surgically slicing, glutting himself on me, glowering, gloating. Now that I have chosen sleep he can have me entire.

Oh, but know that I will wake as dreamers do and you will slip back into the white pebble in a macaque-stomach, and I will lurch onwards.

Will you now?

Oh yes. I accept. Here and there, my body is all sweet flesh and curve, ready for the witch’s oven, ready for the gingerbread hut, ready for the peppermint banisters and butterscotch windowpanes, the cinnamon-gummy rugs and white chocolate stairs. Ready for the black licorice whip oven grill and cotton candy pillows, the pumpkin pie floors and caramel apple chandeliers, the lemon-ice wash basin and the cider bath water. But I’ll wake. And in the end, won’t I make a lovely pie, cinnamon crust with a honey glaze, twenty-four blackbirds baked inside, to lend sugar and mystique to my bones? Won’t that be a dainty dish to set before the King? When I lie souffléd at his bedside and he runs his tongue over my soft grape-flavored centre? Won’t I then be the best dish the witch ever served to his Majesty under a silver dome?

Oh, we are just SALIVATING, darling, positively DRIPPING.

You will see
.
If I accept, if I do not fight, I will prevail.

(—‘Yea but,’ quoth she, ‘the perill of this place

I better know than you—’)

30

Hoo.

I am watching you sleep, Kore, Darlinggold, watching your eyes flutter like bees’ nests, watching your breath whistle through the grass like a scythe. I am watching your coppery chest riseandfallriseandfall, tidal motion of your stomach concealing and cricket-breathing. I am watching your forehead crease like an envelope, lost in dreams I do not share, but can guess.

Oh, womanchild, I have walked beside you and I have chosen to, not because you were weak and needed my padding footsteps next to yours, but because I heard your voice echoed off the faces of every Wall, and came to you drawn as a furry-feelered moth. I dragged my Temple along the Road to you as though it were a plow, as though I were a black-shouldered ox, and I let you breakfast on its fruit. I let you kill my beautiful, simple-minded chess set because even in your delirium you dazzled above all their cut crystal. I let you go mad in my arms. I have pulled you quietly and surely along the Road, to give you what you desire, because you were bright and new against the mud-brick. Just as Maidens cannot help but eat anything they are offered, Beasts cannot resist the pull of Maidens, irrefutable and fierce. We lumber towards you out of our black corners and dripping dungeons, drawn and caught, even when we know it is so. Oh, especially when we know. And I came to you, you and no other, out of the grey of the Temple.

Soon it will be over, my Kore. Soon there will be a blue Door and a Key you do not think I know you have. We have played this scene so many times. Soon there will be a shaft of light through you like a lance and we will part, because that is also the way of Beasts and Maidens. I know. I accept. I have, after all, set this sequence in motion. But as you sleep I am filled like a pitcher with sorrow, because I love you and do not wish to see the last of your many-colored shapes against the sky. But it is the course of these things, and I will follow the tale I know to be ours.

You shift in your sleep and I know it is because of the Stone, the Stone I carry inside me and thus keep close by you, so that it can do its work and change you one last time. You did not want a sequence, but I have given it to you, you were content, and I have given you pain in a silver bowl, for as I love you it is also my nature to harm you, to torture you, to push you along the Road that passes through me and present you amid fanfare with new twists and snarls, with new bottomless wells and dead ends, with Angels and Hares and Lobsters with colored shells. Without pain, there is no progress. Though you cannot see it now, though I am only the little golden Monkey who nuzzles your face, I am also the Stone and the Inquisitor, the Camels and the Carried Women, the Man and the Bar. I am the Voice that Recites verses inside you, from a place you will never remember. I am even the Road itself. I adore you and I worship the presence of you within me, yet I have borne horrors to you on my back, given them like presents. It is the Way, and I have fulfilled it.

I have brought you this far, through the acetylene torch of Walls shrieking a beckoning call, drawing the orange streaks of your soul towards it, to absorb into itself all the cardinal colors, to bring together the reds and yellows and white-heats and oranges, to conflagrate in some Compass Rose which lies at the center of you though you cannot believe in a Center. Nothing grows in this place that cannot carry its own water, the cactus that blooms at night, the single lemon-yellow flower. And you carry seas inside you, the salt and the tide of blood and plasma.

So you walked and became purified, and ascended poles that dwindled skyward like fabled towers covered in thorns, the sky opening like a womb to enfold, envelope, encase, entwine, entreat. The burning blue furnace of heaven, where the world is battered on a white anvil, poured molten into a Labyrinth-shaped mold, spattered with red sparks that become stars and iron-oxide rich soil. You turned your salt-crusted face upwards, creased eyes and parched lips, hands blistered from making corn cakes on the searing rocks, toes calloused from walking through caves with the dark, seductive rustling of bats overhead and the maddening smell of water within, you raised your eyes to the vault of sky, and I saw you like a first revelation. You are so beautiful, Kore, Kore, my Darlinggold, painted with metallic dye, extended arms thinned to thread by hunger and ascension.

The balance of one foot on the pole, like a parchment-colored flamingo, will be as it ever is upset by your arms in second position, and you will falter as you must, feel the hot wind rush up from earth and down from heaven, and as you step off into space, into unknown and unknowable, flesh carved with hawk-claws and pictographs, shaded by the great image of the desert snake etched in sunburn on your back, and I will vanish gratefully in a puff of raven feathers. Their Plutonian violet-black will float in a sudden hush down to the red rock below, and I will leave you to do this all over again, for that is also the Way, the cry of events sounding again and again like the tide, full-throated. We have walked together before how many times and will again. So it is not really farewell, though each time my heart tells me that it is. You cannot teach the body to know the lay of the Maze, it will insist always on its own telling. You will not remember me in my golden fur, you never do, with your shivering eyes, and next time I will not be a Temple-Monkey. But you will be a humanchild, fevered, forever and ever, for it is your tale in which I am the villain and helpful guide and the scenery and even the shuffling prop master.

There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.

31

She wakes, with sand in her eyes, for it is the last day.

It is a silver sun, full of diamond sunspots and a nacreous corona, beatific, filling the sky like a supernova. The Monkey, fur made into jewels by the brilliant light, makes her a last breakfast of robin’s eggs and wild turnips. Terns wheel overhead, with their lonely cries, watching the gold woman and the gold animal go about their morning tasks. She washes her gleaming face in a fountain, water trickling off her features in sweet rivulets. Her blank eyes have become beautiful, have become hers, and they are polished like copper pots. She eats the steaming turnips and salty eggs slowly, not entirely knowing why she savors them so. The Monkey grooms her (savoring himself this last contact with her wild, coriander-scented mane) and she allows his touch on her bronzed hair, calmed of her night terrors by his deft fingers.