Myths of Origin (20 page)

But I also dreamed that beside me ever walks she, the second, or perhaps third self who knows none of this. I wander in her like an echo.

The Skylark Sings

The sun pealed out a hundred bronze bells smattered blue by a bleeding sky.

Standing in the sacred “I” of limbs caught to torso, of
alone
on a mossy stone with the stars combing my hair. I have smelled the sizzle of my curls. I have clawed and screamed but no one would venture close enough, no one’s arm ever lengthened to cup this body like a grail, and the Mountain gobbled my voice like krill.

They are pathetic, my solitude and my dreams, they are sodden and grotesque, dripping their shame on the summit path, the filigree branches, the gossiping reeds. The river roses tangled in a smear of obscene red as the dawn spilled like milk over the tops of austere trees.

It is Water-Carrying day, when the Ayako-body walks down to the River and fills its shabby clay jars. The running stream asks me wordless riddles, the lark punctuates his versifications with small pipings. I kneel and my knees creak—I sadly recall a time when they did not. The newest sun of a thousand warms my back like a winter dress as I lean into the chortling brook.

“Tell me a lesson about water, River,” I murmur, for River has always been my tutor, less stern than Mountain in his dreaming heights. And when River speaks, his voice is yellow and blue, the fringe on an emperor’s sedan chair, rustling imperceptible gold into the wind:

When you put your white foot into me, I part for you. But when you drink, though it is cool and sweet, you part for me.

“River,” I say, “tell me a lesson about earth.” And when River speaks, his voice is green and gray, the mist sloughing down into the valley.

If you plant your meager bed, perhaps a bed-tree will grow, perhaps it will not. But in the ranks of beds and trees and planters, only Mountain abides.

“River,” I whisper, so as not to disturb the harp-tongues of the lark-flock, “tell me a lesson about wind.” And when River speaks, his voice is white and rose, the air stirring new blossoms.

When wind touches the water-birds, it turns them the thousand colors of snow. Yet it does not change you.

“River,” and now I am almost asleep again, my lips scarcely move to make the words, “tell me a lesson about fire.” And when River speaks, his voice is tinged with red, its edges flushed and hot.

Flame travels on strange feet. Its heart is never twice the same.

And down by the dream-river, among jars of mottled clay, I sleep and write these lessons with the others on the tablet of my wax-flesh.

Eaglehawks Metamorphose into Doves

There is a dream-sister. She is all red, even her nipples that cut open the flesh of the sea. When the sun rises over our islands, which lie like a beaded necklace on the green waves, she drinks the light in a goblet of vines. When she sleeps, she sleeps in the curve of my waist, which is also red.

I dream there is no loneliness, I dream that she drinks my sorrow up like the dawn. This is the fire-dream, and I know it, for my limbs burn. I recognize the necklace of orange wedges and crab’s eyes I wear, I recognize the bird-bright throat of my sister.

It is the fire dream and I am going to die.

I dream that it is River once more who holds me down with his turquoise hands, and my sister’s arms are full of stones. One by one she brings the black rocks down onto my body, my sky-skull, the fine bones of my flaming feet. My lava-blood spurts like semen from throttled skin, leaping out as if it hated me. She crushes me under her vitreous stones, under her talon-hands, under her grunts and screams like a skewered boar.

I am not afraid. My bones grind to dust with joy, frenzy, the marrow liquefies ecstatically. In River’s strange-nailed grip I writhe and laugh, tiny flame-hiccups erupting from my bloodied lips. She rains down on me white-eyed quartz, basalt, feldspar, granite. She stuffs my mouth with dream-coal like an apple, and I can feel the seraphic pleasure of my teeth cracking. She is releasing me, and my flesh gobbles her stones as greedily as a child.

The dust-stuff of my bones River gathers together and mashes with rice-paste and goat-fat; into this he pours plaster. He makes of me an island chain, rounded as beads of sweat bubbling to the surface of the froth-torn sea.

And I rise out of my bones like steam—they are nothing but mute earth, now. I am a naked fire, with breasts of naphtha and sardonic knees, I am beyond what once was the red of flesh and the dream of the sister, the crab-iris of my pendant and the blue molars that River sunk into my neck so tenderly as the last rock rushed down and bit into my brain.

In the dream I am free, I range out, flitting from place to place, faceless, formless and wild, painting my scalded heels with ocean. The jellyfish pout in the harbor like little mouths, translucent and pure, swallowing nothing. All paths are taken—I fan out over possibles like hair on lightless water; my matchstick-braids swing wide and encompass heartless mountain-architectures, skulls and steppe-altars, the shape of a crone scraping circles into the sand.

I am a body of flame, without steel-jointed bones. The dream-sister released me and only the fire remains, the fire and the voice, my voice, that ever-owl-screeching voice, banshee-bright on a hundred infant hills that are the old body, that thump like a suffocating trout, tail to the starry south.

The Swallows Return

“Why do you not go up to the second floor of the pagoda?”

I leapt up from the rush-bed of River, the hair of Ayako-I tangled up with twists of milky grass. A great Mountain Goat stood before me on hooves of pyrite, his shaggy wool twisted gray and white, snow and stone, colors of the roots of old things. His horns were monstrous, swept back from his mossy brows in pearl and jaundiced bone.

“It is not so very far,” his voice ground, like a stone moving aside to reveal a cave. It was not surprising that he should speak—when you have built your solitude-temple as I have, many things speak which should not.

“I cannot get to the top. My feet are weak and stupid, now. My knees are like paper boxes.” The Goat seemed to shrug in his tangled skin, his black eyes shifting shades from jet to coal to the roof of a smoking temple.

“I did not say you ought to reach the top. But the second floor is not so great a feat. Why not unfold your knee-paper and climb? If there is a tower, there must be a climber, else why would the tower stand?” With this his hooves clattered on the stones and he was gone, up the side of the mountain where the wildflowers grow all dewy and bright.

Ayako is refuge. I am profound within her. She is the simplest of dreams, perhaps my best one. She trembles and is hungry for fish and rice, she fears storms and has silent flesh which rustles like a robe. I am afraid for us, that if the I-that-is-Ayako ascends the red tower, I will become lost in our/her dream-women, and I will not be able to tell the dream of the lion-haunches from the dream of the belly-winds.

But we had young turnips and mustard greens in our befuddled stomach that day, and these things make bravery.

So I-in-her stood in the center of the pagoda, in the crosshatch of shadows and strewn stalks of sun-leeched grass, looking up through the ruined levels, rising and rising like angular suns. I found a foot hold in the wall, and a ledge to grip, and thus worked my way upwards. There had once been a fine painting on the pitted stone, I could still see shabby colors in the cracks—a bull’s head, a burning horse, a woman giving birth beside a river.

I was a column of sweat by the time I pulled myself through the mildewed floorboards and into the second room.

In a corner long ago conquered by fierce and noble spiders lay a leather wine-sack, an intricate moon finely wrought upon its surface, and it was filled with goat’s milk, which was sweet and warm.

Thunder Lets Loose His Voice

When you come to the sun-wall, you expect a Question. A Riddle. But because you do not know, cannot know, which on is peculiarly yours, all Questions are asked. Only when my scarlet-dripping mouth opens around the divine interrogative does one Question gain ascendancy. Before I speak, all the Questions that ever were lie under the possible quiver of my leonine tongue. And so, because any Question may be there, soft as a Eucharist, all Questions
are
there.

Equally, all these Questions are answered. (This is the logic-dream, intersecting the dream of the lion-haunches at consecutive right angles.) Before you speak, all answers jumble themselves behind your acoustic uvula, a traffic in conceivable responses, as though they fled from some dark monster for whom no answer exists. Before you speak, you could say anything, and so you have said everything.

Further, before you ever came to my dust-bricks and the slow slide of my paintbrush-tail, all the Questions and Answers have been uttered, rejected, accepted, stuttered over, well-orated, and guessed at. You have been eaten, regurgitated, defecated, decomposed. I have been slain, flayed, skinned, vivisected and displayed on your mantle for generations. You have killed the king and married the queen, blinded yourself and died in obscurity. I have picked my teeth with your metatarsals and sunned my belly on the grass. It has all
occurred.

And yet, before any of them have occurred, it is possible that all have occurred, and so they all have. There is no reason for us ever to meet. We have already met. I am in your belly, you are in mine. We are a many-colored
ouroboros
, merrily chewing on each other’s scales. My riddles are answered. I am content.

And yet you keep coming, to find in me the snarled yarns of a thousand and one imaginable universes of envowelation and verbiate gesture—words and words and words, a tower of possible vocabularies, a geography of lingual variation.

It is possible that women are like this, too. That from a single source they dilate into all possible women, like a flame changing colors from the center outwards in wide bands: white, blue, yellow, orange. It is possible that all women are one woman, who has already lived, died, conflagrated and drowned.

It is possible that men are also connected this way.

Despite this, I love because it is my nature the dream-taste of all possible flesh on all possible tongues.

The First Lightning Flashes

The milk was warm and thick, better than the throat-that-is-Ayako has had in many years. In the early days I used to pray to Mountain to send me a little goat I could love and who would keep me warm with her wool, whom I could milk. Perhaps I could even strain cheese from the milk. Instead he sent rabbits and squirrels to eat. But I did not complain.

And strangely, with the sweet milk circling my teeth I was completely Ayako. I was within her tightly and hotly, blooded and fleshed. The dream-women fled and I was the white singularity at the center, open, iconic. Self flowed into self and all things flowed selfwards. The milk seeped through me in ornate patterns, a complicated knot work separating fractal-bright in my veins, which in themselves separated and separated further like winter branches thinning into twigs.

I was truly alone for a moment, and the temple was whole, gilt-edged. Incense sighed from my pores. I forgot the lion-dream and the fire-dream. I forgot the dream-husband and the dream-sister.

The phosphor-stars shone through a hole in the distant roof, and clouds drifted over the moon like mendicant’s rags. And under their house-blankets and mist-curtains I was Ayako, and no other.

But soon the wine-sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.

The Empress Tree Flowers

In my dream, I begin to plan a revenge. My breasts and my thighs conspire.

Mountain cuts an alpine range through my torso, tumescent summits swell up horribly, boils of dirty snow. River is rewarded for his complicity, he flows now directly into the mouth of my womb. I am his banks, I am his delta, I am his floodplain. His fat throat giggles as he encourages himself into frothing rapids along my cattail-ovaries.

But inside the dream of the belly-winds, the revenge-dream begins to form like a gilled fetus, in a
satori
of suspended animation, poised on a curious tiptoe like a Neolithic messenger-god. I am horribly open between them; they have polished my skin like banisters so that they can live inside me, playing checkers on my painfully elongated spine.

Quietly, I start to gather clouds across the black line of my collarbone, to hide the star-areolae from their sweating glances, from Mountain and River, who hold my battered legs open. I take the stars away, I rob their treasure house of all those white jewels, I let them laugh and drink from me like tavern-thieves and all the while I am robbing them of all possible skies.

I turn the dream-oceans dark, shade by shade. They deepen like a bruise: yellow, blue, indigo, black. I spit pigment into the waves, onto the new islands that have burst up in the west, onto the silent continents. I stain everything black. There are no harbors, there are no ports.

But there are villages. River coughs, Mountain smokes his pipe, and between the saliva and the smoke I find thatched roofs in my knee-pits, marketplaces in my sternum. They sink wells in my tear-ducts. I suckle a generation of water-diviners.

I hear them whispering, where a tributary winds up the cloud-side of Mountain. They are planning a Palace of my teeth. Molar-turrets, incisor-halls, portcullis of canines. When it is finished it will block my throat and I will never speak again. They send in canaries and cartographers to map the veins of usable enamel.

But they work slowly. I have time.

Moles Metamorphose into Quails

A hawk sat that evening in the pink flush of sunset picking at grass seeds, not looking up or down, only at the seeds which will now never sprout. And possibly I, too, the Ayako-body and the fire-body and the wind-body and the lion-body and the wife-body, germinate together in some dread aviary stomach wall, fed only by blood and bile and the occasional field mouse, growing dark and strange, with limbs the color of pupils. In the mirror of gastronomy I do not recognize a woman, only flesh, only bone, only the swift-scarlet ventricles of quickening tongues. I see only multiplicities. My feet are rooted in this unimaginable belly, as are theirs. Toes disappear into fluid, into soft veins and pulsation, into rhythms inconceivable, irredeemable, and un-patterned. In the belly of the hawk I am silent, in her thick body I am still.