Myths of Origin (44 page)

My lady lifted her skirt of roses and stepped between the grotesque red trees, calling, calling her thrush-cry voice (
tan-dara-dara-dei
) calling for the unicorn which surely would not come to her, how could it come to her, whose legs clap strong as weeds around my waist, whose lips crushed against mine, whose kisses were so terrible and thick and sweet that our teeth clashed like tiles—what pure beast would come to her? Yet the birches seemed to bleed their white from bark to bark until it emerged, stepping lightly towards her, copper hooves dancing lightly here, there, like an impossibly delicate crab, unsure, hesitant, but drawn to her as though she held him on a string of pale, braided hair.

My lady always had open arms for any lost creature—how else could she have loved me? Her black hair blew back from her face like a nun’s veil as she held out her hands to it, smiling, laughing, coaxing, sitting as maidens will do, as they do in all the tapestries I have ever seen, cross-legged on a mossy patch of forest, with red leaves all around her, sticking in her dress and wind-plastered to her skin. In my memory, in my songs, I can never decide if the dress was red, too, or white.

It was a stallion. A fine white down covered his snowy testicles—I noticed that, of all things, thin pale fur like fishbones lying against his pink skin as he sank down into her lap, as if he were tired, an old man who cannot even bend far enough to take off his shoes when the day is done. His huge head nuzzled her laced breast, great black eyes shuddering closed. He quivered, his diamond hide twitched and his teeth ground together—he groaned in my lady’s lap, the usurper. And the horn—that horn!—long and twisted like an ice-casked branch, knotted and thick and not at all graceful. It a living limb, no ornament, no pretty bauble stuck to a horse’s head. Blood pale as champagne seemed to pulse faintly under the pocked and pitted pearl.

His legs folded onto the moss and my pride was stung—of course it was. They were right, she was a maiden still, and our nights together were as vapor, the seed I left in her no more than a blown dandelion. The head in her lap proved me nothing but a floor-tile, walking like a man, but no less terra-cotta. The silver of the unicorn’s cheek rippled against her skin, and she chuckled, my lady chuckled, her laugh like marigolds opening, and stroked his glassy mane. They laughed, too, the men, uproarious, slapping each other’s backs and pointing at me, at my lumpish shape which could not even take a maidenhead, swimming in armor too big for me.

It was when she touched him—he must have smelled me on her, must have smelled whatever nameless thing takes the place of virginity, buried deeper in her than other women, for my lady was a floor-flower, and who asks a lily if it has lain with another lily? He snorted; his breath was lilac and ice fogging her knees.

I do not want to sing of this. I do not want to tell you how her cheek flushed as though she had been slapped. I do not want to knit rhyme to rhyme just to tell you how the unicorn drew back, his crystalline nostrils flaring, betrayed and betraying, the scent of her a red smear in his perfect nose, how he drew back—I have no meter for it—how he drew back like an arrow and thrust the limb of his horn into her belly, through the skirt of roses and her belt of thyme, through her leaf-skin, her hyacinth-skin, and my lady opened her mouth as if to protest, and blood dribbled from it, black and ugly, falling onto the flaxen beast in long streams and wasn’t it funny to dress up a fool in a lion’s skin? Wasn’t it funny to call his whore a virgin? Wasn’t it funny, wasn’t it funny?

The blood seemed to burn him like a brand; he drove deeper into her, the twisted horn working and grinding against her spine, and he was screaming—a unicorn’s scream! A glass-scrape against gold against bone—screaming and hooves slipping in the moss and bucking against her broken hips as her belly fell into her hands, and she was not a flower, she was not a lily, she was wet and red and she was my wife and she is dead, dead, and I will never sing of anything anymore.

IV.

Stand ye yet, O lime trees

Where we two made our bed?

In the open field

in the open land

where I lay my lover’s head?

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

Stand we yet, we lime trees

who watched you lay her head

Here too are grasses

broken grasses

where she made her bed.

Tan-dara-dei

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

But in the end, the floor cannot be unwalked upon. It is not asked if it would prefer a surcease of shoes. It is trodden; it is worn. It is owned, and paid for, and it will lie beneath all those feet, it will lie beneath a severed white head preserved above the mantle, a white head and a gnarled horn, it will lie beneath those black-glass eyes and never complain. It is not paid to complain. It will sing, because it was made for singing, and because the feet would have their song.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

XII THE HANGED MAN

Lancelot

And when Sir Launcelot awoke of his swoon, he leapt out at a bay window into a garden, and there with thorns he was all to-scratched in his visage and his body; and so he ran forth he wist not whither, and was wild wood as ever was man; and so he ran two years, and never man might have grace to know him.

—Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte d’Arthur

Vespers—The Psalm of Forgetting

Perhaps I never saw her at all. Perhaps I never caught the curve of her hip in my eyelashes, through the rain-speckled window. Did I never stand below the queen, like Gyges, and dream myself a ring slipped onto her finger? Did I never die on her cross, crucified on the gold-dusted frame of her body? Did no spear pierce my side, the wound irising closed like a cataract?

The faces confuse in my memory—was it one woman or two? I remember the waters closing over me, and a black-tipped breast brushing my lips, and milk flowing into my throat like myrrh and sapphire—but no, that was when I was a boy, when the Lake swallowed me and I saw the paintings on the walls of her belly. When the Lady of the Lake peered up out of the water and thought how well she would like to have a son. But a Lake has no womb—so she took me from my nurse whose cheeks were so fat, and taught me to breathe her blue.

I fell so far, so far. She whispered to me in the language of salmon and bullfrogs, taught my uvula to twist itself into the semblance of herons and leeches. I drank the milk of her body for twelve years, and it tasted of belladonna and lemon rinds, it tasted of verdigris, it tasted of the smoke and mist from an unnamable sea. My heart swelled with it, it replaced my blood, the secret currents of snow-bright mercury pooling in my thirsty ventricles.

She opened her mouth and the Lake rushed out of it, and I had no voice but to adore her and call her my mother, my lover, and my terror, to fall into the tide of her beckoning and kiss the brine from her wavering lips. Her cool skin was my bed and her glassy bones were my meadhall—I drank and drank and there was always more of her to fill my mouth. In the night I slept curled into the blue-black shadows of her hair, and I dreamed that once I had been a human boy, and lived in a house with a red roof, and rode a gray horse.

I live with a skein of waves over my eyes even now, and in my fracturing vision I see their faces merge and separate, the reflections of fish just below the surface, skittering out of reach. Was I, then, the Sword in the Lake? I rose from it by her hand, which dripped with the scales of newborn trout, fluttering from her arm like dandelion seeds. I rose from the water and the reeds sang their canticles. And the king took me in his hand and I have been nothing else since but a stupid sharp thing hacking at bags of blood. If I am the Sword I am innocent; steel cannot sin. If I can be nothing but a dumb blade, I can be forgiven. If I am metal, I have been always in the hand of my friend, and never smelled of his wife.

The last moment in the Lake-mother’s arms I wept, and that was the first time I felt the madness coming on, the separating of my skin, the light coughing out from my teeth. I choked, then, who had breathed the Lake for air, and the moon rolled out of my mouth. I stood on the shore, my lungs blazing like saints, and watched her black-flecked eyes disappear, sinking away from me.

Did I suckle at that woman for all my youth? Did I trade my flesh for hers? Or was it all that other she, the one for whom I am punished, the one who will not now hear my name? It is always a black-eyed woman, and I am always prone at her feet, I am always raving at the waters for the false mother—but how sweet the taste of her salt milk, for all her lies—to take me back and wash me clean, take me away from the woman I should not want, from what I have done, from the laughing throat which made me forget that I am only a tool, heavy as a hilt, and all my limbs fold together to make the sleek white edge—I am the musculature of the Lake-knife, and I am not allowed eyes, or blood, or a cock. Yet I strain towards her, always her. Even if I cannot, sometimes, tell the primal her from the secret her.

But I feel it again, I feel the light breaking from my skull like seraphic needles. She will not forgive me, she will not believe me. Her navel spoke to me while her eyes shut my face from the room. It hissed that I was poisoned, poisoned by the Lake, and that I would never be pure enough for the cup to pass to me, I would never be clean of that witch. It hissed like a white serpent and called me damned, and my eyes bled for her, the stigmata of the ruined man.

With my hands in her black hair I screamed the heron-hymns of my youth into her mouth, and she was afraid of me then. She wept and her tears burned constellations into my cheeks, and I’m sorry, I never knew, I didn’t know, my love, my love, I thought it was you. But the queen wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t forget. And now I am losing her, my Guenevere, I am losing her face in the multitude of faces, and her black eyes bleed into my mother’s, and the other one, the one who was not Guenevere, but wore her skin like a dress.

I fell so far, so far. She spat on my hands, and my bones broke like a gate in the wind, and the moon rolled out of my mouth.

Terce—The Psalm of Metamorphosis

It was not only that a hole opened in the world or that in the hole was a garden in which I was the eaten fruit, it was not only that I reached out for a woman and drew back a burned hand. Perhaps I could never have done anything else, and it was all meant to happen as it did, and I was meant to circumnavigate this desert and no other, and pray only to the skulls of buffalo and hare.

I was never innocent, I confess it, as freely as my asthmatic brain will allow. I was a verb, white as opium smoke. I acted, I never stood still. I was the thrust and cry. Somewhere along the way a thing snapped or bent in me and now I can feel my organs expanding like novae, galaxies of liver and spleen, nebulae of bile, of cilia, of obliterated marrow, pounding pulse-rate signals into the blackness of my vast interior—vast enough, anyway, to contain the tumescent moons that spin through me like plates.

But if the geometry of my lover changed underneath me, it did not stop the motion of my hips grinding into her, it did not lessen the red marks of my teeth on her shoulder. The Euclidean planes of her face shifted like glaciers, and her eyes snapped from black to blue. I am guilty, it matters not if I thought that it was the body of Guenevere I loved—it was my fault. I did not die to escape that bed.

But I was not innocent, though I came to that thorn-bed hoarse with faith. I saw it, I saw her lips swell and crack the skein of Guenevere, I saw the Elaine-fruit break its pod, I saw her shiver and her hair flay itself, black slitting to reveal red. I saw it and I did not stop, but I screamed, how I screamed as I felt myself caught inside her, caught as if on a nail in her womb, screaming as I shattered over her body, the glass of my bones pricking her nipples, and her mouth was a trumpet-blare, and the color of its triumph was red, red, red.

The light sluiced from my skin, and her sternum sang my dirge, it gaped between her breasts and I called out her name, her true name which was Elaine, not the white but the clay. I called out her name and her name was the word and the word was the grail and the grail was her womb and my heart cracked like a rotted apple and I was dead in her, I was dead but my son was alive and I could see his face in her belly like the Shroud of Turin and I was lost in the maze of her breath, her wet mouth, her lily-sweat. I was not Theseus, not the hero with the thread of silver, but the mute and rabid Minotaur, raging against flesh-walls and tossing my horns at her phosphorescent ovaries.

Her body seemed to be a cup, and I crushed the goblet to me, and wept into its bowl, and Elaine seemed to smile and promise that she was the only grail I would ever touch, and her mouth was the only life I could ever drink. It was over, over, over and I had betrayed my queen and I clung to the chalice of her, soaked in tears and blood and semen, and her fingers were laced over her liquid belly where the embryonic diamond had begun to swallow its mother in long draughts, the gilled Galahad-thing which I could not now escape.

What a poor beginning for my son, all dressed up in the methane-blue betrayal of morning and grimacing in the light of my skin which was not the light of revelation. But whosoever drinketh from his mother shall have madness until the end of his days and the desert gaping like a jaw at his left hand. I stumbled from the bed and retched a pool of jaundiced stars into the corner, and Elaine was still as stone, listening to the grail-child unfold inside her like origami.

Compline—The Psalm of the Desert Father

I passed out of the world. I ran out of it. I sought out the driest of lands, those red and ochre, burned white and thirsty. I sought out the sermons of the saguaro and the yucca bell. I went deep into the waterless earth, the Lakeless air—in the yellow silt I broke open my skull, and four black opals spilled onto the rock.