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Because in her body, I hardly speak at a
ll any longer. The rusted brass hinges of my voice have gathered dust. I put my/our hands to the soil of the garden, and can feel the heat of growing things, meant to be soon inside my body. The Mountain marks me, knows I am meant to be in his belly, etching his shape against the sky-that-is-not, pinioning the woman, the cobbled personae, the dancing cranes and bobcats and lizards and singing monkeys and squirrels to the slivers of dreams pretending to be stones. He gathers his blue and green and white to consume me, he gathers the gray and the gold. His chortling streams and the meadows lie restful and sweet, as though the moon-goddess had smoothed an emerald taffeta dress over her slender knees. He is impassive and huge, he mocks and waits.
Inside her/me the dreams are burning, falling, raw as bark-stripped pine. There is no sound where they step, for it is possible they are not really there, that these shadows are not theirs, that she is not doubled and tripled, tumbling backwards through bodies like scalding water.
And some secret avalanche on the far side of the Mountain rumbles as he clears his diamond throat.
Wild Geese Go North
I dreamed cannon-winds shot through my belly; each strand of wind carried talons and curved beaks which tore my flesh. My navel was cut out like a coin, my mouth was filled with dead leaves. I dreamed that I was the first belly. I dreamed my flesh dark and star-sewn. My womb bore up under a five-clawed hand, slit down a scarlet meridian, and black daises grew from the skin of its depths.
I dreamed it was Mountain who passed all these canine winds into me. He put his slate-blue mouth to me and took a breath that serrated the edge of the world. I felt his caves erupt in me, his glaciers and his footholds. I dreamed it was River who held me still, gripped my forearms in his hands like otter’s paws.
I dreamed that I cried out to Moon, but she had been eaten whole.
The winds were in me and marauding, the teeth of Mountain nursing at my womb, and he filled me with migrating birds, he filled me with blade-wings that carved pictographs on the inside of my bones, where I could not read them. I dreamed that Mountain shook with pleasure as he emptied all his stones into me, the boulders and the pebbles and the granite flanks, and the sharpest wind which blows at his peak.
When I was filled with stone until I was too heavy to whisper, and wind until I was a body of breath, I dreamed that Mountain and River tore me to pieces with their teeth. They put my throat and my breasts into the sky frothing with whitecap-stars, and my thighs into the glistening rice-fields. They put my arms into the sea that boiled with serpents, and my hands into the desert, palms downturned.
And between them they ate my womb on silver plates, and called it perfection, called it their precious-sweet, their horn-of-plenty, their best work. They sugared it with marrow and lapped with agate tongues.
I dreamed I was dead in them, I dreamed I was scattered over the rims of earth.
And I dreamed that when he had swallowed his last, and I was a spot of blood on his beard, Mountain began to laugh.
Seedlings Sprout
The I-Ayako is satisfied with the progress of the beans. They have not broken the scrim of soil yet, but she can hear them wriggling beneath, like butterflies. She is worried about the turnips. Next year she will have courage enough to ask the dream-villager for some wheat to plant. She looks now to the crocuses peeking up their candle-tips. They will not keep her alive, but they are so sweet on her little pink tongue.
The wind is still cold when it comes down from the Mountain after its prayers on the peak. She would like to say it is a kimono that she pulls around her thin body for warmth, but long ago it abandoned its pinks and yellows and seems now little more than a blank cloth flung upon her.
My/her mouth aches like a shut box. I want so to speak, to moisten my lips and make my own wind-ablutions, add my verses to the Mountain’s long poem. I am afraid it is broken, its tumblers have shattered in the winter freeze.
Thus one evening I went to sit at the foot of gnarled old Juniper near my pagoda and told him my story, which sprouted from my throat like a plum-tree. I do not know the juniper’s name, but he is a good listener, and the moon rustled his branches while I spoke in a cobwebbed voice.
“When I was a girl and had a fine brocade obi and soft sandals, I lived in the dream-village. (I suppose it is possible that this is only a vision like the others, but I am here, and so I must have come from a Place, and one place-tale is as good as another.)
I had seven brothers who were all very wise and brave and they protected the huts and the market and the temple. But then came terrible men with their bodies covered in leather and iron, who swung long swords against the wind which screamed as they bit into flesh. They killed everyone, even my poor mother with her hair like a spider’s best web, and they burned the temple to the ground.
I hid under a wheelbarrow for three days, until they had gone and the dream-village smoked black. I was very afraid. I wandered among the ashes of the bodies and wept.
Near dawn on the seventh day after the men had left, a Sparrow came to me with a fat red berry in her mouth. She ruffled her fine brown feathers at me and spoke: “Go and see Mountain,” she said, “he will be your village, your father and your mother and all your seven wise brothers.” Her fluted voice drifted off and, dropping the berry at my feet, took flight eastwards, towards the craggy toes of the sacred Mountain.
And so I took what clothes I could, a leaky water-sack I could mend, and the fat red berry and I went up the Mountain, following the path of the Sparrow.
It was evening again when I found her, perched atop my pagoda, picking at the ruined paint with her little gold beak. I waited for her to speak again, eager for bird-magic, but she did not. I held the berry out to her in my small white hand and she caught it deftly as she flew back to the village, leaving me to the tower and the Mountain.
It was difficult for the first years, when I had no rice or tea, but Mountain provided for me cherries and plums and chestnuts, almond milk and cold green apples. After a time, people returned to the dream-village and children began to come to me and bring me little presents. Since I am a ghost, they wish to appease me.
And so we sit together and watch the origami-clouds, our dream-village of Mountain, Tower, River, Juniper, and I.”
Peach Blossoms Open
They are suddenly here, floating on the trees like a cloak of butterflies, a blush creeping through their white petals. Suddenly the pagoda has beautiful handmaids which shower it with pale silks. There is warmth hushing through the sky. I lie under the trees with their flower-veils drooping low and I dream that in the afternoon I can see the eyes of a dream-husband in the blossoms.
I lay dreaming on the long-haired grass, legs brown and smooth as a sand dune, arched at the knee at the same angle as the tip of the Mountain, as the line that divides the sun-stone from the moon-stone, the shadowed side from the light. My toes wound in the reeds, tiny emerald rings on the dream-darkened skin, set with the diamonds of milky toenails.
See what in what regalia my dreams clothe me! Violets brush the small of my back with lithe, sugary movements. The scald of blue above me like a velvet gown, cut low on the horizon of my breast, clasped with clouds at the shoulders. See how it covers me in veils and layers of silk, rustling against my now-royal thighs with secretive grace, how it moves against me and strokes the skin. And the gnarled intricacy of these roots of a mountain ash for my Crown, jeweled in sap and leaves yellow as papyrus. What sovereignty my dreams supply! I am clothed in sky and bough, crowned in arboreal splendor. I laugh softly, let the wind imbibe my voice, the tonality melt into nothing like the wax of a candle-clock.
