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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.
I climbed down from the tower—down is always easier than up. When in doubt, head downward. By the time my joints have accomplished it, a weak moon has drifted out of the black like an afterthought. I made my small cooking fire on the familiar earth near the crumbling torii gate and boiled a thin stew of bamboo shoots and young potatoes.
After a time, the Gate seemed to loom larger and I spoke to it, my second tutor, whose architect was ash, a body that had long ago burned out like a cigar.
“Gate,” I said, “tell me a lesson about cooking-pots.” Gate did not turn towards me, but her voice was thick, paper-pulp fashioned into a mouth.
They evolve like drawbridges, they open and shut.
“Gate,” I mused, “tell me a lesson about tea-cups.” Her voice ran like paint, trickling down her red flanks.
They are the nature of empty, there is nothing in them but that you put it there.
“Gate,” I bowed this time, for Gate is much gentler than River, “tell me a lesson about chopsticks.” Her words stood still and vibrated.
Enough of them together line a passage down to the belly-throat, where all things occur.
“Gate,” I whispered, “tell me a lesson about hunting-knives.” Her voice fell on me like a shiver of pine needles.
They are origin.
Hot stew simmering contentedly in me, I curled against her once-beautiful wood and the constellation of the sea serpent coiled overhead.
The First Rainbow Appears
She is my dream-self, my night-self, she is my deep-self, she is my obverse, my androgyne-self despite her full lips and curving limbs, my hunter-self, my archer-self, my earth-self. The self-that-is-wife. She is the god-self that must rest within like a child when I eat beneath the Gate. She is embodied and unbodied, the Saturnine sliver of me that haunts the corners of my elbows, eyelids, and sits fecund in her smoke-lodge creating universes from pine needles. That swallows the world whole like a golden-bellied snake and excretes mythos like sweat from her crystal-scaled skin. The dream-body walks the desert on feet cut by thorns, with scratches on her palms and date-juice on her lips. She is made of earth. But within me walks the unscathed and unmarked, and she is made of light.
I dream I have smashed clocks and pocket watches and sundials and bronze-orbed pendulums to feathered-glass razors, pulverized their round faces into metallic dust. I dream lilies grow from the inner curve of my skull. I dream I can see the muscles in my/her back slide and move beneath her foxglove skin as I moves beyond it, into the next self that dissolves into seafog when I strive to see the one after, to see myself in her body, sheathed in her hair, to unite with her, to be a whole. I walk in the brittle sun and she waltzes under the arctic blaze of the north star.
I/she found your jaw today. It cast a shadow, delicate and wavering on the water, the shudder of a waxwing shaking rain from her feathers. The shadow eclipsed the water, and the water eclipsed the stones, stealing glimmer from the stream and silt. Deep in its fingers lay a row of perfect moon-teeth embedded in pink flesh and a ridge of perfect bone, torn and bloody as a trout in the jaws of a hawk.
This is the dream of the sister-wife, and in it the silt-body becomes a narcotic, a morphine that encourages nothing but forward movement, denies the lateral progression of these beggared forms. She is sheer color, needle-wings of every irised shade. In her morphine river I drift like a raft of yellowed reeds.
Floating Weeds Appear
I have used the last of my tea. The dream-village boy brought it last summer folded into a square of yellow cloth, holding out the wrinkled green leaves to the Ayako-I with trembling hands. He was in awe, to see a living ghost, with her flesh looped over bones like knitted shawls, and hair that brushed the back of her heels like a kiss. His eyes were so wide, offering his tea as though I/we were a statue, a wood-woman covered in gold leaf, worthy only of terror and service. I imagine they draw straws for it, the honor, or shame, of bringing me these
small gifts.
But I have used the last of it, and I must wait until summer to drink my tea again under the slow-blink of starlight. Perhaps it is just as well—my teacups, rough hewn from River’s fleshy clay, do not stand up quite right. Some of the tea is always lost, the sour green liquid sits at an awkward angle and sloughs out when my fingers brush the rim. My fingers, my dream of fingers, are not so graceful. I lose the tea, down my chin, out to glass, onto the earth. I cannot keep it all in my mouth. I am too small for it, and the cups too poorly made.
The wine-sack, too, is gone. I woke, forcing the Ayako-eyelids open as early spring sunlight pried at me greedily, and it was gone. I think perhaps it is wrong for me to miss it. I think I should be content with what Mountain brings and ask for nothing else. Then again, perhaps it is not me.
I warm water in my little pot and pretend I can taste the sharp star-points of tea in my throat. It is enough, but somehow, it is not.
Doves Spread Their Wings
