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I stand in my cloak of embers and stir the dream-earth, my skin-scald medieval and slant-eyed. Sage, peppermint, wormwood are scorched beneath me—I care nothing, nothing at all. Rain like inkwells pummel my sternum, my haunch. Away from the islands that River made, the ion-trail that is my flesh sears the sky.
There is nothing here but the fire-dream, the savage flesh and the stern destroyer, nothing but death under the wide elms, the staunch oaks, death under my own eyes bleeding gold paint, my frescoed mouth, flooded with tempura and cobalt-poisoned blood, the lead of murder-pipes.
I choke, I cough up a wreck of wood pulp and iodine, I drown in my own fluid-flame, in the churned death of volcanic paths, the whirling leaf-self which dervish-scours all in me that would lie well in beds of birch-bark, in beds like paper, where books like this one, which is not mine but hers—the dream-hermit, where books like hers are written in sweat, the manuscript of elongated muscles illuminated in diamond salivations.
I am a vessel of salted meat, eyes glazed over by an abundance of nights, a surfeit of dream-visions wherein I touch human breath. There is a film over my dream-body, a veil which cannot be touched or torn. My heart beats seven times and stops, ventricles covered in thick gasoline. It is only in the stopped heart, the deadened pulse that I can discover any revelation, that any ease is to be unearthed.
I am already blackening the soil, already devouring the root systems of baobabs and dandelions, already seething in my half-living skin. Stamp, stamp, stamp, beast rampant on a verdant field and I am nothing but a heraldic smear, blood on stained glass—the sun refracts through me onto the faces of the faithful and I am again only skin, only surface, only the fur and lip of a woman.
Seize this chimeric body, this betraying flesh and it will always and only escape.
I am a tooth, a body of teeth, and I pierce through as though the world were made of water. What else can I ever be but this black-eyed eater of men? What patchwork breasts can I offer up to the screaming stars that will ever satisfy their dark tongues? My back flares wide and strong under the sky, under the moon with horns like mine. Alone I corrode the earth, alone I carve shapes into the path. I walk uncloven, and open my woman’s mouth to swallow darkness until my jaws crack.
I search for a city, I search for walls. I search for the dream of flammable materials.
The Hoopoe Descends to the Mulberry
The boy who brought tea had clean fingernails. That is how I knew he was a dream—what villager can keep his hands clean after working in the rice fields, at the butcher, the blacksmith, mending the well-rope, spreading pitch on the bottoms of fishing boats? So I spoke to him, since dreams are my peculiar surrogate family, I felt I had the right. That it was my duty to address the dream and call it by name, so that it would stay and join all my other dreams in their agate-toed walk. After all, I had no boy-dreams.
He was very pretty, with unkempt hair and limpid eyes. His narrow hips seemed to jut a challenge, though I am long since the days when the hips of men pointed to me. He extended his offerings to me, trembling—he was the fear-dream, then, the dream of cold sweat. I liked watching his hand shake, as though I could curse his line with a glance and a muttered phrase. I liked the quiver of his brown skin.
A sack of rice, a woolen blanket, and the beautiful-smelling tea leaves, which sat in their yellow cloth like oblong jewels. I could see the whites of his eyes, terror-moons lodged in his skull. I readied myself for the great effort of speaking with the throat-and-belly instead of the mind-and-heart. It is altogether a different skill.
“Boy,” I said, and I was ashamed of my broken voice, creaking like a brass hinge, “tell me a lesson about the village.” I waited eagerly for the dream to speak. I loved my lessons, I was eager for more than River would give.
But the boy only gurgled in his throat, an animal, horrified noise, and with a yelp threw down his bundle and ran back down the Mountain path. Behind him a dust-cloud rose up like an eyelid, and closed again.
Ghosts are not supposed to speak. It is considered impolite. And now I must wait a full year to try and catch the villager-dream again.
Sparrows Sing
I flex my gold-shag paw under a drumskin-moon. It is easier here, in the lion-dream. All that there is on the Mountain is solitude, each of whose notes must be plucked on the harp-strings at just the right time so that the music of my disintegrating self will arc over this land like a temple ceiling, and with as many colors. That is not concerned with me, with asking and answering. In considering the whole, one possible woman is not enough. Only in groups, in clusters like cattle-stars, can they bee seen for what they are.
I ought to remember the name-riddle. It is a good one. The boy who called me Truth still swims within, a seven-gabled fish. Between Questions there is not much to do but lie on the wall, devouring grape-pulp and mashed cardamom, resting the muscles in my back. I have a peculiar anatomy, being a winged quadruped, and the weight of wings on my thick-knobbled spine gives me pains. The city doctors will not come—and who can blame them? If I asked them which roots and roasted leaves would be a salve to me, their saliva would dry in their mouths. If they answered incorrectly I would be within my rights to swallow them whole. It is the nature of things: any Question I utter must be answered with blood—mine or theirs.
This is the dream of science. In this feline body I am bound to examine myself, as though I were a butterfly skewered on a wax board. Maculinea arion. Save that I am also the slim silver pin and the thick wax and the hand that affixed these things. When I look at my flesh it looks back.
This is the dream of separateness. I am not the city I guard. They fear my scythe-claws no less than my mausoleum-tongue. I am sub-urban. The hermit-dream lies with her boiling visions somewhere higher than her city, a superior altitude that forgives her this geography of the unreal. I am beneath and outside my city, I circumscribe it, I keep out the unworthy. We are on the outer edge, beyond the pierce-reach of copper compasses.
Momentarily, I am the men I eat.
But that passes.
Earthworms Come Out
I have become accustomed to the second floor of the dream-pagoda. A few centipedes, with bodies of jointed rubies, have made my acquaintance. The floorboards have fallen through in places. Dust and flecks of paint hang suspended in the air which is often gold these days, under a haze of low clouds that suggest the sun.
Ayako moves more slowly now, as though she/I cannot connect to her body. I hope that when the dream of the villager comes again I will be able to catch him—I think another dream might cure the creaking of her bones. I hate the sound. The other women do not creak.
Everything is full but this body—the rains have brought worms wriggling into the mud, and River’s fat pink fish are full of the worms I have dropped into their throats. The trees are made of flashing wings. My little garden teems with thick young shoots, pale green and dark, promising that I will not starve come winter. But the body is empty. I hardly live in it at all these days. The sun makes it lazy an
d I drift into the dream-women with diagonal ease.
A gentlemanly brown Moth flits in and out of the pagoda. He wears his creams and fawns with the grace of a salaried courtier. He sits in the shadows and lets his antennae waft with the breeze. Often he will land on my hair or my sandals, (which require mending again) and his furry belly will rub imperceptibly against my skin.
“Moth, tell me . . . ” I whisper in a voice like an autumn frog-song.
“Yes?” he hisses, rubbing his paper crane-wings together.
