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“Nothing.”
Cucumbers Flourish
This morning, before the dream-sun could report me, I swallowed one of their villages.
I simply drew my knees together and it vanished, caught between my moss-bones and my vine-skin. I felt the roofs splinter and pop against me, the cattle scream and the temple bells shatter. My thighs exulted, trembling with a shivered joy. I tried to conceal my sighs of delight as they all crushed inwards and were finally silent.
When my knees fell back, there was no trace. Mountain and River did not notice. They are busy with the Palace. They have called the ocean creatures together to fill a great jade vat of ink, in order to inscribe their names over the Gate, and the History of the World. River rests the vat on my belly while he blows smoke rings at the scaffolding which has by now obscured my jaw almost entirely.
I am wasting. I begin to wonder if the villages would sustain me. If I only swallow a few at a time, perhaps they will not notice. They have set the red sun on my steps, and he is now my gold-chinned jailor, arcing over me, back and forth, dragging his great clunking cloud-chains behind him.
There is much activity on my body, and they have poured the foundation of the Palace from a blood-mash of cartilage. The miners tap, tap, tap at my jaw through the night, piling up teeth like cairns, piling them up in wheelbarrows and crates, in baskets and slings. I have heard Mountain suggest seventeen balconies. River plans a tower from which to view the History, when it is finished.
The Bitter Herb Grows Tall
I must confess that there is another dream. It is the dream of the silent girl. It is very small, and the I-that-is-Ayako is ashamed. It is not nearly so grand as the others.
In the dream I am wearing gray—very soft, cat-like. I am washed in blue light. The dream-girl is alone, for all of the dream-us is alone. We come from Ayako—we cannot be other than she, and she is alone beyond dreams of solitude.
Her dream-hair is drawn into a knot at her neck, but strands have escaped and blow darkly against her shoulders. This dream does not move. She does not change. The heart in her beats very slowly, and she wets her lips from time to time. After a pass of her delicate tongue, the lower lips shines silver. That is all.
She peers out a window at a long expanse of trees, which whisper to each other in the night, passing along what rumors there are that concern trees. In front of her/me is well-made paper, stacked together neatly, as if we meant it to stay; all her pens lie motionless in their pots. She has rings on her knuckles, and she taps them against the paper, making a thickly muffled noise. But other than this she does not move, and the paper is blank.
I do not know why she sits at the bottom of the Ayako-belly like a solemn stone. But she is there, and in their orbits, the dreams seem to turn towards her as they pass.
Grasses Wither
I found your clavicle, white as a wand. The grasses are beginning to turn brown at the tips now—not much, but a little, the gold before rot sets in. In the dream of the sister-wife, they seem to wave like tiny hands, the hands of children drowning. It called out to me among the reeds, plaintive and small.
I dreamed that I wanted it, the long chalky expanse, lying in the red soil like a hyphen—the sentence of your body unfinished. I wanted to put my mouth to the ulcerated predicate, to complete you with my tongue and lips and teeth, to bite you off and continue the flesh of you down into my own. In my hand it looks alien, an infinitive from a foreign language covered in bone.
I dream that I hate the owner of the bone. The dream-brother, ghost-husband. I collect him like marbles over half a desert, I crouch in the silt-ridden delta until I have sunk to my knees, grub his filthy bones and chunks of flesh from the earth, to pile them together in a grotesque cairn. When I found his intestines I had to loop them over my arms and around my neck, where they hung slimy and stinking, a mottled serpent-noose. They tried to drag me under.
It is what I was made for. The dream-search and the spill of his organs like egg yolks on glass. I hate the smell of him now, the curdled scent of his veins turned inside-out. It is all over me, gesticulating in my pores, his foreign sweat.
Yet I want the clavicle. It is smooth and clean of flesh. Dreaming within my dream I put it to my lips and play his collarbone like a macabre flute. My cedar-dusted fingers press into the marrow and low notes exude, sibilant and lurching down its barometric octave. Music throttles itself and serrates the wind.
Wherever the sound touches, the grass separates into dust and falls to the starving earth like a handful of torn pages.
I dream that he is death in death.
Barley Ripens
I-Ayako has become ill. I watch her retch by the River with disdain. Her body heaves like a blown sail when the wind changes. I hate that she is old, that her skin is no longer beautiful. Below, in the valley of the dream-village, shocks of green writhe like demoniac oceans—the barley comes of age and the I-Ayako adds our body’s sloughing to the earth.
My hands are not mine. Fingernails half-grown, jutting out like moons buried in a black-soiled field. I am only this lurching body. I am only this. These.
Yet, I begin to wonder about the body which hangs on me like torn clothes. If she dies, what will happen to us? Is there an I-above-all? An ideogram that is me and I and Ayako and all the dreams together—is there a divinity of first person? A prime mover of our limbs? We are afraid that she is failing us, that she will keep lurching into the water, vomiting and vomiting until she empties herself completely and we too have gone out of her by the throat-road. We are afraid the cramping body is the only real.
If she dies, will we simply blow apart, pine needles in a swift wind? Do the dreams possess location? Are we locative, dative, ablative? Where is the language of Us? What linguistic calculation could be made which would result in our variable, our presence outside of the Ayako-equation? We are cross-multiplied, we are exponential. She is not.
I am Ayako, and since she cannot answer, I cannot. When she/I drink our tea-less water, it falls into the flesh with worry edging its taste.
But in the morning it had passed, and our belly was calm.
Mantids Hatch Out
I dreamed of a great maze. It turned underneath me, left and right and over itself, a great snarl of brick and mortar. It was painted and at each turn a color faded into its mate, so that the whole expanse curled like some impossibly complex sea serpent—perhaps if I had lingered I could have read some forbidden language in its knot-work. I could almost scry its subterranean tongues, reaching into the earth—down, down, down.
