Page 4 of Myths of Origin

Whither and how. Shall I go on?

Do I dare to crawl on my belly through this pilgrimage of grass and earth? A pilgrimage with no Rapture at its dread terminus? Wear my knees to inkwells over endless Paths. Shaken by the spidery intrusions of words like snaking belladonna, I am not so firmly forward moving as I was. The clouds are threatening admirals, dusted in golden medals of sunlight. I have not heard the shuffling gait of a Door on my trail in days. It is strange, the ineffable silence. Do they no longer want me? Has my smell become less delectable in their nostril/keyholes? All around is barren, Walls of bare copper wire and a scalded Road, and I am the most blasted acre of this waste. I have seen scurryings in the corners, I have heard scratching feet. Yesterday a thrush shook its wings of rain nearby. But it would not speak to me, it turned its little brown back. I am verboten, nameless, null. There is a sliver in the pad of my ring finger, the reliquary of my own flesh cradling a breath of ash, tinged in blood and vinegar from lips of sorrowful countenance. In my earlobes thorns, my eyelids draped in shrouds with the imprints of a thousands faces emblazoned in sweat, a spear entering my mouth and piercing my skull at its base, obsidian arrowhead dripping in liquefied faux diamonds, the viscous substance that pools in my brain pan and slides from the edges of the wound, thick with hieroglyphic ideation and the terribly worrying diagnosis of blood-poisoning. Oh, yes, I feel it already, marching through the byways with alkaline toes. Sad to think I am so streaked in squid-ink poverty that I cannot even be devoured properly. She was right. I do not know my name. But. I accept.

A sound fractured the air, behind a Wall of diamond and boiling pitch, spilling onto the Road in a writhing swamp-hand, reaching, reaching. My scalded eyes rolled like slot machines, pivoting to follow, sliding to wrap the molten corners. I was not ready, not ready for another thing to disturb my madness, growing like a favored son in me. I could almost see its source, spy with my little eye—

“A MAN!” it cried out, voice bleeding gasoline, slow and egg-runny, wriggling towards me.

“WALKS!”

And I could see it then, scaled knee sunk into the pitch, mouth gaping like a cellar Door. A swath of green hyphenating the Doorscape, glittering coldly and savagely in the brittle sun, still slick with the waters of some distant marsh. His great tail slapped the air, thumped the earth with enthusiasm and abandon as he, a monstrous Crocodile, clacked his feral jaw and winked, launching full force into his sermon, quivering in every green claw, gesturing with fat scaled fingers.

“A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR! Hallelujah, child, hallelujah, I say! Say it up and say it down, say it east and say it west, say it diagonal, child, say it out loud! A MAN! WALKS INTO! A BAR! A! MAN WALKS! INTO A! BAR! A! MAN! WALKS! INTO! A! BAR! AMAN, child, sing it, AMEN, glory on high, walks into a bar, and do he

ever walk tall! A man walks into a bar, my child, do you hear what I say? He walks and he walks slow, he walks like paint drying, my friend, but he walks straight up to that bar and it’ll only be the best brand for this one with his five-day-beard and better-day-seen jeans! Oh, yes, girl, surely so, a man walks into a bar and don’t he have the look of a union man, don’t he have the look of coffee and cigarette break on the hour every hour, don’t he look like our kind of boy! Oh, pour him that double shot! Pour him that twelve-year old brand name! How many apostles on that holy mount, my child? Oh, yes, my girl! There were twelve! Can I get an AMEN? Oh, pour him that apostle-scotch, barman, pour that drink! A man walks into a bar, holy holy, holy! Oh, he walks long and he walks strong and don’t he walk grand, like a boot-barrel man should, and ain’t that cigarette in his mouth just as white as your mama’s wash-day, child, and don’t that smoke rise up? Oh, way up high it’s said that men they don’t walk but fly but oh, my child, I say unto you that that man walked into a bar and he drank that whiskey down! Say it high and say it low but in he walked and lay his money down, in he walked and sat on that red vinyl, in he walked and tipped that barman five dollars, hallelujah, child, five dollars! And ain’t that green bill crisp, friends and neighbors, ain’t it brand new, ain’t it mint? A man walks into a bar, in his holy name, and it is nigh on last call but he lays his money down, he lays it down and drinks it down and ain’t that just fine? Ain’t that right as rain?”

I arched a kindergarten-paste eyebrow like a flying buttress. The Crocodile stamped his feet joyfully, splashing my ankles with black grime. His eyes glowed like pools of crude oil.

“Do you hear me, girl? Do you get what I’m saying? Can you grab hold and swing it around? Can you feel it in your teeth? Can you grasp the sublime and angelic perfection of the Gospel of the Man and the Bar?”

I leaned on one hip, exhaustion covering me like a lead shield. “I heard. I hear. It is no different than the Gospel of the Hare or the Gospel of Ice-Fishing. Everyone has another useless revelation.”

“But it is different. Can’t you see it through and through? I have heard those Gospels and they are false prophets. They are cheap copies. Truth lies with the Man and Revelation in his Bar.” The creature inched towards me, his fat green body swaying from side to side, black eyes roving over me like sweaty hands. “I’m not surprised. We Crocodiles are spiritually pure. We can hold the Gospel in our mouths. Can’t expect a little thing like you to grasp the higher registers. Your mouth is too small.”

“I try, I try to understand the manifest and the invisible. I Devour. I Seek, I Walk.”

“Of course you do, precious thing, of course.” He sidled up to me and pushed his emerald head up under my hand like a cat. “No one blames you. It’s just not how you’re made. White as paper you are—well, what’s paper for but writing on? And the paper knows nothing about it, can’t go about reading itself. Just so, you can’t be asked to know my Gospel any more than the number of my scales. If I had hands I might scribble a bit on you myself. Such sweet skin.” He gestured in a friendly manner with his slick reptilian legs. “You just keep on as you are. Downdowndown. You haven’t found your true Author yet—not like my own radiant self and the radiant Man. There is one that will cover you in ink like a hand. Until then you’re just a river without a bank, rushing and crashing and flooding with no ocean to devour you. To gobble you up. Wish it could be me. If you could touch but the outer rim of the golden meaning of the Man and the Bar, the first layer like a crystal onion, you would be saved. If you could only understand that there is only one Man, and only one Bar, and they walk into each other, and they are the same. These are High Mysteries. But no! No one expects you to be pure like we are, pretty girl. Why, no!” He looked at my hips smugly, his marble eyes preening. “But whether you grip it in your little white hands or not, a Man walked into a Bar, and it was a fine day.”

The Crocodile ambled away, humming a little, slogging through the sparkling pitch with the sun pooling on his back like thick rope.

10

I see.

Shoeless in the cunning morn, under sky’s wet wings, blackness of the huntress-night faded to denim blue, old washed jeans hung out to dry in the rain-scrubbed air, knees torn open to reveal a blaze of dawn. Another day, it goes on and on, ever faster around a dying sun. Things have changed, they never change. Have I never seen another creature, Hare nor Angel nor Man nor Bar in the nevertime of my tenancy here? It is possible, I could not say. Memory is full of back-folds and hidden levers, my origami-crane mind, creased upon itself, blankness crushed into Form. It is equally possible I have seen and spoken and trembled before them a thousandthousandthousand times before. It flows together. I shrug underneath it, the dilated copper of the Road and the Journey re-settles on my muscled shoulders. I accept. If there is a new thing in this place, its newness may be mine. Longago but also tomorrow and Thursdaynext I lost the grasp of solid hand on happenstance.

There is something. It appears suddenly and without golden trumpets. It is not threatening, it does not speak. This is a relief. From the terrible cisterns of memory I excavate a name for this silvershimmer thing I find on the inner curve of a dead-end Wall. Mirror. Copper snakes raven each other around its polished surface, gnashing teeth like guillotines. Asphodel twines through their tangled bodies, pike-branches piercing the thick serpent-flanks. I approach, because it does not move or hiss. Deadwood-drift I on its silvered Sea, azure ether of reflection wreathes my face. And the hieroglyphs of the Angel’s hand which seemed so radiant leaping like enthralled fish under her fingers are now surly and vulgar, wide swaths of grease staining, avenues of gaping black wounds, fury of childish lizard-scribblings biting into body, slime-tracks of some unimaginable worm, foul soup of rotten tempura tearing obscenity from unthinking skin. My flesh her possession she scrawled in wordless barnacled umbilici, each downstroke of pen a penetrating blade, spurt of reeking ink over breasts and belly, navel filled up with grotesque swirl of jet, hair streaked with toad-skins, the snowy peaks of curls hidden in sightless amphibian eyes, paints clattering over me like a kettle of festering squid, eating the white and pale with their horn-beaks, destroying, destroying.

I can see reflected her horrid watercolors seeping into me like poisoned semen, defacing the Walls of my womb with angry graffiti, splatter of mucus-paint and ravening teeth tearing bloody chunks away, like a crumbling Wall, vandalizing my uterine Wall with obscenities drawn in fouled india ink and tongue scrapings, the ravening hawk, the gaping earth. Streaking the mouth with the oil of octopus eyes. For only the eyes remain, horror-blank, the erasure of iris, pure white as rice paper and saki-cups. I wept and screeched with that ruined mouth, owl-rage filled up with razored feathers. Betrayed into monstrosity. Hic monstra delitescunt. Milky tears seeped from my blasted eyes like sap.

(—Dare frame, dare frame thy, Dare clasp—)

Mirror. Threads of voice and fennel like capillaries, invading my mind, refracted words from a beforetime I know has never been. Curse I all things. Mirror-eyes full of reptilian venom, green scales clinking like armor, full of unanswerable ecclesiasts. Despair rises up in its terrible bubbling laugh again as I fall, head full of hammering, onto the calm silver thing, clawing with ragged hands and spouting all-vowel gurgling rivers, my mouth a goblet of ash.

And the Mirror gave way, into tumbling and pale, into watery possession, sleek of covering mercury, perfect wash of purifying silicate, hydrochloric Sea burning slicing pulling skin from bone, ramora nibbling vermin from a great grey arrow of shark-flesh, warm pain flowing clear, fallingfallingfalling.

(—In what distant deeps or skies—)

The rush and foam of that invisible Sea aural licking at starving earlobe, thunder a ceaseless rhythm of time irredeemable, ecstatic Seaweed strangling gleefully, leaping goldfish sparkling into waiting mouths, open icy aquamarine descent through cobalt and midnight, phosphorescent tumbling girlshape in (at last) the Void of sight-without-seeing, in the oceansmith, in the blue, blue forge

(—On what wings dare he aspire—)

benediction of liquid gliding half-intoxicate eternal coffin-wrappings of cerulean manuscripts, the Water Verses. Ear over heel, downdowndowndowndown. Or up. Up or down, I could not say, I could not say. Lime skins cover me like garden snails, suckling gently. Turning and sizzling in the deep, bubbling skin like fiftyfiftythousand cauldrons, jostle of newt-eyes and ox-horns.

(—What dread hand and what dread feet—)

My hand like a white starfish among them, bouncing among the morass, the soupy opiate snowbank enveloping. Something different, not the Road, but the Fall, breathtaking Descent, bauble-perfect and giggling, the Fall surmising the world, surmising the Maze, surmising vandalized I in its blue-black wash. Crushed stuttering onto a silver washboard, strong brown hands pounding into cleanliness, all of us slipping, falling, drowning, throats coated in blue, nothing but blue surrounding in this incubatory downstroke,

(—What the hammer? What the chain—)

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