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There is flotsam everywhere, but that will pass. Seabirds call out desolate songs and search for aeries that have long been swallowed. They roost now on anything that is buoyant—cradles, spinning wheels, stable doors. That will pass, too. The world will be made again, no doubt. It is the way. The process is indefinite. It is made, it is dismantled, it is made again. Perhaps this time I will make it, and write my name in crushed jade.
I am peaceful now, the peace of the full belly. I look out over the sea and watch my wounds heal themselves. Flesh knits itself to itself, slowly, slowly. I am still missing many teeth, but I have confidence that they will turn up. I can afford contentment, I have bought it dearly.
Half of my body is still hung in the sky like a trophy. I lie on the earth-that-is-me and stare into the sky, which stares back. And we rock ourselves to sleep, we two, in this infinite mirror.
Softly, Mountain rumbles beneath me.
Pheasants Dive Into the Water Becoming Monster Clams
In the dream of Ayako, she touches the book with tender hands and the Fox watches her. In the dream of Ayako she is washed in moonlight scented by the sea. It is becoming very cold, and Mountain has drawn over himself his old snow-cloak. In the dream of Ayako, her hands are terribly thin and have begun, in places, to shine blue and indigo.
In the dream of Ayako, the thought has begun to form in her that none of the women are real, that even she is a shade, a vision. Perhaps the villagers are right to think her a vengeful ghost. Perhaps the village is not real, either. She had, of course, long suspected that the boys who brought her rice were dreams. This thought was like the grain of sa
nd that forces the oyster to make a pearl—it pained her, and yet the fist of her soul closed around it.
Perhaps the dream at the base of her soul was true—the silent girl who did not move. But perhaps not. Ships existed that had no anchors, perhaps even that had no sails or oars. It was possible that she existed with nothing at her core but ether, nothing but a dark swirl of air.
In the dream of Ayako, the Fox lies down beside her in the weak light, her red haunches glittering. She is very lovely, with her grand tail. Ayako thinks that the Fox must have found a great many succulent mice to keep her this fat in the swift-snowed winter.
And because Ayako is lonely, she reads aloud, simply so that she may hear the voice of a human, whether or not she is real.
The Rainbow Hides
In the ninth month of pregnancy the fetus is nearly fully grown. It has gained a great deal of subcutaneous fat and can normally breathe outside the womb at this stage. The mother will experience anxiety and discomfort in the weeks prior to birth. The fetus sleeps for the majority of its tenancy in the womb, and experiences REM sleep, an indication of dreaming.
I kneel in the deep water to give birth, to finish the course he decided for me. In a dream did I mount the golem-husband and take the child into my belly. In a dream did I swell like a bow drawing and feel the hawk-headed son stir in my womb, felt the hard press of his talons against my flesh. Feathers serrate the uterine walls, and the metallic beak kneads my flesh like meager bread. In a dream did I set the body into a sarcophagus of jasper and agate, and let it sail into the south on the great currents.
And now I kneel in the silt, attended by crocodiles with their pupilless eyes, and my body drains out of itself—water and blood and pages of dedicated verse. I have lost the dream-husband, even his desiccated flesh is lost to me. I replace him with the dream-son and hope that I am not asked to sew his bones back together with the threads of my hair, as I have had to do with his father.
I cry out to the desert and my voice is eaten by a dearth of wind. My belly cuts itself like a flayed fish; a bloody-eyed child crawls out and shakes amniotic fluid from his feathered hair. Sobbing, I reach for him over the ruin of my body, clutching my son with the moon between his brow, little Horus, who will make the world over again.
I fall backwards into exhaustion, and my blood eddies out into the Nile. It is promptly devoured by a school of infant catfish, and the sun begins to rise in the west.
Heaven’s Essence Rises Up and Earth’s Essence Sinks Down
“This is the last woman,” the Fox said, and I knew it was true. I was not the last woman, of course. I was not the first. The I-that-is-Ayako is a hinge which opens and shuts strange windows, who dreams she is more than her flesh.
“Words are redundancies, after all, my girl. Mountain abides. River changes. The cicada sings its time and is silent. All these things can be known without a single word. You have been glutted with words, but I have opened up a drain at the base of your heart and soon you will be empty as an amber shell. It is not altogether a sad thing.”
I, and all the dreams of myself, looked in one body out the window of the pagoda, at the striated skin of Mountain, gray and quartz-white, as though he had been weeping. The blue-gold light of dawn crept up his flank, pressing his velvet nose into the stone. The sky had dropped its hazy veils over the valley, and to sit in the center of the morning was to sit zazen in the center of some vast pearl. The trees had all become bare again, and my garden was a patch of black soil, concealing the dreaming seeds.
As I turned the last page of the book and began to read, Fox extended her rosy tongue until it nearly touched my face.
And on it, like a jewel, was a single, perfect cicada shell.
Walling Ourselves Up, It Becomes Winter
The man who was killed they called the breaker of horses, and the one who killed him dragged his body behind a chariot around the walls of the city. The sweat of the brown horses ran thick and fast, and the fire-goddess drew back from the holy city, so stunned was she by the madness of two men. The charioteer had driven himself into a frenzy—his hair flew wildly as a ship’s loose sail, his teeth gnashed, his knuckles were white on the reins. Women tore their hair and begged him to stop, but even as the wheels splintered into wedges and two of the horses dropped dead of exhaustion, he would not cease.
The city trembled at the sound of the careening hoof beats, and the fire-goddess bided her time.
But I lay over the city and it rose to meet the movements of my crimson body—I only had to wait a little while. It crackled through my fingers and the mortar itself exploded into flame, the towers thrust up into me and fell back scorched to dust. I laughed and wept as my skin covered the walls and courtyards, the markets and temples. The wind whipped along the ramparts and the flames arched towards the pure white sky. The swords themselves melted to a bronze wine, running freely over the cobbled streets.
I lay in the center of it, curled into myself like a yin-yang, pulsing with heat, smiling into my belly and reveling in the surrender of the city to my love. Soon it would be a smoking black ruin, a diorama of ash that had once been called sacred.
But now was the best time, when I shot my flames into the windy towers and consumed the flesh of my body and the flesh of the divine city with one great, red mouth. This was my finest work, my masterpiece, the conflagration of cityflesh and horseflesh and manflesh. I could smell the hair of consecrated virgins sizzling, the paint bubbling on their altars, blood cooking into the walls. Over and over the city swore itself to me, gave itself over, abandoned its body into my arms. The tombs that ringed the citadel like a pretty necklace became pyres, and within the spiced smoke I suffered my scarlet paroxysms of luminosity.
When it was over, and the city lay steaming black on its high bluff, when the sea thunders its funereal march, I watched the last timbers cave inward, the last sparks gutter in the dawn wind.
