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(we remember how she told this story,)
|how she used to give you a flake of cinnamon bark|
/to suck when you teethed/
I
{we}
had no teeth, my
[our]
eyes would not open, I
|we|
could not stand, I
*we*
was nothing but a sack sloshing with water, and only the fish would take me,
—us—
would give me
(us)
their tentacles to suckle.
:: and the tear in her grinned wide :: wide, ah, wide! :: wider than the mouth of the watchful fish, and she thought her bones would shatter as she squatted by the green water. I came out of her :: like a leech-child :: and her hands on my soft head were red as paint, and the umbilicus was knotted round my neck
—yes, she always told it like this: she tore it with her teeth—
/oh, what a fish mother caught that day, with the pole-and-line of her ruined flesh!/
:: And gasping in the flotsam of her body she looked at the rosy fish again ::
the fish carried me
[it carried us—didn’t you feel that we were in you already,
the promise of us, the taste?]
away from Onogoro; I
(we floated with you, the seeds of our plums and our weeds)
rested on their backs like the bow of the boat of heaven, island to island, and the water tasted of mother, and I, I was so alone.
*Oh, beauty, oh self of our selves!*
(You are not alone, we are none of us alone!)
I was alone then, in the dark.
[Never again, we swear it]
