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I am bringing the sun home to you, brother. I wonder if it will make you smile. If it will light the shadows. If it will keep us all warm when the snow comes.
Behind us, the water is an unbroken hyphen, blue as heartbreak. There are whitecaps. There is wind. Soon we will not even be able to smell the salt.
XIII DEATH
The Green Knight
And I will stand strongly on this floor
to abide his stroke if thou wilt doom him
to receive another stroke in return from me;
yet will I grant him delay.
I’ll give to him the blow,
In a twelvemonth and a day.
Now think and let me know
Dare any herein aught say.
—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Black Queen to King’s Rook Four.
The sun comes through windows dusted like vellum pages, soft and slant-wise, unable to dream of vertical space, pooling gold paint onto my fingernails. I am yellow as Midas’ best loved child, and it is winter in the world.
Outside these walls I can hear the angle of the grass under the wind, grandfather-bent, pointing east, east, east, where all things begin.
I play chess, to pass the time between Christmases. My opponent is a stable boy whose eyes glitter black and silver, the colors of saddles and bits. When the clouds shift, his skin shines horse-pale, and the light plays tricks with the board, flickering like a movie reel—the queens mock each other with sardonic lips. I cannot tell if he is real, if he is ghost or fey, if he has a soul. These things are hard to divine in Hautdesert. But it is pleasant here, in the green mires, all the colors of emeralds crushed between ivory teeth. The hill-mounds curve, humming dusky hymns of earth and root, and I sit in the center, striking a monkish pose with my hands on my mossknobbled knees, dreaming of games within games within games.
It is left to me to wait. Once the challenge has been made, the glove thrown down with all the force ritual can manage, the wager accepted, nothing can be done at all but to wait for the onrush of conclusion like the cold salt tide. So I wait. I am the reed-flute that plays itself, I am the branches waving wild, red stars of holly swelling up under shadow-green leaves, I am the secret places under the hills, where the dark swallows the light with a tender mouth, sweet as well water.
I cannot tell, some days, if I am a man at all.
I am only my shape, grotesque and beautiful, a mask with horns and a grimace. I am bounded on all sides by a light which is not light. A net of spider’s legs and gloam, held together by the sputum of diamonds. Here on the low mountains, here on the lips of a turquoise bay, I learn to have no face, to wait and be Quested For, to feel the hands of the sun on my belly.
It is as though I rest within an alchemist’s oven—liquids boil and bubble witchwise all around, in silver pots and copper pipes, steam cackles up towards a stucco ceiling and spices hang heavy in the Byzantine air—my head is haloed with these earthen fugues. This is my thatched hut, my kitchen flagstones, my grasshoppered corners and spidered rafters. This little café which burrows under the California light, the unchanging saffron-scented 4 pm sun, liquid and slow, honeycombed wind touching a multitude of skins.
Students cluster as they always have, clutches of infant cats suckling at their books, escaping the great black gates and storming towers of San Francisco in the perfumed loam, in the musk-heavy air. My little bone-china cup opens its lissome mouth to me, breathing into my throat all the satchel-herbs of East and West I long ago forgot—cardamom, cinnamon, cloves crushed like specks of coal, ginger, cocoa.
I have time for a few cups, I think, before he comes.
But each cup is a hundred other cups, journeys on horseback from Persia and India and New Orleans, far off places I relinquish so that I may have this little green hut, round as a heart. Each cup echoes forward and back, beginning and ending at the one cup which is to come—ah, but I get ahead of myself. In the midst of all this human/inhuman hush I drink, and slowly, so that none is spilt.
I can see the Chapel, far off on an island in the snow-gray sea. It has been a year since I have knelt at its altars of manzanita and rough amber, lit the tallow candles which rest in sticks of crushed spectacles, straightened the fern-tapestries and left my offerings of buckwheat flowers and white sage. All those seasons, hissing by like copper kettles, untouchable. Winter comes again on cedar paws, Christmas lights appear out of the sky as suddenly as newborn stars, glimmering red and silver and green. The year stoops and begins his long funeral, laying out a nicely tailored coffin of steel and nettles, gathering his grave goods at local thrift shops. Combing his raw-flax beard into thread, the old year sits in a great blank hall and spins the hair beautifully into silver on his tiny birch-wood wheel. Another will come—years self-regenerate like mites in a haystack. But when the rains come and my elbows ache under those storms which fall graceful and sad, my bones cannot help but whisper their age to one another, and I am weary of it all.
The knight is beginning his pilgrimage now, in his palace, his flame-rimmed cathedrals. He should be bare-foot and rag-clothed, as all pilgrims ought to begin, even if they do not end so. But I can hear the leaf-rustle of his armor and the billow of his starred shield. He knows no better. He guards himself against me—we are all so eager to guard and defend!—I defend my Chapel and he defends his flesh. For him I shall be a monster—because it is expected. If there were no great monstrum at the final castle, there would be no quest. And if no quest, what need would there be for knights at all? I am required; without me there is no kingdom.
I lie beneath their courtly cosmos of lighted halls and long-braided ladies to whom souls must be pledged. I lie under their games of adoration and betrayal—I am the wolf-belly and the dreaming trees that crowd in on all sides, the shadows and the sighing fog. I lure them out, I give them my own body to loathe so that they can fill themselves up with light like clay pitchers. I must be the darkness for them, since they fear it so. They must come to my world, and dwell in the dreamlight of my great bronze axe, so that the stars will know them ever after.
White Queen to Queen’s Bishop Four.
Smoke converts the Chapel to a bath-house, the smell of rich chocolates and drying apple peels leeches impurities from the skin. The flesh percolates, brimming with itself. Smoke and mist, these are the winter coats I wear, the best mystery-wools and strange-cheeked monk-cowls.
