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This is my confessional flesh, wet and kneeling even when I stand. Wet and kneeling when the moon empties herself onto my desert, my red rock and whittled canyon. Thin tracks appear over the flats, a race of rivulets, mercurial, sparse as strands of hair. Thatches of green are opening in the cliff walls like eyes, and the rush of water fills my ears, my mouth, closing over me, familiar and silent.
There are arms now, arms in the desert, spinning like the thousand arms of copper-bellied Buddhas, spinning in cattle-horns and barbed wire and agate and gold flecks, serrano peppers burning like sacred hearts, train engines and thirst and burro-haunch, spinning until they are nothing but water, water, and she is here, she is all around me, I am inside her again, beneath the Lake, and her arms around me are as blue as those idols, Lakshmi and Kwan-Yin and the Lady, always the Lady, whose cheek presses against mine.
Her cool skin pools in my hands, and those old black eyes croon over me as if I was a baby again, her own changeling child, down in the deep and the dark, with her and in her and over her. My mother has never said a word to me, but sung in her own liquid language, her burble and splash, her deep thrum which vibrated then in my jaw, but now quivers in my belly. I put my arms up to her, pleading, humble, begging for some surcease, some end, opening my body in supplication to her nebulous form, begging for the Grail from her hands. She gathered me to her breast, and showed me again the place to drink, tipped with black water—and I shut my eyes when she flowed into my mouth, the taste of apples and apple-petals, apple-bark and apple-sugar. I shudder, I shudder, and pull harder against her, sucking her into me, the apple-fire snaking through my veins like honeyed lightning, and the names disappear from the wind, evaporating into nothing, just meaningless letters, wafting up to the sky like ashes.
Arthur. Guenevere. Elaine. Galahad.
There is only the Lake, and the Lady stroking my hair with an azure hand, and my hand twisted in her lightless hair.
When I let her fall from my mouth, and reel upwards at her moon-dark face, I am calm. She holds something in her hand, something I cannot quite see. The small of her back glints in the shadow-and-light of the water, and at the base of her spine I can see a strange root whose tendrils wrap her inky waist. It winds up, around her ribs and cupping the bottom of her heavy breast, curling at last over her shoulder and into her open palm.
She turned to me, and the grail was nestled in her fingers—a flower which was not a cup, and a cup which was not a flower. Its squat stem opened over her hand in white stone, in bundles of white sage, in gnarled lily-roots. The chalice was not a blue blossom, and it was not a black jewel, hollowed like a gourd. Its glass-petals wavered in the current, and it held the rain perfectly still, it did not spill a drop. I looked into her mirroring body, and its light was unmistakable—the light of blood and dark caves, the light of rotted wood and iron, mother-light, the light of the womb filled with stones grinding aside. It cast no shadow, but shone simply as a star.
I reached out for it, extending my fingers in innocenc
e, and she drew away from me, drawing the cup back into her body, under the waters of the Lake, and the light was gone from me. Her eyes (black, still black, black as dreams!) did not blink, or look away, but I knew that I was lost. I fell so far, so far. It was not for me, not her body, not the Grail. It was for the webbed hands growing in a far-off belly, and I could only see, could only watch her open herself into a Grail, and close again. I had drunk and drunk of her, but her Grail-self was forbidden to me, who had killed a deer on the day of a wedding, and clutched a hip which was a lie.
Her hands unlocked from mine, and as fast as water disappears, as fast as the yucca bells close in the desert, her bright body receded from me, flowing back, black and blue, the wave rolling back to the sea.
The stars became waterfalls, and the wasteland was alive with grasses blowing silver and green, brittlebrush and chicory, asters, datura, and bee-plants, verbena, milkweed, and toadflax, globemallow and Spanish needles, creosote and saltbush—and cereus, their white bowls opening with a rush of perfume. Hares snuffed at the suddenly thick air, and sleek mice pattered through the brush.
I looked back towards the road, the great black line bisecting the desert, linear, simple, an equation.
I opened my jaw, and the moon rolled into my mouth.
VI THE LOVERS
Balin and Balan
Then afore him he saw come riding out of a castle a knight, and his horse trapped all red, and himself in the same colour. When this knight in the red beheld Balin, him thought it should be his brother Balin by cause of his two swords, but by cause he knew not his shield he deemed it was not he. And so they adventured their spears and came marvelously fast together, and they smote each other in the shields, but their spears and their course were so big that it bare down horse and man, that they lay both in a swoon.
—Sir Thomas Malory
Le Morte d’Arthur
Balin
Thou shalt strike, he said, thou shalt strike. Thou shalt strike a stroke most dolorous that man ever struck. And he put his hand, speckled like an owl’s with veins and liver spots, on my shoulder as if to absolve me, or pity me. What entrails or petrified bones did he consult? What cards, what runes, what bird-flight told him that my hand would find its way to so many throats? And why was the stroke so dolorous, of all the strokes I have made? The spear in the king’s thigh? Or you, my brother, my brother, on this crane-nested island, alone and armored all in red? My brother, my twin, my other face, how could you not have shown me the eyes I loved? How could you not have made some sign?
But I suspect the old fortune-teller meant the spear and the wasteland. Fratricide is nothing to them, easily pardoned with the old bleach-gold words: ave maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus—what is it to them, who never shared a womb, who never locked translucent fingers with the child whose skin was white as a mirror, who never rested within the symphony of three hearts beating?
They all want to talk about the spear, that horrid spear, the great ash-wood thing dripping with blood, all hung with ripped altarcloths stained with sacramental wine, a paste of host wafers rubbed into the wood. Wasn’t it obvious, they say, that it was sacred? Not to be touched? It didn’t belong to you, it was plainly meant for someone purer and more pious, how could you, how could you, how could you?
How could I? It was easy. My sword had shattered in the battle like a looking-glass, pretty and useless. Room by room I ran with the clamor of men grunting and cutting themselves into corpses rattling in my ears, until I ducked into the chapel and saw the spear.
It was dreadful to see, slick with warm blood—but it was light, it had good balance, a solid heft. I thought nothing at all of it, I took it from its frame and sunk it into the king’s thigh—it would have been his heart, save that at the last moment my hand slipped in the blood seeping from the ash and the stroke fell awry. It went into him smoothly, as though his leg was its sheath, and I spat on his beard.
But what is that, what is that compared to you, my brother, spitting blood into my lap? What is that king’s coarse nettle-beard next to your downy face? Oh, you were never able to grow a proper beard, it sprang up soft and sparse, moss on a classical statue, and how we used to laugh. What is his gaping thigh next to your chest sucking at the cold island wind, to the birds waiting for us to lie down and change from men to feast?
Why should I weep for the wasteland when we are dying here, together, and the cattails are playing our dirge?
I was there only a moment ago, it seems, in that castle, with my spear in the old man’s thigh. And then the pillars began to bleed, too, and the rafters cracked, loosing a clutch of dove-corpses—poor beasts cooked up there by the summer heat—and the thud of their bodies on the tiled floor (in the Moorish style, of course, Pellam was nothing if not stylish) was flat and wet. Then the windows gave, the glass bending horribly before shattering, a spray of pink St. Catherine’s nipples and the jaundiced yellow of a dozen angels reciting the Dialogue of the Seraphic Virgin. The shards slashed cheeks and earlobes, and the walls came down like Jericho, like the earthquake of ’06, like a blast of steel trumpets.
And I was caught, under one of Pellam’s precious black agate busts of Mary, the back of her veil inscribed with the precise genealogy connecting his family to those barn-huddlers, out to seventh cousins and step-uncles.
But the old man came and put his owl-hand on my shoulder, and (thou shalt strike) led me out of the wrecked manse onto the clean grass, the strawberry fields around the house, still peppered with migrants tending the irrigation and the nascent fruit. I thought he was saving me, a great hairy angel with scotch-and-water breath, taking me from the endless identical fields of the San Joaquin to the redwood-chapels, where I could heal. But he brought me to this murky delta, this chain of islands leading to your tower—how could he not tell me it was yours? And the mouse-faced little novice told me to fight the Red Knight—well, what am I for, if not bashing against things, if not doing what mousy-faced novices tell me to, what am I for, if not for the kill and the reward and the next kill down the line?
What was the Dolorous Stroke? They will tell me it was the spear, that I should have known it for a holy relic—but I know, I know as your body weighs on mine, that the spear was meaningless.
