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Last night I was a a glass of beer. I was foamy and golden, and slender and bitter-earthy. I think I was a microbrew of some kind. I sat on a coaster with a picture of a mallard flying low over a marsh on it. The marsh was wet with spilled bourbon. I sat for a while the woman who bought me talked to her suitor, laughing synthetically and stroking her swan-cheek with grape-colored fingernails.
I wondered if I could taste myself while she regaled him with tales of her corporate dragon-slaying. If I could taste my own liquidlight, then I would know myself, whether the foreigners I feel was by the brewer’s design. But while I mused on the taste of myself, the woman stopped trying to be seduced and sipped me in silence. I felt the warmth of her throat, the slickness. I sighed into the heat of her body, letting desire pass over me in sunlight and moonlight and grasslight and fishlight, and I did not try to hold it with both hands. Soon I had passed of necessity from the beerself to the glasself, and I rested in my own emptiness, foam clinging to my cupbody. I was transparent, the clarity of my bones was sweet, and I reflected a myriad of eyes, like a crystalline Argus. And for a moment, in this glass in an antediluvian bar, in the hands of a sad and lovely woman whose belly cried inside her I was the grail, open and clear. For a moment which slid away as quickly as a strand of beerfoam, I was no longer my own ever-striving self, but a chalice of blown glass, yawning to encompass the sky and the sea, floating i
n dolphinlight, I was not a questing knight with tobacco-stained hands, I was you, the king in the forest, and I wept into my own lake, watching the ripples expand into fractal infinity.
And then I was not a glass, or beer, or a lily, or a fish, and the grailight was gone. I was alone in the dark, and even the alcoholic fishermen who dread their children had dragged themselves home. I crumpled in the shade of a brick building, my belly betrayed my grief and I vomited the Pacific into the street, my throat flaming—I was the Chinese boy who drank the sea, and I gave it back and back until no more would come and still my body convulsed in anguish for the moment I could not keep. In fear for my sanity, in fear that I was a hallucinatory Fool with the black dog at my back, who dances in beerlight alone on the cliff edge to the tune of a man who may not/I want not to exist.
And I was ashamed of this so-human act.
Last night I was my father. I looked at my mother from above her body, and I saw, not her face, but the face of another woman, with hair like the spaces between stairs. I did not understand, and when her mouth shifted, red to pink, it became my mother’s mouth, the mouth I knew, and in my father’s skin I cowered, I crawled away from the slick of her belly, and the moon rolled out of my mouth.
Last night I was my father, and I went into the desert. I yearned for the cup, the cup, always the cup, the thing you offer me so easily, that he could never hope to touch. His hands were hung with women—my hands are empty.
You cannot bear any hands which remember other grails. They must be pure, they must have been waiting for you since they first turned brown in the sun. My father died in the desert like a man who stuffed his mouth with peyote, and when he returned, his eyes were full of dead lakes. He patted my head and draped himself over a cross until the chapel stank of his sour sweat and shit. He never spoke to me, not a scrap of scripture or drunken curse for my mother—in both his hands he gave me silence like a black ball of opium.
But last night I squatted in his skin as though it were a sacred hut, I breathed the sage-smoke rolling off of his bones, I drew patterns in the sand which had settled on the roof of his stomach. I put my toes into the water that filled him, and writhed with him under the rain-bringing moon. I was sick with the thickness of him, I asked for nothing but escape, I longed for my salmon-skin—yet I had swum to the stream of my birth, as a salmon must, and the water choked me. I spluttered and flailed in the wake of it, trying to touch the rim of my mother, somewhere in his desert geography—but she was not there. I was not there. We did not exist for him; we were not the saguaro and the yucca. This is what I understood in his marrow—I was encased in a vial of water, and he wanted only sand.
And now I seek the waters of you, because no black-eyed queen ever looked at me with fire cutting her fingers.
In the cell of him, floating over my mother and the painted desert, I tasted the apple-bile of his sorrow, and forgave that cairn of murdered words. Perhaps I would not have survived that gaze.
He should have known better than to seek you in the wild—a cup is a thing of the city, it is civilized, it sits at a hundred thousand tables and travels from wood to mouth. A cup is only needed when joined hands at the river have failed, when an adobe hut is raised up, and a stone oven shaped into the wall, and dried flowers thrown into a pot. He sought the Lady, I seek the King.
Perhaps there is no difference, perhaps the King wears a gown of river-white, and the Lady binds her breasts under an ermine robe.
Last night I was Lancelot, and I fathered myself on a woman I hated, and I begged forgiveness from a lake of night.
So this is the end.
I walked with heavy feet to the end of the pier last night, and looked into the sea which is the rim of the western world, and wondered when I accepted that this was inescapable. I still hate that you did not think me strong or clever enough to turn from this road. (And of course I was not.) But there on the pier was a little fisherman’s hut, white paint curled back by sea wind, and it glowed softly in porcelainlight.
I stood outside for a long time, and the door seemed to grow to enormity, to much for me to dare. I felt and still feel that this is all too big for me, that I am a salamander before the throne of the King of Spears. The threshold mocked me, and whispered that I was a very clever child, the strongest and cleverest of my brothers, but I would never, never be wise, there is no forest deep enough to purify me, my madness will last and last. So in the end it was pride that drove me through the door, that I would show myself to be pure enough, just barely, to finally see you.
And there you were, not so powerful-looking, an aging man, but not infirm, the gold of your hair not quite conquered by snow. You sat in a deep leather chair, your left hand held an ancient fishing-spear, your right held a cup of living glass. Yet in the lines of your body there was a darker shape, a liquid self moving behind the lines of your skin, holding black-tipped breasts out to me with both hands, like a sacrifice.
You looked at me with laughing eyes, and I saw that sleek shape moving behind them. I wondered then if I saw you with a beard because I could only give myself over to a father, to a King, and the rest was beyond my touch—pure enough for you, but not for her. I suppose it doesn’t matter, in the end—if you are doubled, if you are twinned, I will know in a moment, when the chair is mine, and I vanish into the glass.
You could not speak, that was not the ritual, it was mine to ask the question you have desired. But you laughed because you understood, of course. You know the nature of quests. You know that this has been the question, all these words to you on the road to this temple/hut. You know that my fighting has burned this body hollow, and made it ready for this. You know that the end of the quest is silence, only the quest is the sound and dancing and galloping toward.
And so I reached out, able to do nothing else but dare this thing, and touched the rim of the cup/lake.
And the burning filled my vision.
And the sea swallowed my voice.
XVI THE TOWER
Mordred
For King Arthur lay by King Lot’s wife,
the which was Arthur’s sister, and gat on her Mordred.
—Sir Thomas Malory
Le Morte d’Arthur
The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one’s deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions in the field:
