“Why do you not go up to the second floor of the pagoda?”
I leapt up from the rush-bed of River, the hair of Ayako-I tangled up with twists of milky grass. A great Mountain Goat stood before me on hooves of pyrite, his shaggy wool twisted gray and white, snow and stone, colors of the roots of old things. His horns were monstrous, swept back from his mossy brows in pearl and jaundiced bone.
“It is not so very far,” his voice ground, like a stone moving aside to reveal a cave. It was not surprising that he should speak—when you have built your solitude-temple as I have, many things speak which should not.
“I cannot get to the top. My feet are weak and stupid, now. My knees are like paper boxes.” The Goat seemed to shrug in his tangled skin, his black eyes shifting shades from jet to coal to the roof of a smoking temple.
“I did not say you ought to reach the top. But the second floor is not so great a feat. Why not unfold your knee-paper and climb? If there is a tower, there must be a climber, else why would the tower stand?” With this his hooves clattered on the stones and he was gone, up the side of the mountain where the wildflowers grow all dewy and bright.
Ayako is refuge. I am profound within her. She is the simplest of dreams, perhaps my best one. She trembles and is hungry for fish and rice, she fears storms and has silent flesh which rustles like a robe. I am afraid for us, that if the I-that-is-Ayako ascends the red tower, I will become lost in our/her dream-women, and I will not be able to tell the dream of the lion-haunches from the dream of the belly-winds.
But we had young turnips and mustard greens in our befuddled stomach that day, and these things make bravery.
So I-in-her stood in the center of the pagoda, in the crosshatch of shadows and strewn stalks of sun-leeched grass, looking up through the ruined levels, rising and rising like angular suns. I found a foot hold in the wall, and a ledge to grip, and thus worked my way upwards. There had once been a fine painting on the pitted stone, I could still see shabby colors in the cracks—a bull’s head, a burning horse, a woman giving birth beside a river.
I was a column of sweat by the time I pulled myself through the mildewed floorboards and into the second room.
In a corner long ago conquered by fierce and noble spiders lay a leather wine-sack, an intricate moon finely wrought upon its surface, and it was filled with goat’s milk, which was sweet and warm.
Thunder Lets Loose His Voice
When you come to the sun-wall, you expect a Question. A Riddle. But because you do not know, cannot know, which on is peculiarly yours, all Questions are asked. Only when my scarlet-dripping mouth opens around the divine interrogative does one Question gain ascendancy. Before I speak, all the Questions that ever were lie under the possible quiver of my leonine tongue. And so, because any Question may be there, soft as a Eucharist, all Questions are there.
Equally, all these Questions are answered. (This is the logic-dream, intersecting the dream of the lion-haunches at consecutive right angles.) Before you speak, all answers jumble
themselves behind your acoustic uvula, a traffic in conceivable responses, as though they fled from some dark monster for whom no answer exists. Before you speak, you could say anything, and so you have said everything.
Further, before you ever came to my dust-bricks and the slow slide of my paintbrush-tail, all the Questions and Answers have been uttered, rejected, accepted, stuttered over, well-orated, and guessed at. You have been eaten, regurgitated, defecated, decomposed. I have been slain, flayed, skinned, vivisected and displayed on your mantle for generations. You have killed the king and married the queen, blinded yourself and died in obscurity. I have picked my teeth with your metatarsals and sunned my belly on the grass. It has all occurred.
And yet, before any of them have occurred, it is possible that all have occurred, and so they all have. There is no reason for us ever to meet. We have already met. I am in your belly, you are in mine. We are a many-colored ouroboros, merrily chewing on each other’s scales. My riddles are answered. I am content.
And yet you keep coming, to find in me the snarled yarns of a thousand and one imaginable universes of envowelation and verbiate gesture—words and words and words, a tower of possible vocabularies, a geography of lingual variation.
It is possible that women are like this, too. That from a single source they dilate into all possible women, like a flame changing colors from the center outwards in wide bands: white, blue, yellow, orange. It is possible that all women are one woman, who has already lived, died, conflagrated and drowned.
It is possible that men are also connected this way.
Despite this, I love because it is my nature the dream-taste of all possible flesh on all possible tongues.
The First Lightning Flashes
The milk was warm and thick, better than the throat-that-is-Ayako has had in many years. In the early days I used to pray to Mountain to send me a little goat I could love and who would keep me warm with her wool, whom I could milk. Perhaps I could even strain cheese from the milk. Instead he sent rabbits and squirrels to eat. But I did not complain.
And strangely, with the sweet milk circling my teeth I was completely Ayako. I was within her tightly and hotly, blooded and fleshed. The dream-women fled and I was the white singularity at the center, open, iconic. Self flowed into self and all things flowed selfwards. The milk seeped through me in ornate patterns, a complicated knot work separating fractal-bright in my veins, which in themselves separated and separated further like winter branches thinning into twigs.
I was truly alone for a moment, and the temple was whole, gilt-edged. Incense sighed from my pores. I forgot the lion-dream and the fire-dream. I forgot the dream-husband and the dream-sister.
The phosphor-stars shone through a hole in the distant roof, and clouds drifted over the moon like mendicant’s rags. And under their house-blankets and mist-curtains I was Ayako, and no other.
But soon the wine-sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.
The Empress Tree Flowers
In my dream, I begin to plan a revenge. My breasts and my thighs conspire.
Mountain cuts an alpine range through my torso, tumescent summits swell up horribly, boils of dirty snow. River is rewarded for his complicity, he flows now directly into the mouth of my womb. I am his banks, I am his delta, I am his floodplain. His fat throat giggles as he encourages himself into frothing rapids along my cattail-ovaries.
But inside the dream of the belly-winds, the revenge-dream begins to form like a gilled fetus, in a satori of suspended animation, poised on a curious tiptoe like a Neolithic messenger-god. I am horribly open between them; they have polished my skin like banisters so that they can live inside me, playing checkers on my painfully elongated spine.