You swallow like a child, milk-desperate.
II
YASUGI
Mother, Mother, I mourn.
I claw at the clay, the red furrows reek in the earth like kanji, ideograms of grief, need-glyphs. Mother, let me in, move aside the stones for me, for your poor boy who loves you. Mother, I cannot find the way down, I cannot find my way under the mountain—open a canyon for me, a cave, a door. Where are you? Why do you not answer your son?
If I kill a dragon for you, as heroes are wont to do, if I damp the soil with blood, will the stain become a gate, a hole, a passage into Mother, into the dreamed-of hell?
I am the only one who mourns her. The rest hav
e all forgotten. And yet, and yet. Am I really her son? It is not an easy genealogy to parse—would she open the ground for me if I were not her son but a lover, a suitor, an ardent and earnest creature seeking only to lay his head on her knee? I walk in the woods like a wild innocent—could I not lure her out with this purity, worn on my breast like grass-plait?
Yasugi is a knobbled field spackled with huts, and clouds roam over it like clapping mollusks. Mt. Hiba dresses itself up in blasted rock, red as rusted blood and pitted like a crone’s breast—it protrudes, it leaks a sickly milk of clinging snow. I am tired—I am hungry. The soles of my feet refuse to harden, but bleed openly, crack, gape pale and womanish on the grass. I have asked at sake-houses and bath-houses and fish-and-rice-houses after the passage of a snake, a monster of any sort, even a particularly tall or lumpish man. They know nothing, they see nothing. They are so slow, so dull I can hardly stand to smell their breath, their bandaged thumbs—if my descent-body disgusts me, theirs buckles my legs with retching. If I were my right self I would bring the waves up, blue and black, over this whole valley and scrub it clean of their crawling and crying. They nibble the suckers off of white and fleshy stalks of squid, and suggest I go further south, to the city. They know everything in the city.
South, south, ever south.
The sun slaps my back as if it loathed me specially—which, of course, it does. What sister misses an opportunity to annoy her brother when he is least eager to be annoyed? She knows nothing of Mother, she cares nothing for her, she drives me south to the city, the wretched city where there is no Mother, there is no Monster, there is nothing but fat men sweating in steam baths and dead, stupid statues draped in garlands of sweet-potato blossoms. They write precious little poems, delicate as eel-fat, and call themselves brothers of the sun, because it is a winning image, evocative enough to ply a pink-kneed girl behind their screens. But the sun is my sister, and rides my bones hour upon hour, and oh, how she burns, she burns. There are no eel-poems about us, only lightning, and wind, and red, red heat on a man’s brown back.
I hate her, Mother. Why could you not have sown me alone in Father’s flesh, like a persimmon tree growing without saplings in a prairie? The things I would tell you are not for her flaming ears.
I hesitate to recall it; I do not wish it to have been. I came across a shrine yesterday—I suppose it is the fate of the Kami to be forever plagued with monks and shrines. They stamp the landscape like ant-farms here, lumpish tunnels arching over well-planted fields and bubbling through the shimmering squares of floating rice, worming through the world, digesting it and exuding it from their pasty bodies as if earth could be offal.
But, like any ant-commune, they have great stores of food, and will occasionally part with crumble or wash when a man passes by and asks after their statuary. I did not mean to imply that theirs was in any way spectacular, but ants will be proud of their collected corn-cobs and strawberry stems. It is, however, a singularly uncanny sensation to look up at a statue of oneself, snarling and dancing and stomping, yes, I swear it, eight small snakes.
My breath was lost, unsure which way to blow, frozen under my own face, and my skin seized as if run through with rain, for oh, oh, since Izumo I have often thought—worried, suspected—that I am walking through a story that has already occurred, and here, here are the relics of it, here are the stations of the holy, here are the oft-walked pilgrim trails that repeat a journey I made long ago but am still making, but have not yet made, and yet the ants—the ants! The ants, they seem to have catalogued my every step, and swathed the grass-impressions in bronze, and held festivals to mark my left foot falling in Yasugi. Little librarians, and their scrolls have already illuminated my killing of the serpent, the thin-spun beauty of Kushinada under its coils—all of this is in their greasy hands, and if they know this, if they know my family secrets, do they not also know the way down to Mother, and if I will find her, and the shade of her face in the dark? They must know, wretched things, it is their business to know, they do nothing but know—I am chronicled, chronicled, and soon I will not exist at all but in their scrolls and their mute clay statues—
I wanted to talk to them about this, to close up with them behind geometric screens and ask them how the story goes from here, ask them if they think, perhaps, I was in the wrong when I went to my sister’s house, if what I did there was wrong by their ant-measure. Their little white-capped heads must belong to oracles, scryers, magicians, if they could have formed this terrible statue from raw dirt, tunneled it into being—I wanted to hold them by their throats against their moth-eaten reliquaries and cry: who am I in this body? How long will she punish me? Where is my mother? Where is the snake? How do you know these forbidden things, you stupid, mewling men?
But in the incense-pregnant shadows of the interior rooms—lined with gold statues in that same eerie pose, foot raised over the squirming nest of heads—they only piled my hands with rice balls and salted plums, raw salmon and cups of soy-broth, smiling inanely, heads bobbing like lolling daffodils.
“Who am I in this body?” I asked, having devoured four plums and a quantity of bland rice. The monks scratched their heads beneath white caps and looked at each other like a gaggle of birds at seed-time. They smiled pleasantly and spread their hands.
“You are musuko, you are our son—all men are sons of the gods, all men are sons here, in the house of the gods, and beloved.”
“That is not what I mean,” I answered gruffly, clutching my chopstick as if to break it.
“What else could you have meant?” Their clean, white smiles did not falter. They did not know me, my blood chortled—rice-gobbling peasants know me by sight, but men trained to worship my kneecaps cannot recognize their god when he walks through their door. This is useless, said the blood, useless and comical, if it were not pathetic.
“I think you do not know half so much as your statues,” I sighed.
“Most likely,” they agreed heartily, “this temple is dedicated to Susanoo-no-Mikoto, Storm-God and Deathshead. It was he who came last from the nose of Izanagi in the beginning of the world, when the Great Father had finally rid himself of the foul dust which emanated from the body of the witch Izanami, who dared speak—”
I would like to say I did not bellow like an ox in heat, that I did not lurch out of my cushion through the scented air and smear rice and salt-plum into the noses and down the throats of the monks, just to shut them up, to stop up their stinking breath, greased with lies, that I did not screech my mother’s holy name while I tore at their sun-colored robes, shredded their ridiculous hats, claw at their soggy skin, skin that already smelled of death, of putrefaction and again, again, of lies, that I did not rip the cat-gut that strung together their looping beads, and laugh when the pebbles clattered onto the floor like rain falling on copper rooftops.
I would like to say these things.
But under the gleaming, muscled knees of that awful statue of myself I bound them with what prayer-twine were left, back to back in a ring like soldiers in the grass, and panting, seething, sweating salt through these meat-pores I never asked to own, I began to read those fools, those orange-swathed ant-farming fools, I began to read to them their lessons under the tamarind trees throwing up their branches into the black-bustling sky like frenzied arms. Did they quail? I did not look, I did not care. No one listens to me, but these mouse-eared men would. If it is possible for a god to be filled with the evangelic, I boiled over, and they were the scalded stove, and they would hear, they would hear me, or I would open them up and spit scripture into their grinning throats.
“Listen to me, listen to me when I tell you: this is how it was in the beginning of the world—”
SECOND HEAD
Men, even gods-in-men’s-skin, believe passion means (to adore, to lust, to be exalted through love.) They are foolish. Passion means to suffer. It means (to endure great sorrows.) Passion is the grasp of blister-ridden hands, breaking its thumbnails on the floor of heaven. (Passion is fear, like a peach tree planted in the navel, when your sister comes not wandering back over the cicada-emboldened hills.) It is hoarse, needling, the great iron vat in which flesh becomes oil. (It is eyes floating in murk, eyes crusted in salt like tears.) Its pelt is deep-shaded, like love—red and black, wine-dregs and sour mash—but it is (not) love. (But then, then you said it was, when you opened for me.) Passion cannot weep. The tracks of once-liquid sorrows run down its face, jaundiced and leprose-rose, a warm line of marrow-dust pooling on its collarbone like the burst bow of a violin. (Passion cannot weep, but oh, oh, it cries!) Passion hollows bones to flutes and seeds the flesh with baobabs, baobabs and women like baobabs, dark and deep in the muscle walls, growing like recalcitrant children, gnashing their agate teeth at intestines of twisted ivory. (I gnash, you gnash, we gnash at each other and eat each other and swallow and excrete each other and look at our passion, look how it gleams, look at the peachstones of our suffering in these caves!)
I am the second body (daughter.)