SEVENTH HEAD
I am dragging blood behind me like menses—the grass is full of it, clotted with it, hungry for it, and I pick myself up over the hillocks and dells with a belly bloody and inflamed, a mass of maidenheads burst and gaping *we sit on the floor of the monster like a blister of blood, heavy and black, and we seep through, we seep through, and stamp our wet wombprints on the path from what was once our house to what is now our nest* I did not mean for this to happen *did you think you could eat a thing and not become it? We always knew, we who have eaten the soup of eyes every day from birth; what is there we have not seen between the eight of us?* Kaori, Kaori, it hurts *yes, it always hurts, we knew that, too, but blood is blood, blood is a portent, and you are beautiful when you bleed, when you bleed for us, and with us, and in us, and around us*
I was so weak when I came to you, Kaori, so weak with the blood bellowing out of me *and your back, your poor back. None of the rest of them saw you as I did, your jeweled skin cracked open, your stomach ruined. No seduction there, only a monster, and terrible* I could not even cry, the sounds which came out of me were a cacophony, all those voices, all that screeching, I could not hide for the blood and the vomit of voices *It didn’t matter anyway, there were only two of us left, and mother would let neither of us go to the man who was neither well nor sick. His face was moon-blanched when morning found it, his voice gone with my sisters, and he was turned out of our house like a dog, but there was nothing left of him to whip, nothing left but food for other dogs* There are roots in my vertebrae, twisting and gobbling bone, and I am become the Root-Country, I am Ne no Kuni, all these throats stoppered up with women, women lodged in them like corks and the pain, the pain *I hung behind my mother’s skirts, too young even to look him in the face, and whispered to her that I felt so sorry for him. It was not his fault the snake had taken all his wives, and why should I not have my chance as his wife, when all the others had? I could be a good wife, I told her, I know how to make the soup, I know how to arrange the grass on the floor—why should I not be allowed to wear the rich, thick kimono my sisters had worn?* Kaori, the blood, where does it come from? *I was a silly girl, but pity sat in me like a fat baby.* Something is growing from my shoulder blades, I cannot see it, I cannot see it, but it is there, and its roots seize my eight livers, and its thirst, its thirst—
*It didn’t matter, in the end. The man who was neither alive nor dead cut his belly open on our stoop before the day was out. He had seen the snake too many times, I suppose. Mother sighed and sat heavily against the house—I was safe. Kushinada was safe. She had two daughters left to her, and the snake would not come, she thought, now that the offending husband was a cairn of meat on our steps.* It was not him, it was never him, but the blood, the blood sang for you, Kaori, it throbbed hot and thick, and called your name: Ka-o-ri! *I sat out in front of our little house that night, that warm night, and looked at the stain his suicide had made on the stones. It was such a sad little mark.*
They are sticking out of me like pins, and I can smell them, yes, the trees, all their trees, plum and cherry and dogwood and waist-high reeds persimmon and even the eyes, Kyoko’s eyes, they blink on the shell of my back, among the trees, and the trees split me open, they witness my second birth, no longer snake but woman *And my trees, the orange trees of Kaori, white as paroxysms, which saw my birth in the garden, my hardly-marked birth, seventh among daughters, my mother’s womb barely felt me leave it, so oiled and hinged by other births was the poor, wrung-dry thing* yes, yours too, and the fruit is heavy, round as suns, so heavy and I can hardly drag myself among the hills, down to the city, and I know the fruits have no sugar to give, only more blood, more blood, and they will burst and wet the roots again, and they will grow taller and it will go on and on* but she gave me the meat of the orange to suck, her breasts gone dry with too much milking, and I was calmed by the sweetness of it, the stinging gold of summer, and she sang to me as I nursed the thready fruit, my eyes sliding shut in her arms.*
I slid through the empty streets after a virgin like an opium-eater after a den. *I wondered, I remember, I wondered if you would come anyway* and I saw you sitting as though you expected me, and the blood was so thick on the alleys and I moaned and all these voices came out of me, you turned as though you knew them *I knew the voice of Kazuyo, and Kameko, and Kiyomi, and Kyoko, and Kaya, and little Koto, I knew them like my own, and standing on the mark of their dead husband I saw the terrible thing that had eaten them, with their love pouring out of its mouths* I tried to say ‘come to me,’ and it came out ‘sister, wife, be our sister, be our wife.’ * and I knew them for what they were, and I saw the saplings on your poor back, and I knew them for the birth-wardens of my family, and I would not be left out, I would not be left behind, they wanted me, and I ran to you* you ran to me, and your hair flew like veins behind you *I ran to you with open arms, and you were so weak* I could not eat, though the Mouth churned in itself, demanded you, throbbed your name in the midst of all that blood: Ka-o-ri! *you could not take me; I opened your seventh head myself, and the air from within you smelled of orange blossoms, I patted your head, your blistered, root-ridden, suffering head* and you stepped inside me with all the trust of a lost child who sees the end of the wood *and darkness closed around me, but not silence, never silence.*
It took all night to stumble out of the village, my belly so bloodied it might have been a heart, but we were safe, all of us, beyond the blue ridges by the time the sun rose *They married me to him anyway, of course. It was felt that propriety demanded a final marriage for both lost souls—I had said I wanted him, had I not? And he so fond of our family. He should not go down into Ne no Kuni alone.* We watched, our heads resting thoughtfully on a boulder, as the ghost-wedding proceeded through the village, and a priest said words over empty space, and a feast was eaten while weeping, and an empty bed laid out, clean and white, for the weight of ghosts to rest upon.
*I laughed, and the orange trees on my* our *back shook, to see my* our *sepulchral maidenhead vanish into the cloth*
while we wet the mountains with our red and ruined flesh.
VIII
IZUMO
It was the colt that she could not abide. She would have forgiven the rice and the shit, eventually. But she held its bloodied, skinless skull in her arms like an infant, looked up at me over the whites of its eyes with such betrayal in her stare—for a moment I was shamed, I stood before her like a child caught stealing sweets, but the storm-seed laughed and danced in a puddle of his own making, and I could not conceal, not really, not from her, the joy I took in our daughters chaotic cries, in her own red-streaked gown. She was more beautiful to me in that moment than when she first descended the stair of heaven, cloaked in all the sun’s regalia. Her hair was matted with black clots and her sleeves dripped scarlet onto the floor, her fine cheeks were painted with horseblood and I loved her so, I loved her filthy and squalid, swimming in death.
She took me in her arms, finally, and both I and the storm-seed exulted in her heat, her nearness, her light pouring from the spaces between the streaks of horsefat. She took me in her arms and pressed me close, and the gold of her ribs cracked the grey-blue bone of my own, and her face was a boil of grief, and her fire rose up all around me, as it must have risen from Mother, Mother and her boy burning her from the womb out, and my sister burned me from the mouth in, her punishing kiss scouring my flesh of storm, of cloud, of lightning, of sky.
I felt her kiss push me down, down, like a hand on the head of a drowning man, and the sky was caustic, my bones lit up like braziers, and something came spiraling out of me—the strange pearl of Izanami’s flesh, the yellowed orb of what she had to give me, the clot of her dust and rot and flesh and Izanagi’s fluid—it tore out of me like semen, expelled into the fertile clouds, and who knows what storm it salted there.
It was in Izumo that I landed, face first in the mosquito-mottled grass. Izumo, meaningless village, just over the hills from the stink and sink and sick perfume of Hiroshima.
From far off, I heard my children weeping scarlet, scarlet and black.
KUSHINADA / EIGHTH HEAD
:: Look at you, great enfeebled thing, choking on my sisters, spitting them out of your mouths like chewed meat. ::
Look at you, look at how we sit, like teacher and pupil, you below me with that thoughtful stare, looking up into all these eyes, shaded by the wide camphors like a net of protecting arms. Don’t you think it’s funny, don’t you think it’s a classical pose, all the rituals of dragon and maiden observed? I am trying to decide not to eat you, but it is difficult, difficult.
:: I am naked here, and alone, and I am sure that is all as you imagined it, last girl among all the girls, eight, eight—there are always eight, eight of us and eight of you, the eightfold path, and I am at the end, Right Maiden, Right Prey. It is dark here, but my irises have widened, I can see my own mud-streaked limbs, white as poached snails, and I have rocked back and forth on the forest floor clutching them, and I have wondered, wondered when I would join the others, when you would speak to me in their voices, but you will not, you hold them back from me— ::
I hurt. I hurt so much there is no space left in my throats for the hunger. My belly is gape-open, there is so much blood,
{we} never thought (we)
had so much blood in
me/us,
|we|
didn’t know
*our*
flesh went so deep.
It is becoming confused, crowded, and the smell of flowers gags, oh, it
(chokes)