Myths of Origin

My beard shows best in this light, the bramble of my practiced symbology, holly and yarrow and horehound, the green tinge of next year’s wheat, blackberry and hyssop, heather culled with little white knives, shoots of bamboo and snow peas, crocuses sleeping soundly near my chin, wild rose sideburns and mustache of Italian grape and wormwood—I am all the wines ever bre

wed. It tumbles down to my basil-leaf navel, a tangle of root and branch, huckleberries peeking through and white sage smudging the skin, strawberry leaves sorrowful and low, blue crabgrass and dandelions brushing my elbows. I hide a harvest of gleaming pomegranates in my knees.

I am the Object, I am the Self-Defined. I need do nothing but exist, I draw all men to me as surely as if I were the birth-place of their salmon-hearts. The knight comes and I can hear his progression from square to square, the silky clop of his horse on black and white cobblestones I laid myself in some summer beyond this place, when I was not yet married. I can hear the snow catch in the nutmeg-colored mane, collecting on the reins and hooves when he rests, smell the slush of it in his helmet. There is no step he takes that I do not feel in my ribs and liver and the shaking thorns of my beard.

Boughs of pine hang from high-arched windows, the architecture of cathedrals repeating in this sanctuary like a story told from mother to suckling child. I dwell here, in the skipped frame, the caught film, the grandiose expanse of smelted clocks. I have chosen this place to wait until the new year gnashes its stone teeth and swallows up the old.

This is Limbo—between the first blow and the last, a head for a head for a head. I told the students when I returned last winter how my skull rolled onto the palace floor like a child’s ball or a golden apple. The callow youth stood up, his limbs betraying his shuddering heart, whose storm-ridden blood could be heard through the glassy hall. He looked so small with my axe in his hand, the shaft wound with ivy and raspberry bramble—he searched for a place to grip the bronze where thorns would not pierce his tender hands. I waited, as I wait now, patiently as a lion teaching his cub to hunt, for the quick tongue of the blade in my neck.

The spaces between stretch like light, bending their calculated arcs over bodies—the time between the lifting of the axe and the falling, the departure of the boy and the arrival. The nature of the universe is a held breath, a filled lung which never empties into the ether.

When his blow came, inevitable as autumn, I thought he would fall over with the weight of my weapon. The tidal edge came and my blood flowed green as sea-rot onto the vast mosaic floor. Ladies excused themselves in horror, knights vomited into their helmets, children scrambled to pick berries from my hair. The black-eyed Queen looked curiously at the flow of blood nosing her slippers like an affectionate hound. Her eyes strayed softly to a knight, a fearful falcon seeking the hunter’s arm. The king laughed too loudly and drank his mead through pale knuckles as though it would save his life.

I lay on that floor cut in two, my own conjoined twin, enwombed and devoured, flooding into my internal seas. I felt the room become the board, the fates of the pieces shifting as the check and escape rippled into clarity. I felt the boy’s heart connect to mine.

The separation, the ripping of my heart from my head, was so peculiar—calm spread in me like the tide through salted sand, and as though I called to it through tin cans connected by string, I whispered to my body. The colossus turned, breastplate bristling with mistletoe and strangled oak, groping the silence for purchase. I called quietly to its sinews, familiar as old harp-strings, and I blindly gripped myself by the hair.

Nestled in my arm, I looked at that boy, gone white as whalebone, and said: Next year in the Chapel, Gawain, next year in Jerusalem, next year in the Christmastide when the stars flash red and green, next year in my castle where the apple-maid has been.

A bet is a bet—I shall be here when he comes.

White Queen to Queen’s Bishop Five.

My wife has no name. She does not come to the Chapel, but lies naked as a lion and turns the sun to dust settling on her gold haunches. Is she the monster I keep in my house? Her lips part and show an endless forest. Did I bring her here, once? Or did she spring from Hautdesert like a water-choked cactus, putting forth her necromancer-flowers?

I think I am inside her all the time.

Even now, even then, in the court with the thousand candles, all around me I saw the walls of her body, slick and butter-warm. In the Chapel, where the altarcloth chants the vespers prayers in a voice dredged from the silt of the sea, I taste her flesh on my tongue like a communion wafer, and this is her body, unbroken for my worship, and this is her blood, poured out for my exaltation. I am a body of her body, and in her deafening heart I am transubstantiated, I become verdant, I become the deepened earth.

When my axe split my cordwood throat, I felt only her tightening around me, her breath wavering in my vision as though I watched the boy through a shroud of heat. I felt her hands on my stomach even when my head’s wet veins grasped uselessly at the glassy floor. I wonder if I have ever walked outside the tower of her skin, if I ever really let myself go down beneath the knight’s blue scythe. Perhaps I only curl within her and dream, a fetus suckling at her sugar-womb.

Sometimes she looks both north and south. Her northern face is a clutch of stones, slate rasping against granite. This face wears a cowl of nettles, and gnashes black flax with its teeth. From its cracked lips a sallow thread issues like a tongue; where it touches my flesh, I flush green and holly cracks open my pores. Her saliva turns my skin to soil—calendulas sprout in my knee-bones, chrysanthemums fulminate in my mouth until all I can taste is their obscene red. Ivy pierces my septum, stalks filling my body with chlorophyll, shooting through capillaries, thorns sprout from my chest, roots from my thighs—I gag, I spit, I retch in the midst of all this green.

Her southern face is a white river. This face wears a cowl of hair like light, smelling of sage and thistle, the first gold an arthritic miner wrestled from a Californian hill. From its polished lips a thick rope spirals out—silk that was once a worm—and when it grazes my eyes like the pelt of a deer, the pupils flush with blood and smoke. She touches the leaves of my beard and calls it good, she tells me I frighten her, and her skin warms under my blooming hands. My fingers go through her as through a tidepool, and when I draw back, anemones suckle at my palms, blue as kisses. With my hands in her watery hair I am exalted, I am greened and imparadised, I am the Edenic monster.

But I fear her other face, the hag who haunts the dust of a hundred corners.

White Queen to King’s Bishop Eight.

The road through the Wirral to the San Joaquin Valley is paved with pulverized magpie bones, and plated in Nevada silver. It is an endless suspension bridge, anchored with horsehair and ambergris. The root system of the bridge connects the water tables, the lightless tide of continents. Neither place is real, but the quest spans all points on all maps, and if the Gawain-child begins in Camelot, he must eventually pass through San Francisco, swallowing the foghorns as he rides.

And in the thigh of Saint Francis I will meet him and place the sacraments between his teeth, mark his hands with my stigmata, and draw him under the hill—for the Chapel is but the opening to a body, a crevice in the dream-soil, and I am waiting within it, for him to enter her body and mine, the green lord and his two-souled wife.

In Chinatown, the crone spat three times and shook her yarrow sticks at the sky, red and black. Her tar-clouded lungs rumbled, hissing: Lu. Ch’ien. Sun. The Seeker Descends from Heaven, and Submits to the Gentle Wind. With her hands pulling at my cheekbones like fish-hooks, she whispered the name of Gawain into my tear ducts, and I wept a tincture of salt and oleander. Am I no other than this, his object, his end? Am I this spectral mask, the giant and the beanstalk in one still-voiced body? There is nothing in it, to sit on the bridge with my holly-beard grazing the water and wait, a fire growing in his mind. I have no tongue, I have no blood. I am only the monster, the false knight, the price of his Christmas feast.

I went across the bridge in my leaf-body because she wished it. After all, we are the witch and the monster that dwell in the glen, it is our duty to set the trials, and draw the boys from their warrens to lie with us.

The winter dark came, and called us across the bridge, and I pulled my hag-wife over me like a coat of folded wings. I stepped into her skin and sealed up the edges with a paste of rosemary, for remembrance. Inside her, I was the Green Knight, and not Lord Bertilak, not myself. I exulted in the grotesqueries of the branch and bramble she lent me, in my seven-mile stride, in the voice that cracked steel. From inside her, I looked on the placid Queen and saw the ocean of that perfect torso twist and roil. I saw her, the king’s wife, catch her perfumed breath in fear that the Devil had come to punish her for opening her mist-midden legs.

But it was Gawain and not that faithless who came to us with his green calves quaking, and when his pentangle shield reflected its red on the red of our eyes, we forgot the Queen and her whimpering tryst. We slid into his equation, the quest and the endpoint, we recognized our most beloved Rook, and knew peace when he separated us into heart and head.

But I am not content bridging Christmas to Christmas, holding his purity like a plastic lotus and forcing my fingers into a sullen mudra. I am a bronze Buddha, green with age, motionless, meaningless. My eyes shed blank enlightenment, and he cannot see me as a man. My wife is the storm and the wheatfield, I am only a signpost. Without the mask of her skin I am but Bertilak, and that is less than the weight of the moon on a moth’s wing. And Gawain is a milk-brained child staring mutely at the wonders of the world. He will not even mark the passing of the bridge beneath his feet.

Look at the three of us, our little dance. Are we not heroes, are we not terrors?

White Knight to King’s Bishop 5th.

The Chapel is filled with sweet smoke, the vanilla and oranges of Christmastide, peppermint candy sticky on my hands. The nave secretes opalescent sweat, flooding the floor with holy vapors. The Lady Bertilak is not here, though I look to the torturously painted tiles of the ceiling and see the arch of her summer-breast.