Myths of Origin

who watched you lay her head

Here too are grasses

broken grasses

where she made her bed.

Tan-dara-dei

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

But in the end, the floor cannot be unwalked upon. It is not asked if it would prefer a surcease of shoes. It is trodden; it is worn. It is owned, and paid for, and it will lie beneath all those feet, it will lie beneath a severed white head preserved above the mantle, a white head and a gnarled horn, it will lie beneath those black-glass eyes and never complain. It is not paid to complain. It will sing, because it was made for singing, and because the feet would have their song.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

XII THE HANGED MAN

Lancelot

And when Sir Launcelot awoke of his swoon, he leapt out at a bay window into a garden, and there with thorns he was all to-scratched in his visage and his body; and so he ran forth he wist not whither, and was wild wood as ever was man; and so he ran two years, and never man might have grace to know him.

—Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte d’Arthur

Vespers—The Psalm of Forgetting

Perhaps I never saw her at all. Perhaps I never caught the curve of her hip in my eyelashes, through the rain-speckled window. Did I never stand below the queen, like Gyges, and dream myself a ring slipped onto her finger? Did I never die on her cross, crucified on the gold-dusted frame of her body? Did no spear pierce my side, the wound irising closed like a cataract?

The faces confuse in my memory—was it one woman or two? I remember the waters closing over me, and a black-tipped breast brushing my lips, and milk flowing into my throat like myrrh and sapphire—but no, that was when I was a boy, when the Lake swallowed me and I saw the paintings on the walls of her belly. When the Lady of the Lake peered up out of the water and thought how well she would like to have a son. But a Lake has no womb—so she took me from my nurse whose cheeks were so fat, and taught me to breathe her blue.

I fell so far, so far. She whispered to me in the language of salmon and bullfrogs, taught my uvula to twist itself into the semblance of herons and leeches. I drank the milk of her body for twelve years, and it tasted of belladonna and lemon rinds, it tasted of verdigris, it tasted of the smoke and mist from an unnamable sea. My heart swelled with it, it replaced my blood, the secret currents of snow-bright mercury pooling in my thirsty ventricles.

She opened her mouth and the Lake rushed out of it, and I had no voice but to adore her and call her my mother,

my lover, and my terror, to fall into the tide of her beckoning and kiss the brine from her wavering lips. Her cool skin was my bed and her glassy bones were my meadhall—I drank and drank and there was always more of her to fill my mouth. In the night I slept curled into the blue-black shadows of her hair, and I dreamed that once I had been a human boy, and lived in a house with a red roof, and rode a gray horse.

I live with a skein of waves over my eyes even now, and in my fracturing vision I see their faces merge and separate, the reflections of fish just below the surface, skittering out of reach. Was I, then, the Sword in the Lake? I rose from it by her hand, which dripped with the scales of newborn trout, fluttering from her arm like dandelion seeds. I rose from the water and the reeds sang their canticles. And the king took me in his hand and I have been nothing else since but a stupid sharp thing hacking at bags of blood. If I am the Sword I am innocent; steel cannot sin. If I can be nothing but a dumb blade, I can be forgiven. If I am metal, I have been always in the hand of my friend, and never smelled of his wife.

The last moment in the Lake-mother’s arms I wept, and that was the first time I felt the madness coming on, the separating of my skin, the light coughing out from my teeth. I choked, then, who had breathed the Lake for air, and the moon rolled out of my mouth. I stood on the shore, my lungs blazing like saints, and watched her black-flecked eyes disappear, sinking away from me.

Did I suckle at that woman for all my youth? Did I trade my flesh for hers? Or was it all that other she, the one for whom I am punished, the one who will not now hear my name? It is always a black-eyed woman, and I am always prone at her feet, I am always raving at the waters for the false mother—but how sweet the taste of her salt milk, for all her lies—to take me back and wash me clean, take me away from the woman I should not want, from what I have done, from the laughing throat which made me forget that I am only a tool, heavy as a hilt, and all my limbs fold together to make the sleek white edge—I am the musculature of the Lake-knife, and I am not allowed eyes, or blood, or a cock. Yet I strain towards her, always her. Even if I cannot, sometimes, tell the primal her from the secret her.

But I feel it again, I feel the light breaking from my skull like seraphic needles. She will not forgive me, she will not believe me. Her navel spoke to me while her eyes shut my face from the room. It hissed that I was poisoned, poisoned by the Lake, and that I would never be pure enough for the cup to pass to me, I would never be clean of that witch. It hissed like a white serpent and called me damned, and my eyes bled for her, the stigmata of the ruined man.

With my hands in her black hair I screamed the heron-hymns of my youth into her mouth, and she was afraid of me then. She wept and her tears burned constellations into my cheeks, and I’m sorry, I never knew, I didn’t know, my love, my love, I thought it was you. But the queen wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t forget. And now I am losing her, my Guenevere, I am losing her face in the multitude of faces, and her black eyes bleed into my mother’s, and the other one, the one who was not Guenevere, but wore her skin like a dress.

I fell so far, so far. She spat on my hands, and my bones broke like a gate in the wind, and the moon rolled out of my mouth.

Terce—The Psalm of Metamorphosis

It was not only that a hole opened in the world or that in the hole was a garden in which I was the eaten fruit, it was not only that I reached out for a woman and drew back a burned hand. Perhaps I could never have done anything else, and it was all meant to happen as it did, and I was meant to circumnavigate this desert and no other, and pray only to the skulls of buffalo and hare.

I was never innocent, I confess it, as freely as my asthmatic brain will allow. I was a verb, white as opium smoke. I acted, I never stood still. I was the thrust and cry. Somewhere along the way a thing snapped or bent in me and now I can feel my organs expanding like novae, galaxies of liver and spleen, nebulae of bile, of cilia, of obliterated marrow, pounding pulse-rate signals into the blackness of my vast interior—vast enough, anyway, to contain the tumescent moons that spin through me like plates.

But if the geometry of my lover changed underneath me, it did not stop the motion of my hips grinding into her, it did not lessen the red marks of my teeth on her shoulder. The Euclidean planes of her face shifted like glaciers, and her eyes snapped from black to blue. I am guilty, it matters not if I thought that it was the body of Guenevere I loved—it was my fault. I did not die to escape that bed.

But I was not innocent, though I came to that thorn-bed hoarse with faith. I saw it, I saw her lips swell and crack the skein of Guenevere, I saw the Elaine-fruit break its pod, I saw her shiver and her hair flay itself, black slitting to reveal red. I saw it and I did not stop, but I screamed, how I screamed as I felt myself caught inside her, caught as if on a nail in her womb, screaming as I shattered over her body, the glass of my bones pricking her nipples, and her mouth was a trumpet-blare, and the color of its triumph was red, red, red.