Myths of Origin

Prime—The Psalm of the Roadside Stand

Apples and cherries, grapes and oranges, peaches, apricots, plums and ears of corn like arrows. The desert has no right to these things, this sugar water bursting at variegated skins. I have no right to them. I dimly recall, when I first came, being disappointed that the Mojave was not empty, was not the wasteland I craved. Black-eyed witches and nicotine-toothed magi chewed tobacco and held out hands full of fruits and jewels—I reeled from them, my skull full of tangerines and white jade, groping for hermitage amid all these unmovable faces.

It was the apples I feared most. Everyone knows that red means poison, means a swollen tongue turning black, means years in a glass coffin. And when I was a boy, my mother’s breasts tasted of apples, her hair like apple-leaves, and under the surface of the Lake, my mouth was always full of the papery sweetness. I put my mouth to her throat and it was like pulling fruit from a branch, huge and red as a heart.

And there they lay, exuding that same earthy smell, in row after row of identical red—I covered my eyes and behind the lids were only ghosts, with their slim arms full of apple-roots. I went into the salt-flats, where the cool flesh of those fruits could not survive, and I ate mice, cracking open their delicate bones for the marrow.

And still, I could not escape these peddler-crones, holding out their beans and dried peppers like relics to be kissed, mouthed—these idols in orange and scarlet—habanero, poblano, ahi, guadillo, mesilla, shiny with wax and the tender hands of the faithful. Even in the emptiest of flatlands, one will appear as if she had grown out of the rock, slate-gray hair braided under a green bandana and a wide-brimmed hat, and wordlessly hold out the husk of a pepper, desiccated into gold, insisting.

The stars last night huddled for warmth in the shadow of the cliffs, and I shared my fire, my mouse-feast, and the rattling pepper-net I could not refuse, which they quarreled over like wild dogs, tearing into the red and yellow skins, snarling and lapping at the spiced rope.

Afterwards, the stars sat around the flames and I confessed that I was mad, that I was fleeing the water and the threat of apples. They hunched together, coronae bristling like tangled branches, and told me that the curvature of the moon meant rain was coming, they told me that the lizards and

sparrowhawks were dancing for rain, that the poppies were singing in opiate harmonies to call down the rain. They told me that the Grail comes up from the bleeding soil, that the rain tells it secret things, and it spins up like wild onion. The bowl of its cup is blue, the leaves are dusty white, sage-white, willow-white, and I will know it by its water, for it will hold the rain perfectly still and not spill a drop.

They accused me of heresy, of turning from the water that gave them the perfume of saguaro flowers, washed their haunches, and fattened the snakes under their feet. I was no madman if I could not weep, they snapped, and weeping is nothing but water. They stroked my stomach with fingers that smoked and sizzled, promising that I would never dry myself to the ruby shell of a roadside pepper, that I would never bind my flesh with those rough ropes or taste the sun’s meat.

I wept, under their hands like midwives, and they mocked my tears for water. They pointed at the moon, overturned like a broken bowl, and pulled at my jaw, trying to fashion it into a lunar basket, lips and rushes woven water-tight. They told me that no one with hands so dry could touch the cup of the desert, which was an avatar of liquid things: blood, sweat, milk, tears. They laughed like ravens over carrion at my legs which had not borne a child. They prodded at my old wounds. They sidled into my ears and whispered the names, the terrible names I could not let into me, those acetylene syllables searing through my inner ear, the secret ear which hears only shame:

Arthur. Guenevere.

It was a poor madness, they said, which remembers all its sins.

But I do not have to remember—the desert knows those names, they are written on every hut and dry riverbed, they are in the cave-wall glyphs and scrawled like graffiti on the Anasazi cliff-houses, they are stamped on every fruit in every stall, on the tongue of every turquoise trader, emblazoned on the door of every red-tiled mission with their great lonely bells. It is deafening, it is blinding, and in the night the names couple wildly and reproduce themselves in new crevices, on the backs of whipsnakes and iguana, burros and turkey vultures. Even the stars mouth those names, mash them with toothless gums, roll them over their cold tongues and push them into the earth again, where they will germinate, and under the moon’s first rain will detonate into lilies and poppies and knowing anemones.

Arthur. Guenevere.

Nones—The Psalm of Remembering

I walked these last days with my head skyward, until I was blinded by the bleach-boned sun and the expectation of rain. I feared it, I feared its worm-droplets burrowing under my hair, I feared the taste of it mixed with my sweat and blood-dust. I feared that it would know me, and burn at a touch, for all that I have done.

I was not allowed eyes, or blood, or a cock. These things were not given to me the day of my oath. A sword, yes, and a title. But flesh, a tongue, desire? None of these—but when she leaned over me—she, not him, Guenevere, not Arthur—and touched me with the Lake-blade, the diamond at her throat swung forward and brushed my forehead, and I smelled her skin, which smelled of no other thing but apples, and I felt the water floating again over my face like hands, obscuring the vision of king and ceremony, until only she filled me up, the brush of her rainwater-jewel and her lion-braids hanging low like the tongues of church bells.

And later, when I knew what her mouth tasted like, and the milk of her body, when she had miscarried twin daughters, and when her dresses smelled of us, a miasma of apple and horsehide, I could not stop, I could not breathe unless I was inside her, unless I could wend her hair in my fingers and shriek, hoarse and dry, into her neck.

It has always been so. I am always the little boy climbing into the laps of women too big for me. And I am always surprised when they close over me, and I cannot see the sun for the ripples of their tides.

I climbed into the lap of the desert, too, clambering over loose stones, caked in dust that should have been Aramaic, crusader’s dust, Byzantine at the least. I scrabbled under scrub-brush and hubcaps for the disc of sainthood, the nova to surround my head, the balm for my drowning, and there was nothing. There is nothing in the desert, there is nothing in women, there is no revelation to be gained by swallowing the sun or by pulling on the body of another like a shirt.

Am I cured, then, by the birth of this homunculus, this black little cherub somewhere in my lower intestine? Should there not be a heroic burst of music, fiddles and drums and low, hooting pipes, as befits the geography? Should not the railroad keep the time, the chuffing trains play metronome to the coyote-sopranos?

The moon is almost upside-down. I lay beneath it and it boils my skin white, white as the tail of a starving deer, white as that mange-ridden stag which bumbled into the wedding feast, gobbling the cakes and shitting noisily on the draped dais.

The signs were there, for anyone to see who cared.

When I left Elaine, Galahad-heavy, she saw—she saw, the most perfect of the pronouns that bury me—and Guenevere’s glance was the same as it had been on that long ago day, the day she married, when she watched a poor white deer, its mouth smeared with sugar and honey, stumbled into the feast-hall, start and cry out feebly as it was gashed by a dozen arrows. It crashed through the goblet and plate as it fell, legs spasming, spattering the altar with filth. And she watched, calmly, as they carried out the ruin of that sick beast.

Here, too many years hence to admit, my hands still trained to the shape of her waist, I wait for it to rain. I pray, I keep the liturgy of the wolf spider, I ring out the hours on the bare rocks—I pray for the only promise I have left to show itself—that the Grail will bloom out of the desert like a blood-colored marigold, and that I will be pure enough, just enough, to fall into it and cover my body, this mewling body, the splayed thing, hung head-earthwards on a six-spoked wheel made from the twined legs of three women, this horror, cover its shame with light.

I am not cured. I have learned to speak the dialect of the mad saint, which consists mainly of fire and bone, and printed the lexicon on my ribcage, stamped in perfectly even letters, the typewriter-hammer slamming home each time, expressing the virtue of exactitude. But when the bread and water were carried from Rome, they passed me by, deeper into the desert, towards the pepper-stand woman and the star-pack, and I, in my grubby sandals and mantis-hung beard, could not catch them. Canonization is for those who find God in the desert. I found only the smell of the earth before rain, and the memory of wetness exploding in my chest, the ecstatic drops on my blistered lips, my cracked chin.

The moon rolled over and presented her throat to the stars; the stars closed their mouths over her white fur.

Matins—The Psalm of the Rain

The fruit stands packed up more quickly than I would have thought possible, collapsing into neat heaps like decks of cards. The pole-children scatter like sullen crows. And now it is truly empty here, as I imagined it, the cross-hatch of railroad tracks binding the expanse of land like a corset, the mesas that clothe the world and meet the sky, and through the heat I seem to see the air shape itself into many-towered Camelot.

But I cannot touch it, the mirage of a well-appointed castle, a castle swollen with happiness and nobility—why would anyone claim such a thing, when we lie around its walls like corpses, genuflecting maniacally, mired in the wreck of it all?