Myths of Origin

Everywhere, on every high stalk of yarrow or fennel, on every low branch of camphor or juniper, even on the outcroppings of the dream-pagoda, the cicadas are leaving their shells.

Each one is perfect, unbroken, clinging to the stalk it has chosen with total abandonment. They must know such rapture as they wriggle out, and the grass rubs their bellies while the whole sky sings.

I think on what the Stone taught me as I watch them. I can never quite catch them at it, I only see the translucent shell cast off, with delicate mandibles and a diamond thorax. Some strange-eyed goddess has cast off her jewelry, and my meadow is full of sparking gems. The sun shines through them and they become little lanterns attending a nameless festival, swaying merrily from their stalks while the wind gossips with the flowers. They have sung themselves empty; the melody took their souls. The dream-shells remain, little urns empty of ash.

There was a moment when I wanted to gather them up and burn them in a pyre, to honor their lives under the ground and wish them well in their mating. But I could not. It seemed wrong to touch them.

They are familiar to me, as though each of these carapaces is a mirror rimmed in bronze, to show the lesson of the cicada’s dream: that I am deep in the earth and dreaming, and it is the seventeenth year.

The Eaglehawk Sacrifices Birds

River has seen my tears; I dream they anger him. He washes up roughly against my face to clean them from the skin which is still beautiful and green. His whitecaps like scalpels cut the salt from my ducts, trying to stop them up entirely. But he cannot do it.

He calls on Mountain, who fashions blinders from his shale rock, and places them over my eyes. I cannot see to the side, only straight down the ridge of my nose to the half-built Palace. It is coming along, now, since they painted the History. Great crimson turrets rise up, exactly the shade of my lips—and in fact they have sliced away layers of lip to make a deep-colored pigment for the portcullis. I am being torn down to the bone, and it must come soon, if the conspiracy of my limbs is to come at all.

This is the architecture of affliction, the cryptogram of the palace stairs whispers that no freedom is possible, no surcease can be salvaged from the flotsam of my quarried body. Boils erupt on skin that once did not bear up under the roots of houses. This is the dream of desecration, the dream of the palace building. This is the first body, which foaled all other bodies in an unimaginable stable. It can be seen as though it were tattooed on a woman’s stomach—the line of bodies, connected like a chain of paper dolls, from the one the Mountain harmed to the one the Mountain loves. A shock of limbs move between us, rimmed in light.

In my own body which is not my own I palpitate and sweat great oak barrels of Chianti. I weep Retsina and bleed a late harvest Riesling. The drops well on my fingertips like rain—small lips fasten to me, drawing the vintage from my pores. I sit in a basket of lies like oranges and pears, building, too, the architectures of pain and vengeance.

Heaven and Earth Turn Strict

When I was a child and Ayako only, the village had a great number of silkworms, and the women wove with radiance. The fat little grubs ate such beautiful things in order to make silk in the ovens of their bodies—white mulberry, wild orange, watery lettuce. They were coddled like tiny emperors. Perhaps my gentleman-Moth was once a silkworm, for when the time came that they metamorphosed into moths and had mated, the worms were forgotten and shooed from the house as a nuisance.

I can remember one autumn when they all became sick, for the mulberry crop was sour and fouled that year. They did not produce the pure white fluid that dried into the fine thread which then could be wound into a delic

ate rose-shade, even dyed indigo or emerald. From their translucent worm-bodies came only a thick black fiber, which was not even or pure, but knotted and bunched in places, so that it caused the poor things great pain to expel the viscous, wet silk. In my child-dreams I heard them screaming as their ashen bellies were torn out by masses of dark, coiled rope.

It did not dry properly, and so the women burned it all in a great heap with the bodies of the silkworms which had died giving birth to the death-thread. When they caught flame the smell of flesh and cloth burning was like white cardamom crushed in a china pot.

The ashes blew away with the next wind and the silkworm colony healed itself.

Yet I have always wondered—what marvelous, secret things could have been woven from that wet, black thread, the thread that smelled so sweet burning?

Rice Ripens

I dream that I am kneeling on the riverbank, vomiting into the clear water. In one hand I hold his leg, severed at the knee, and tears have mixed with bile and silt-water to make a horrible stew.

I can see on the kneecap a tiny white scar where he cut himself shaving, and I kissed the blood away. I remember the copper taste in my mouth, the taste of his inward self, his red blood swimming in me.

And now I have a surfeit of his blood. I carry it in buckets and in water-jars balanced on my head. I carry it in wine-sacks and water-bladders, in thatched baskets and even in my cupped hands. I did not think a man could have so much blood, even him.

I dream the brother-husband with his sundered body. I dream I see him in the moon which drives the sky before it like chariot-horses. I dream the corpse forming around me, the homunculus of his disparate parts, graying and moldered, and I have no thread to sew them.

What sort of golem will rise up out of this collected flesh with emet tattooed on its palm? Will I have to whisper in his wizened ear, wet and wrinkled as a newborn, some arcanity to bring it surging together? Will it love me still?

I dream it will not.

I dream I will not see the golem-husband whole.

All my eye can see is my own shape hunched over the river, emptying my own body of itself.

The Wild Geese Come

Feet crunched on the pebble-path to my pagoda. The heart within the Ayako-body leapt up like a fish flashing in the sun. The dream of the village-boy has come!

And he did come, walking up the Mountain path in a simple shift with a polished walking-stick, carrying a leather pack on his shoulders. He was not the same boy—I did not expect it—but he was handsome and strong and I was eager to speak to him.

The boy caught sight of me and a look of horror stole into his black eyes. For a moment I saw myself as I must have appeared to him: an old witch-ghost in tattered rags with horse-like hair that stuck out in black and gray bolts, filled with twigs and leaves and river-reeds. My bones were visible beneath skin that was too pale, and the hands which reached out to welcome him must have seemed like death-claws.