Myths of Origin (19 page)

I cannot tell if it
is
me curled on the damp earth. The gray spider perched on her dusty wall seems equally myself. I apologize, it is what happens when the loneliness is built up and frescoed in costly paints. Solitude becomes populated with a legion of selves, each laid on each like stacked frames of film, like pig’s ears in the noontime market, or the floors of a pagoda that once was red. The original is lost, just one of a thousand thousand silvern copies, scattered upwind.

Laying over the dream-tower is the dream-wall. It is brown, glum-grained and jaundiced by a Sun which frowns under her straw hat. Dream-men pressed the earth together to build it, and now it is my Nest. In this copy, which is not Ayako but comes from her like a long braid which begins at her crown, I can feel the bristle of fur like a bronze brush on my thighs, the jut of morphine-wings on my back. It is the dream of the lion-haunches, which is familiar as a shoe.

A Boy comes to the dream-wall. He is smooth and brown as an almond tree, with wide-set eyes and a cruel mouth. His hips sing of palm-oiled pleasures and I like him in a moment, because his beauty touches me like a hand. My paws are deep-padded and hungry—I breathe his smell in sheaves, smell of cinnamon and burned bread. My belly yearns for him, knows he is meant for me, will swell inside me like a black apple. I am certain of him, of how he will feel inside me, how his sweat will taste.

But he is waiting for me, and I oblige, for the dream-body knows the thing for which it is intended. Riddles, and games, and adulation.

“What is my name?” I ask in a voice like the sound of the Mountain gnawing his knees. The Boy looks at me with a quixotic raise of his brows.

“That is not a very good riddle,” he replies, and I let his voice slide through me like spiced honey. He is worried, now, for he must suspect that he cannot possibly guess the answer among the possible answers that spread out in his brain like a Euclidean plane. When he attempts it, I can hear his tongue thicken in his mouth.

“You are named Truth, for only Truth can loose what is bound.”

And it is a good answer, better than most can dredge from themselves, pulling their words up like wooden well-buckets. My belly exults.

“No, beautiful boy, dream-within-dream. I am called She. She who travels when the snow flies fast. She who devours with woolen teeth. She who asks. I am all possible shes. There is no other She born under any mockery of a moon. I am the she-Wolf, the she-Axe, the she-Belly. I am the destination of that which is He. I cannot be guessed, and I am never known.”

And then the dream-boy was inside me, in my throat and in my lion’s stomach, whose ulcerated walls pulse in time to the flooding of rivers. My teeth drank him, and I slept in the corpulent sun.

Woman rises out of no-woman, and Ayako stirs in her sleep.

River Otters Sacrifice Fish

Metamorphosis. It is a long line of bellies, chained together flesh-wise, circling each other in a blood-black smear. The sparrows pick cold red berries from the mud, the hawks pluck the sparrows from the sky. The fish swallow grasshoppers, the otters gulp down the fish. The world eats and eats and eats, and stomach to stomach it embraces itself. Hawk is Berry, Otter is Grasshopper. Woman is Fish and Sparrow.

Ayako sees this as she watches the new sun tiptoe on the river. She understands it, for she, too, has a belly which longs to pull creatures into it. The I-that-is-Ayako knows that dream-bellies also connect, along a strange umbilicus of tamarind bark and snow-pea shells. In the half-shelter of our ruined pagoda, I can see the stars, the constellations rotating in their angular anatomy. Over my/our flaxseed hair the kimono-sleeve stars tumble like lost feathers. The river whispers arcane spells, thick-voiced and gurgling with pleasure at the face it holds in its ripples, which is mine. The dream-face, with eyes of new apples, for in dreams, all eyes are green. The River and the Mountain split me between them—they have a treaty which is re-negotiated regularly. Codicils are added, addendums and appendices drawn up with rustling laughter. There is no time here—Thursday has been killed in his sleep. They can afford to wait.

It is a small dream, this. It follows the seasons and eats orange kabocha squash boiled with wild greens. And into the dream occasionally some black-eyed boy or girl comes, to bring me a sack of rice or a little box of tea. They come from the dream-village, which has not the gentility to know it is a dream, because they pity the old woman on the Mountain. And I long to ask them riddles they cannot answer, I long to hold them belly-to-belly. They go back down the Mountain with innocent feet, back to huts and
miso
and smoked fish.

Because in her body, I hardly speak at all any longer. The rusted brass hinges of my voice have gathered dust. I put my/our hands to the soil of the garden, and can feel the heat of growing things, meant to be soon inside my body. The Mountain marks me, knows I am meant to be in
his
belly, etching his shape against the sky-that-is-not, pinioning the woman, the cobbled personae, the dancing cranes and bobcats and lizards and singing monkeys and squirrels to the slivers of dreams pretending to be stones. He gathers his blue and green and white to consume me, he gathers the gray and the gold. His chortling streams and the meadows lie restful and sweet, as though the moon-goddess had smoothed an emerald taffeta dress over her slender knees. He is impassive and huge, he mocks and waits.

Inside her/me the dreams are burning, falling, raw as bark-stripped pine. There is no sound where they step, for it is possible they are not really there, that these shadows are not theirs, that she is not doubled and tripled, tumbling backwards through bodies like scalding water.

And some secret avalanche on the far side of the Mountain rumbles as he clears his diamond throat.

Wild Geese Go North

I dreamed cannon-winds shot through my belly; each strand of wind carried talons and curved beaks which tore my flesh. My navel was cut out like a coin, my mouth was filled with dead leaves. I dreamed that I was the first belly. I dreamed my flesh dark and star-sewn. My womb bore up under a five-clawed hand, slit down a scarlet meridian, and black daises grew from the skin of its depths.

I dreamed it was Mountain who passed all these canine winds into me. He put his slate-blue mouth to me and took a breath that serrated the edge of the world. I felt his caves erupt in me, his glaciers and his footholds. I dreamed it was River who held me still, gripped my forearms in his hands like otter’s paws.

I dreamed that I cried out to Moon, but she had been eaten whole.

The winds were in me and marauding, the teeth of Mountain nursing at my womb, and he filled me with migrating birds, he filled me with blade-wings that carved pictographs on the inside of my bones, where I could not read them. I dreamed that Mountain shook with pleasure as he emptied all his stones into me, the boulders and the pebbles and the granite flanks, and the sharpest wind which blows at his peak.

When I was filled with stone until I was too heavy to whisper, and wind until I was a body of breath, I dreamed that Mountain and River tore me to pieces with their teeth. They put my throat and my breasts into the sky frothing with whitecap-stars, and my thighs into the glistening rice-fields. They put my arms into the sea that boiled with serpents, and my hands into the desert, palms downturned.

And between them they ate my womb on silver plates, and called it perfection, called it their precious-sweet, their horn-of-plenty, their best work. They sugared it with marrow and lapped with agate tongues.

I dreamed I was dead in them, I dreamed I was scattered over the rims of earth.

And I dreamed that when he had swallowed his last, and I was a spot of blood on his beard, Mountain began to laugh.

Seedlings Sprout

The I-Ayako is satisfied with the progress of the beans. They have not broken the scrim of soil yet, but she can hear them wriggling beneath, like butterflies. She is worried about the turnips. Next year she will have courage enough to ask the dream-villager for some wheat to plant. She looks now to the crocuses peeking up their candle-tips. They will not keep her alive, but they are so sweet on her little pink tongue.

The wind is still cold when it comes down from the Mountain after its prayers on the peak. She would like to say it is a kimono that she pulls around her thin body for warmth, but long ago it abandoned its pinks and yellows and seems now little more than a blank cloth flung upon her.

My/her mouth aches like a shut box. I want so to speak, to moisten my lips and make my own wind-ablutions, add my verses to the Mountain’s long poem. I am afraid it is broken, its tumblers have shattered in the winter freeze.

Thus one evening I went to sit at the foot of gnarled old Juniper near my pagoda and told him my story, which sprouted from my throat like a plum-tree. I do not know the juniper’s name, but he is a good listener, and the moon rustled his branches while I spoke in a cobwebbed voice.

“When I was a girl and had a fine brocade
obi
and soft sandals, I lived in the dream-village. (I suppose it is possible that this is only a vision like the others, but I am here, and so I must have come from a Place, and one place-tale is as good as another.)

I had seven brothers who were all very wise and brave and they protected the huts and the market and the temple. But then came terrible men with their bodies covered in leather and iron, who swung long swords against the wind which screamed as they bit into flesh. They killed everyone, even my poor mother with her hair like a spider’s best web, and they burned the temple to the ground.

I hid under a wheelbarrow for three days, until they had gone and the dream-village smoked black. I was very afraid. I wandered among the ashes of the bodies and wept.

Near dawn on the seventh day after the men had left, a Sparrow came to me with a fat red berry in her mouth. She ruffled her fine brown feathers at me and spoke: “Go and see Mountain,” she said, “he will be your village, your father and your mother and all your seven wise brothers.” Her fluted voice drifted off and, dropping the berry at my feet, took flight eastwards, towards the craggy toes of the sacred Mountain.

And so I took what clothes I could, a leaky water-sack I could mend, and the fat red berry and I went up the Mountain, following the path of the Sparrow.

It was evening again when I found her, perched atop my pagoda, picking at the ruined paint with her little gold beak. I waited for her to speak again, eager for bird-magic, but she did not. I held the berry out to her in my small white hand and she caught it deftly as she flew back to the village, leaving me to the tower and the Mountain.

It was difficult for the first years, when I had no rice or tea, but Mountain provided for me cherries and plums and chestnuts, almond milk and cold green apples. After a time, people returned to the dream-village and children began to come to me and bring me little presents. Since I am a ghost, they wish to appease me.

And so we sit together and watch the origami-clouds, our dream-village of Mountain, Tower, River, Juniper, and I.”

Peach Blossoms Open

They are suddenly here, floating on the trees like a cloak of butterflies, a blush creeping through their white petals. Suddenly the pagoda has beautiful handmaids which shower it with pale silks. There is warmth hushing through the sky. I lie under the trees with their flower-veils drooping low and I dream that in the afternoon I can see the eyes of a dream-husband in the blossoms.

I lay dreaming on the long-haired grass, legs brown and smooth as a sand dune, arched at the knee at the same angle as the tip of the Mountain, as the line that divides the sun-stone from the moon-stone, the shadowed side from the light. My toes wound in the reeds, tiny emerald rings on the dream-darkened skin, set with the diamonds of milky toenails.

See what in what regalia my dreams clothe me! Violets brush the small of my back with lithe, sugary movements. The scald of blue above me like a velvet gown, cut low on the horizon of my breast, clasped with clouds at the shoulders. See how it covers me in veils and layers of silk, rustling against my now-royal thighs with secretive grace, how it moves against me and strokes the skin. And the gnarled intricacy of these roots of a mountain ash for my Crown, jeweled in sap and leaves yellow as papyrus. What sovereignty my dreams supply! I am clothed in sky and bough, crowned in arboreal splendor. I laugh softly, let the wind imbibe my voice, the tonality melt into nothing like the wax of a candle-clock.

Lying so I looked up into the wind-braided branches of the dream-tree, its skin brown as the paint-pigment, the pale green of leaves against profound cerulean, the pink shimmer of flowers glinting like voices. They gleamed in the molten light, bright as blood, bright as the Dog-Star in the deep-blue days of summer to come. And slowly I saw, in the interchange of colors, red, green, brown, blue, white, that two of the blossoms were not blossoms, that their shade was not rose but the familiar olive-gold of his eyes, the dream-husband, staring blankly down from the branch, become the season‘s first fruit, snagged on a splinter of rose-tinged wood. Heavy-lidded, still rimmed in the kohl I mixed with my own fingers in red clay pots until the tips became black as cat’s claws. I tenderly darkened his eyes that past dream-morning when he broke into pieces. I ran my fingertip over the fringe of eyelashes, letting my lips brush the iris as I move from eye to eye.

And now I lie under those eyes, against a tree which may or may not be on Mountain‘s flank, on the banks of the reed-jeweled river. I watch dream-crocodiles warming their bellies in the sun, regarding their mates with a fond reptilian eye.

I dreamed I had no trail to follow, that he left no blood-path. The dream-husband, the dream-brother, left me to scramble after him and clutch his body to me like a penance. I wandered, merely wandered, like a caravan-woman, my hair tied up into a crimson veil to keep the smoke-black length off my back. I did not speak, except to the hawks which flew at my shoulders, and they were silent.