Myths of Origin (24 page)

It is the dark, earthy taste of persimmons and the fire-orange of their skin.

It is the sound of herons washing downstream, the sound of their blue feathers rubbing together like cricket’s legs.

It is the song of the plovers in the scented trees.

It is the shade of the pagoda at noon, the shapes that its shape casts on the earth.

It is the thick-dropped rain playing in the mud.

It is in bare feet that tunnel in loose soil, and the hum of cicadas which is like monks repeating their syllable endlessly into the hot nights.

But it is easily disturbed.

White Dew Descends

I dream that this time it is a girl. She comes to trade her water-jars in the great market, and indeed, they are skillfully shaped, with elegant spouts and handles that curve backwards like the necks of water-birds.

It is all the same to me whether her hair is the color of a burned oak or of the fire that burned it. But like all my postulants, she is beautiful. She smells of alfalfa and licorice. I feel a question-bead slide down the strand, and its passing sounds a baritone note, deep and wide as a bell.

“Monster,” she speaks first, which is unheard of, not
done
—“may I ask you a question first?”

I dream that I consider it. Of course, it merely prolongs the ritual. But she is lovely, and it will not save her, so there is no harm. I nod my golden head, and the sand-choked curls of my mane tumble forward.

“What walks on four legs in the morning, six in the afternoon, and none in the evening?”

My dream-laughter fills the desert and I am sorry for a moment that I will have to devour her. I want to caress her cheek instead, and feed her from my own mouth, as if she were my cub.

“Why, I do, child. For in infancy I walk on my four paws, in maturity I add my two wings to this, and in old age I creep on my belly and use none of these. That was a good riddle, girl. I shall remember it.”

Disappointment rakes it fingers across her face. I can see that this was her plan, to win her entrance by becoming herself the monster, and reversing the natural order. But such plans are not to be. The face of the coin cannot be its reverse. I am to far beneath the earth to be troubled by such small movements.

“And now for mine,” I intone, in my richest voice. The girl squares her feet as though she is to recite a verse, and shakes her hair like a broom tangled in cobwebs. “If
n
is a whole number greater than 2, prove for me that there are no whole numbers a, b, c such that an + bn = cn ?”

I dream that my smile is fat and sated, knowing she cannot answer and that the sweet smell of her skin will soon be inside me.

The girl’s eyes fill with prismatic tears. She understands. Any answer she might make would be a fantasy of foolishness. And instead of stuttering a guess, she simply walks to me, puts her tiny hand on my flank, moving her fingers in the thick fur with a thoughtful grace.

The dream-girl lies down beneath me, willingly, and exposes her white throat to my mouth. Her tears slide off of her cheeks and onto the dry sand, onto the strands of her hair.

I dream that I weep as I swallow her.

The Evening Cricket Chirps

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 delicate 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.

I do not know where she comes from, the crone that sneaks into the house and steals girlhood away.

Hurriedly, the boy lays out his gifts on the damp grass: a sack of new rice, tea leaves folded into a blue cloth, a pouch containing dried lentils and a chunk of pork fat. It was a treasure—each year the gifts were better, and within my Ayako-heart I was happy, for I knew this meant my old home prospered.

I called after the boy as he turned his feet to run—but not too fast, lest the ghost be angered—back to the village.

“Wait, Boy,” I rasped. This time, I was sure, I knew the way to trap the dream of the clean-finger nailed child and make him stay. He would help me take down the timbers of my solitude. “Let me tell you a lesson about the Mountain.”

He paused. The young can rarely resist a lesson. They pretend to loathe them, but in their secret hearts a good lesson is sweeter to them than winter cakes. He looked back to me and whispered, his voice full of terror, “All . . . all right.”

I crept up to him, the first human I had spoken to since the men with the iron clothes burned the village. “What you see is not Mountain. It is the dream that Mountain dreams.”

The boy squinted skeptically in the late afternoon sun, which rumbled a pleasant orange-gold.

“Are you the Old Woman on the Mountain or the dream that she dreams?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, young one. I am old, and I live on the Mountain, so it is possible that I am she. I possess three floors of a pagoda and a bean patch. What do you possess?”

“A colt, which will one day be a horse,” the boy replied, “and a black rooster with yellow eyes. The rest belongs to my father and will be mine when I am grown. But why do you possess only three floors?”

“I am too weak to reach the top,” I admitted, ashamed again for the bulging veins and jaundiced fingernails I also possessed.

“Then why not just try for the fourth? Four is more than three. Perhaps then your guess will be better. My father teaches that the more a man possesses, the wiser he is.”

I laughed quietly, and the chuckle was a hoarse and empty one. “Then your father must be very wise.”

The boy looked strangely at me and I saw his heart decide to speak no more. He bowed and retreated down the Mountain, with the sun on his back. I did not have the heart to try to stop him again.

Swallows Return

Into the belly of the sun, my eyes burn to white oil and threads of flame spin down to the earth. I dream that my hunger gnashes its own heart, searching for a city as beautiful as a tinderbox, a city to lie over and sigh into its towers.

I dream that the autumn has passed while I danced in the laps of a dozen mountains, throwing my hands through their rooftops. In the fire-dream, all things burn under me, and the scorching of all things smells sweet.

On the horizon, I can see a great wall. It is a hundred shades of gold and its gate is strong. A wide plain stretches before it that might have once been green, but pitched battles have stained it red and black. It is a city by the sea, dark as wine, and sleek black ships line its harbor like suitors. Warriors are pressing against the wall, a bronze wave breaking on stone. Its towers are coquettish and tall, slim as girls, beckoning.

I can smell incense burning desperately in temples, I can smell terror-sweat in seven hundred bedrooms. I can hear the dull thud of marching men, and the squall of the dying. I can hear women weeping, and the rustle of their dresses on marble floors. The great wall whispers that it would welcome me, that it would show me new pleasures of which I had not yet had the courage to dream.

I feel my mouth water, and drops of oily flame begin to fall from my body.

Soon.

Flocks of Birds Gather Grain

This time I spent an hour stuck between the third and fourth levels, limbs splayed like some distended, helpless spider. There were no more footholds at that height and the distance between floors had seemed only to grow. Excruciatingly I inched sideways, my hips aching, to a thick vine that hung against the wall.