Anonyma
Page 8
A dark saber of light swells in the distance. Like cloud rooms on high, all has come back to me, desolate and backwards. The light is weak. It breathes through the treetops, so dark that spirits sip it from the eternal overhead. But in this illusion, I confuse myself. This phantom flirting through the dark woods to retrieve my sisterdaughter. They say there are shadows here, but what of solace and gloom does not haunt forests, or men? I might have known myself as less foolish then, spending more time in the woods pondering heavy thunders, and the gentle flapping of wings. I kneel for a moment in a state of wonder. What men might haunt these woods in spirit?
There is no power in me so plain that I would refuse to cheat the world with my own brand of injustice. Visions are scarce. The heart of them black, painted with light so that no one might see, but is this not the same in the hearts of men and tyrants. I pass through the woods and it is a small treasure. A small delight. A cathedral of prayer and plants, leaves-- but there is a bitterness that grows in the black light, encroaching upon me from every direction. An abysmal mystery. The curse is my side life. I find some hidden desperation exposed and what I present is an authentic face, an authentic body. There are no mountains to poison, no seas to spit in. Only the words in eternity of one chance-- one life --to make art of the dark. I have held these frustrations of mine from childhood. I speak not of such things in company. Have not spoken of them to anyone or anything. The black abyss that is the woods as a splendor of revelation-- in it, I consume myself. From it, this waxing and waning of confusion sweeps. My left hand crosses my chest. I have taken hundreds of steps into the woods. I'm filthy, bloody, gold, unsure of myself. I'm unsure of the path back to the house. Dull gray light groans over the ground. I think of life as a germ--a vague sound washing through the leaves and branches. The hissing of small creatures scurries through the leaves. Might I know some black doom in these branches? The strange voice speaks to me-- approaches without feet. I wonder if I am one of these?
Visions rock me. Swelling, are these voices without bodies. These voices without names. Black sparks shoot through my chest. My eyes are bleeding, and dreadful thoughts run across the daylight. My throat aches, but I do not despair. There will be more sadness, more scarcity in life than this. I must make it home. Growing through the black wilderness, I must untangle my sisterdaughter from the fence, but with a stream of words I have lost myself. It a side effect of passion, or of ignorance. No hope can lead me towards an explanation. Only fear and fever rocks me now.
A tremendous cry trembles by. I cry out myself, but the sound is choked by the nothingness. There is a beauty in the anticipation of emergence-- to be great, or to be told that things are not things. I will know nothing within the woods, and yet it is the only place I must be honest-- complete, without pretension or representation of life. I leave nothing here but breath and sensation-- twilight breaking through the treetops, the fragrance of oak and ash leading down my nose. I shiver at the prospect of fire-- what would be left in such a place after that? I see the magnificence of burning all around, as though it were more than a dream, but how might I dream so vaguely in passing with such violence and desire for destruction? Why, when the sunset is golden, is my sorrow thicker than these dead leaves floating down? I entertain reason by wondering how my sisterdaughter may have dropped herself in such a predicament. I know the full feeling of being a sibling. Of being an older sibling. of being a sisterdaughter. In dark moments, I brought myself down with this awareness. I exist as myself, in power. Not over her, but in duty. Only I could help her in such a predicament, though I wonder why the boy felt himself unable to help her? Perhaps he saw her romantic hair sweeping across the peeling paint, and feared some misunderstanding if he sought to untangle her from her confinement. Is that a halo in the sky? I ask myself and remember the blessings of former years...
My organs swell up with degradation. Between days and words, there was only the contemplation of myself, determined to break the accepted elements of life. I let her know none of this. She perceives very little and we go about our lives in the sacred denial of my most heathen aspects. She is my sisterdaughter. There is no blasphemy that she could learn of that would not break that sacred bond. I anticipate this inevitability-- suppress it. I'm tortured by it, but my imagination gets the better of me in such conditions. There was a vigilance to protect her at all costs, and yet here she is somewhere out beyond the forest, tied by her own most feminine aspect. I wander through the eerie wood as silent as a priest before his master. Hog, my flesh grows scarlet in the frozen air. I imagine a demon with a crown of hair, reaching up to the cosmos.
I step over coals as they burn and blossom as creatures of God and of Satan. I hear an evening bell toll at some great distance, and feel the thrill of human life. The autumnal coldness does not break me. I am not dying. I know the green streams run by me. The silent houses sit on the edge of the world. There is my sisterdaughter, caught up in her predicament. Her soul lingers here and there, beside me. Is stronger than mine. Jagged flashes of light illuminate the trees, and I imagine her footsteps beside me here in the woods. Sick creatures weep, unsure of the darkness around us. I'm sure of the sounds, unsure of the dark silence in me that is so rare. When I feel the slow dripping-- the blossoming of my dark heart-- the solitary depths of womanhood here, would rise as angels. I have been rat, red sun and black fly. My sisterdaughter will never know such things if I should say so. I would protect her from such petrified, frozen hours of life. I hear the music of strings, the wail of dark corpses. I would protect her from the banishment of her childhood at all costs if I could, and drive myself mad in the making. The white knight screams on from the future. I am not yet in the nocturnal grip of the wood. Soft sounds bleed through, my steps grow older, the silence deepens. Black fir trees sway as though moved by giant hands. Blossoms of blue and white crumple underfoot. The dark autumn is tranquil. It is deceiving.
I stumble momentarily, wondering. I hear the rumble of mice, the cold steps of wolves. I touch a frozen finger to my mouth. My heart has always been a black globe, softly fading into nothingness, painted only with the frosting of sweet interactions with my young sisterdaughter. Drunk on wine and derelict imaginings, I find myself sheltering her from me-- the skeleton of my former self. Enamored, enraptured, consumed by the approach death. What is it for a young girl to see someone rotting before her? When she has no one else to protect her? I would rear her up as though she were myself without pain, without memory, but she has horrors of her own, no doubt, even by that age. In the end she will be as dark as me, though tougher. This is the privilege of womanhood-- to be so strong and so densely hidden within that there can be nothing but endurance. There is no pleasure in such a life, or very little of it. I think of her motionless and restricted in her condition. I think of the slowness of my passing through the woods, feel regret-- feel the crumbling of my own dignity, and hurdle myself through the trees. I am exhausted in this old age dream, like scattering wind and leaves, like a monster. She need not my help. Who needs the help of a dark, broken thing?
The great green lamps and the tensions of the village. I return the memory of the woods. Sink deeper into myself, as does the melancholy of pushing further. I lose my patience with this charade. I feel like sobbing through the streets towards the house, imagining her small face close to mine. I am truly mad, am I not? Frightened of myself and this manner of touching and destroying, wishing for wellness, but doing only this. Who could ever think that life could be so inelegant? So demented? My soul undulates in excessive worry. I consider the possibility of possession-- that I have lost my sensitivity in this tainted passage through life. The pain is unimaginable. I will not sleep. I will not eat. I will not read the fables and tales of old as I did. I have no patience for such things. There are labyrinths within me-- layers of decay-- the deepest being so strange, that I might think myself a demon walking on air in a cherry pink hat, in gold dressing, face obscured by rays of interminable color. I salute myself in this absur
dity! For evil in absurdity cannot be so intolerable. I told myself such things in my boldest dreams, melting into spaces of retreat so that I could know myself as horrid, but not to be taken so seriously.
Lamps glow over the cobblestone streets. I am almost to the fence, breathing in the semi-darkness of the village, wondering when the first strand of ginger will shock my senses. My wrinkled lips part in the freezing air. I am-- no doubt-- sick now. Sicker than I was before the passage through the woods. These revelations of truth rush through my body, vandals of truth in a weakened shell. This phenomenal night has drawn me closer to death. I know not how or why passage through the natural-- through wood and ice-- could bring about such thoughts. Light evaporates overhead. The sun-- once a skyless prison of branches-- has become brighter, shielding me from the decay of life. I imagine my parents towering over me, the feeling of disappointment in them. I grow smaller and smaller, more diseased, contemplating the horror of myself, the limitless echo of their words gnashing against me.
I would raise her up so fiercely. There would be precious days of incoherence-- experiments and indecorum. I imagine the highest spirits walking among her. Invisible sentinels circling, evaporating the darkness, lines of energy pulsing, only a method of approach that would bring her closer to this great problem-- mortality.
The deep ache of my condition lingers. I am married to an inverted blessing. I cannot finish these contemplations. For a second, I dream of a wind that carries me up off of the ground and into the air, summoned by byrds. Emotions calls out, hideous and unmistakably human. I expect no less from my imagination. I am a shape on an edgeless globe. There is no feature so absolute that I cannot be wiped away by wind or light or fire or grain. I remember my father walking and groaning as he would pass by me, powerful and distressed. I became smaller and smaller, shrinking away into the nothingness of any room. So small that he could crush me with a single footstep.
I am incoherent. The wind rocks me. I am frozen, barefoot somehow-- scrapes beneath my feet bleed. I imagine an empty winter coming towards me. I recognize the horror of life coming, coming. I flutter my eyelashes. I grimace. I tremble. I find her there because I want to find her there. Eyes settle upon something impossible. Immersed in the vulgarities of life, I wave on to an invisible water--a bodiless voice who knows me in the woods. I grew up in the darkness. The handle of my door remained locked and I sat in fear of self-understanding. I have added another night to this contemplation of death. The sky bleeds into me, thoughts I cannot handle. I will be vigilant. I will sink into the white streaks of imagination, mist hanging over me. I swallow hard before the house, as I did in the wood.
I've come to the fence. She is not there. She is not anywhere. Sisterdaughter in my heart, so sacred that I might forget you were never there.
Will I ever have a sister?
daughter
daughter
daughter
daughter
daughter daughter
XVII.
The pillar-- an obelisk-- is composed of fragile teal particles, like salt from the sea of Ameeir. A seductive sight, I am absorbed into the gloom of the city square. Passersby ignore the structure. Embracing the silent hell of impatience, I stagger back, without expectation. There are things I must know and must learn, but without course or company, I blink at the silence of the evening. Unease flavors the dusk, as the city intends. Cursing quietly, an assault against myself, I almost miss the tendrils of black ink, painting the sky in words without meaning, without audience. A familiar spasm brings me to the ground. I remember mother most in moments such as these. Attentive and clear, ever-present, ever-near.
An inhuman bell tolls loudly from the tower down the fourth of nine streets. Children in colorless cloaks run-- a stampede of anticipation-- towards the fountain. They drop their garb against the cobblestones, crawling over the barrier and into the water. There are smiles and eyes swelling with sweetness, a momentary reprieve from the infinite tragic cosmos. I do not envy them their fun. Not entirely. Only mourn the absence of such experience, unsure if it was taken by the world outside or the world within.
Their features tell a tale of expectation. I watch in wonder as their skin turns to a faint shade of blue. A shade I recognize without hesitation. It is that of Von Aurovitch’s blue lady.
This new dance would clear my head of the violent attention. I disrobe slowly, allowing myself a careful existence before the onslaught. A dark scent refreshes me. I am in everybody’s eyes under the celestial stillness.
Feeling the warmth of my own frailty, I lose myself in shimmering light. A Sabbath of gloss and mistaken genius slides away.
Pink clouds weigh down my eyelids. At the zenith of self-reflection, I keep one hand on my stomach and one free. The panorama gives nothing but slime. Caught in a fright under dripping skies, I come to remember the sea as nothing, as everything, as magnificent and meaningless as myself. A shroud of velvet rustles in a distant corner. I dream the fool’s dream of him being there.
Creatures of artifice, unhealthy bodies! I swell up in muteness. Eyes wander to the darker mysteries of the slime-sea gathering. I am reminded of my favorite tree—a willow, afflicted often by the suffocation of a cold breeze. Determined and calm, I know it is time to leave. The horizon is painted pink and gold. I forget the fluids of vanity and wallow in the rays.
The final version of myself will be a contradiction, caught in safe and deadly air.
▼
I hold my hands still. The slime, the wetness—it is all familiar, but not so frightening as home. To which I speak, the passion of organs—there is more monstrosity there, in the limbs of men, than in the most primitive of beasts here. The horror lies in the illusion of evolution. That these things have evaporated from the forefront of thought as necessary, but as elements permissible of neglect. They are not.
A dance of light streams in every direction. At times, transparent sprouts pop out of my unkempt hair. Unordinary colors painted magic worlds. I awake on a white marble slab on a dizzy afternoon. Shaking my head, I find my tongue tangled with sweetness.
The horizon appeared as fluff and brittle vapor.
I tiptoe over a pale stream of moisture. He is difficult, I think. I was unprepared. A scent of dust and cherries fell from the labyrinthine pink pools.
Desperation grips my soul, calmed only by skies of grey. My face bloats with attempts at cognitive diplomacy.
Damnable spirits roar from the blue swamp. The atmosphere keeps them quiet. Contained. But not without her thriving entirety, bursting through. The horrid history of the marsh doesn’t lend itself towards light-hearted creatures. I have found Autura here, unshackled and alone. Not yet dispersed. I ask her why they have allowed her to live. She does not answer.
An ancient love fills her cup with white blood. The night sky opens, flickering violent rays and swallowing stars. A swarm of silence brings fatality to within arm’s length. She waits in a madness of serpents. She calls out to the birds of earth, who hear slight pang of other worlds. A shiver or ache in the wing.
Why do I hold my heart against her? Why might she lower her head in thought? In spite of all, she faces me-- her gold dress flowering, blooming, crossing in front of her in the dark. The light lifts from the horizon. My head splits. My cynicism blossoms to a point of sharpness so intense that a white flare scares my thoughts. I am clumsier than she. Darker. There is too much ambition inside of me, and I wonder how I might be free from such a thing in this body. My mind rises. Convulsions rock my limbs. I remember her undulations-- the softness of her movement. Count on me, darling girl, she says.
The world is ruled by sleep. I swallow pink drops-- the powder of the skies. There is grace in her speech. She reaches out and pulls my hair away from my face. I am not as pale as she. My lips are not as full. My cheekbones not as high. My heart not as white. I detach myself from this madness, fearing that I might harm her more that I should. That she may suffer as freely as I had alone in the woods. Where did she come
from? Where has she truly been before all of this? I try to embrace the calm that is looking into a face that knows the universe-- that knows me. We are surrounded by flowers and traveling light. She speaks and I listen attentively, concentrating on her mouth-- on the sound of her voice. Her generosity. Her intelligence. My reactions are slow and contained.
She is as I may have been, had I not been ill. Had I not been broken. Had I not been touched by the darkness of love. But in this, I fool myself. She has met with the same heart, the same body. He appeared in her vicinity as festive and as empty as in mine. Her forehead flushes with fever and I know that she has been touched by the yellow illness of the Afterworld. She will sink into the flat earth, beneath serpents, beneath blood, beneath the grey fabric of this doom.
What do they want of her? Clouds move in over the garden. Her body rocks forward and backward. Her silence cuts open the sky, cloud trails of black and white gold flowers sprouting up. They think I will bring them the new slime. My blindness is boundless. I answer, not wanting to admit to myself the bond between us. I will choke back these regrets. There is enough hurt in her and helplessness in me to preserve the moment of grace. They want to pull me through the black forest, she says-- the wood so unlike the others. One hundred dreams of hard work cannot match the menace of those woods. I remember my ancestry. She reminds me of her. I remember mother, dark galaxies of thought within her hair.
What will you do, I ask her, in dread of a danse macabre-- a last display of beauty before death.
I will tear out this tired resentment within me. Retrieve my soul from the torment of the stone room-- a place in my heart of scarlet injury. Music sounds only in memory of love and dark ecstasy. I will save myself, and know myself as you see me.