Are we shades not webs woven of night marauding webs senseless only the presence of water soothes rock blood remembers flesh hot blood above all the tongue thirsts for thickens on leechlike O the flood utterance a shade and a lifelike speech in visible form
Where I go, fire goes, blood bright on the stone, that I nurse to me like a newborn at the breast. By my light they know me as I come licking. They see me. They hear the flutter of burning, the wings of fire. The walls burn like daybreak from a long way off. They cringe away, those shades, like the winged and clawed cave bats hugging the walls. But the bats hunt, swoop and grab in their greed for blood, and the shades never. I hear the scrape of their passing, their huddle and twitch. Who are they? They neither know nor care. She is not with them. She is looking for the mother who never left her side a single day until she handed her over at the black ships
She lost a daughter, the great goddess, the greatest, if the tales are true, and she sought her as I do with two firebrands, a flame folded up like a leaf spider in two great fennel stalks, immortal fire, and she found her in the end underground found her I walk that path fire in my own hands one for grief one hope
What of the wedding dress she wore to go under the knife? It bloomed dark red. We who spun and wove it for her, we women of the royal charnel house, we with our own hands stitched her shroud
In her bride bath she lay on the last day of her girlhood safe in her father’s house. The marble was robed in the firelight and her body no less white in its folds of shadow, the last bath of her life and no bride bed to follow. Was his place of death unfitting? What mother brings a child into the light of day only for its father to send it screaming back into the dark? Her own bride bath would avenge her
The god of gods raped her grandmother astride the waters. For her the priest’s knife in her silken throat. What a descent was this. How did the gods allow it?
What have you done to her?
She is with the gods.
So they bury us now, do they, the gods?
Stop your mouth, woman. How dare you insult the gods.
Gods. Answer me.
Silence?
Do you shriek for us? Claw out your hair, your flesh, for us?
Woman, you will pay for this.
I have paid. I am empty-handed
(until next we meet and I wield the double axe)
On a rock by a pool of unseen water I wait. My firebrands seep light into the walls above and below the surface they lift out wavering nets of light where I sink my feet. A bath in a nest of rock, a river hollow. So we sat in summer with the women and children of our house on the riverbank under the trees. With the city afire with summer, the sun afire on the rock wall, the bone-dry citadel, amber of heat reflecting in and catching us like bees in the furry glow of midsummer, when the river was too far to go, and the slaves filled the bath instead and we took off our clothes and waded, wallowed, all white limbs and loose black hair, my children and I and our nurse, until the light was gone and it grew cold under the stars
Light draws me as it drew you who are fallen here caught in my own toils as I am myself. Have no fear. What is a shape of air to you, or the fiery tongues lighting my way? What am I? A nothing. Through your outflung hand, see the bones flare. And see, you are not burnt. Or do I alone see? Few of the living find their way here and fewer leave. Let me save you and light your way. All I want in return is for you to look for her to tell her I look for her always forever, or you shall rest no more than I do, ancient and helpless as I am, and bereft. Have you no pity? Why do you shrink from me who am your last hope? Among a thousand mouths of darkness I alone know a way out. But it takes
visions memories
blood not of my spilling
one lick one thread
sets free
I alone know light lick and live for a time flames flow shred tatter cling a fume of darkness am made on hollow air I am an image on the folded skin of a lake a pool a bath a dark womb I speak out of I am the labyrinth of myself
A trickle loud in the hollows not as near as it sounds, a pool of light, of reels and spools of broken shadow – bubbles cluster and float and the water flows cool, sweet, stony water
How he gloried in the fall of a city in blood and fire and I in the fall, blood fall, downfall of him who felled it. Not since he embarked had I set eyes on him and nothing had changed. A bag of wind, a hero, firstborn of a house of shame, who sold his own virgin daughter for the sake of rape and pillage and took a virgin daughter of that ruined city for his whore and ruined her. What did he have to pay? A nothing, a mere daughter. That other he brought home safe on a black ship through seas whipped high by the same wind that barred his passage once. I made short work of them
My brands kindle embers deep in the rock. They smear a red glaze on wall beyond wall, they kindle an army of shadows
Their life has all leaked out. They are dust, a grey fume. Only I keep watch. Fury drives me, the call of blood to blood
From the tongue of the snake flows wisdom and yet all who are alive fear snakes. They lift their heads as we pass. The air flickers with tongues. Honey and fire flow from me, blood and water into light
A stone world, bloodstone and greenstone, crystal, limestone, palaces
Membranes and fronds of banded rock, eyes and hands of rock, spindles, ribs, waxen tapers, speckling growing always dripping stilling, distilling
Over and over I live the dance of flesh and shadow as my arms rise, fall, rise and fall on flesh and shadow and web and spurting blade
You fear me? I mean you no harm. On the rock face a spider is groping in a swill of light, huge, black, and a ruby spider slung in its net has taken fright and run off to hide. Little one it was your shadow you saw. So it is with you lying here cringing, when you should know me for a shadow, a flaw in the light, no more, a crease in the flame, helpless, a shade
I less than the spider casting no shadow I am the shadow’s self
We shades we take and lose shape, endlessly frilling and spooling, looping, smoke veils, ribbons of flame in the gloom, heads swimming, jellyfish, ruffling, porous, supple, now shining, now vanishing, sifted and winnowed in the tides of the wind until they abate and we are lulled asleep. We move as the tides of breath move us flowing free through the skin of the world, cave breath, earth breath, stone breath. What do you see? A power of speech. A tongue crying out, a mirage of flame. What hear? Hush
I hold sway here the dead speak in whispers the shuffle of long echoes this web of mystery I will unweave
Thinking to find her waiting by the river of the dead and when her brother slashed me to the heart thinking only now my daughter hold you to my cloven breast mingle with yours my heart’s blood where are you seeking me? not give way to grief I will not I am grief’s body and its shade and did the holy mother of the earth not die in her heart each time her child shrank back underground? For her we would make our halls an oven with the roasting of wholegrain and honey as if she were alive thin air starving never for her the food of the dead
Bellying of the silk mantle, crimsoning of the water, as the octopus flailing puffs up and fills the water with her darkness, as did he, black and soft as her ink comes the flow of blood in the firelight and I swelling, a leech fastened two can play
The black ships carried home our few living and left the ashes of the towers and a multitude to moulder away to dust. Grain by grain, the great corpse, the earth revives, transfiguring herself, only ever herself
I am she who weaves her way mourning graven on the air of the dead city she and her net in a blaze of blood her fire held high a shade flying fire in her hands she cannot get out
and underground cisterns in the darkness a hissing and a coiling
a face of gold hanging a discus in the humming air who? my shadow I see snake over and under rock underwater
web, rather than net the living thread or if no longer living spun from the living body as a child is at birth suspended from the twisted double thread
the plains baked to a crazed platter the mountain raw
men I have lain with as they gave up the blood the breath and the shade and the skin dried on their bones
the rushing of rain and wind and a crackle of thunder sounds in the earth’s depths I hear I must fall back abyss gloom I who desire the oven alight and singing the beehive of fire and bread
In the cave air I am the shiver and sigh as invisible as this water in pools and lakes and rivers of invisibility, as invisible as the air as I follow my lanterns. I am not cold but fiery, a pool that a hand or foot might dip into and not feel, a pool at blood heat, adrift and alive in air, deep enough to drown in. What your eye cannot see may see you. You have a pool nearby to slake your thirst and a path up into the living light, a pool of deep water embedded in rock like the bath I had once and not so far to go
I seek a name no name flesh and a fate laid on me not of my making I lost a child what was she called? I what was I? I know mother child nurse son husband father sister O yes O daughter
O fluent blood, fire that is blood to infuse us and loosen us, free us as long ago the crimson wine did, for as long as it lasts, and if dry blood is better than none, even stone blood, fresh flowing blood is what the tongue fattens on
When there is stone there is more stone. When I draw blood in the stone, the finest thread, then my eyes open out of long sleep into the worlds of light. The blood hidden in stone, woven, interwoven, is my lifeline, my thread of rebirth
Wanderings of the mind, the slithering in the cave, the scrape and flutter in the tunnel, one great glowing tube of dark breath and vacancy, a tongue as rough as a cat’s on my skin burning into the flesh, licking and sucking, lapping
Woman, go back to your loom, they said. The matter is out of your hands. And he: Hold your tongue, woman. War is men’s work. Yours to make, ours to unmake
Ours to make flesh and blood. I did as I was told and sat down to my loom. The web I made there no man would unmake
How many of the dead of the city did he leave to burn or shrivel in the dust unburied, carrion for the crows to jab as here they jab into ripe figs, and pomegranate, tearing out gobbets of red seed? And for this deed did he deserve full burial? He who swaggered the shrine of the god at the gate on to the red carpet, unclean. Or could he do no wrong?
Sated, afterwards how we lay on our rocky peak, my goatman and I, and let the sun rise on us and the moon. How we swallowed the harvest wine and fed each other on pomegranates and figs, clawed chestnuts from the fire for their charred brains and sucked our fingers. With honey, meal and oil we fed the dead, as if they hungered, only not him, not the high king, and the wine we poured on the tombs burned rust into the stone. We lay together in the royal bath and bed, white flesh and brown, woman and man, umbilical
I come across a living man
and my hair swings in a flood
over his face and neck engulfing him
cold he may be
and hot-blooded still at the core
my mouth seeks the spot
where the cords of the neck
are shallow my lips force
from his throat
a scream of recognition
his shudders shake me
his blood fills my mouth and his seed
my other mouth and drinking
deep I take shape
aghast, he stares, cowering
his eyes aswill like egg white
in the fire of my torches
never fear
living flesh may take its fill of blood
all the dead take is one sip
I rule in the citadel while the king makes war, with my lover who is of his blood and has a blood debt of his own, and shares bed and board and vengeance with me and will mix his blood with mine on the flagstones, two slashes of the one blade, my son’s blade, last of a line of murderers that he was, steeped in hate, born knowing what a man’s job is. A father’s son
I am the slung spider, the serpent coiling uncoiling, the octopus swollen up in a flow in a blood red spurt, slit eyes slipping in ravelled ink and a hawk’s beak. I am the net and the blade in the dark on the nape of the neck
These caves and halls, the earth’s hollows, where hands, bare hands, flare out of a red mist, they swallow women too, corpses gone to shades, throats gashed agape, like my darling, dead, thrown down, a man’s doing, all to be fused and bedded in this graveyard
I am eyes of fire and tongue of blood. I hold my burning fennel stalks, goddess-given, or am I she, one in each hand aflame as I walk in her wake in her shadow
who killed the king?
I said the double axe
I said the web woven of silence
I said the bathwater
I said the rival
I said the lyre
I said I
I, O my people, said I, behold what monster of the deep have we trawled up here. Murder, they bawled. Treachery. And the sweeter for it, said I. Was it not treachery, when he wormed his way into the wooden belly of a horse and won to his glory what he never could by force of arms, he who was outmatched in all but treachery? What, not treachery, when he laid hands on his daughter in her wedding clothes and fed her to the gods? Not treachery when his young son avenged him with a swordthrust to the breast that gave him milk? Like father like son, said I, in a house of treachery awash in its own blood you all appease him truckle to him follow him butcher your daughters go on or does it take a king for such deeds of valour? O father what a name to be reckoned with is father
I bring her into the world like me a firstborn girl in a bath of blood this marble bath of mine and lay her dripping on my breast bound to me belly to womb with a braid of living blood and that is all my doing
Bring her to the ships, wife, he writes, got up as a bride fit for a hero of heroes and waste no time about it. And so as a bride I bring her to him, fool that I am. At her father’s bidding, but her mother has had a hand in it, as a bride she goes under the knife. And that is men’s work for you, all his all all his doing you be the judge
o they hammered him out a face fit for a god in his immortality did the goldsmiths of the high king a death mask a golden muzzle to hold the dead in the truth of murder in a mass of sludge busy with worms ants empty eyes a pelt of rot all over so little gold it takes to sanctify
You two are the firstborn, the daughters of your mother the queen, our old nurse crooned at bedtime, combing our hair, and of none other than the god of gods. From on high he saw her bathing naked and smooth as the swans in the reeds, and he sailed in ablaze and his wings thrashed the water as he trod her and as thunder and lightning he enfolded and went into her and lifted off and soared up outspread, high in the sky above his prey. Sunk hot and cold in a fever she was by the time help reached her, torn open, shuddering, raving in rapture in agony about a swan burning the air where no swan was. Praying for death she took to her bed as her belly rose up and swelled day after day until, screaming, she pushed out one great egg and then another and even your father the king had to take her word for it then. You hatched first, my golden ones, said our nurse, who was our mother’s old nurse, you and your sister cupped in the half shell, squalling, and I put you to the breast. And your brothers hatched and the tale of how you four came into the world was sung to the lyre in the great hall of the citadel on the holy days
Seers, augurs, oracles, necromancers, liars of priests fattening on treachery, butchery, the baked meats of the altar stone, if there be gods and goddesses prowling here like jackals after flesh and blood I never saw any, nor did you, on or under the earth, nor shall we though all life be welded fast in the fires of the bedrock. If a god rules here, with a bride who had a mother once, who lost her, why do they not hold out their hands to me and my lost child, who are as they are, close kin of the most high god? As flesh and as shade are we not woven on the one vast loom? Why am I alone cast out? Or is she too stranded beyond the farthest reach of the gods, beyond hope and despair?
bitter is our life in the fl
esh and sweet feel me how soft I am and pliant I am not here to harm but save you so hairy so rank you are O the red wine charred goatmeat chestnuts apples alight in honey O earthmist leafmould one bite on your throat lips mushroom stalk flesh two withered pouches smeared thighs O blood O rape of innocence what have they done to you? And I unknowing barred my way get back to your women’s work what was she if not my women’s work?
Who would have thought? No seer soothsaying at his shoulder then, no oracle or high priest or god in any shape or form, none but a whore at his side to fling in my face, a madwoman no less, bought with a daughter’s blood. O fit reward. He who spanned the sea dolphin-like day and night in the salt spray, the high king of the black fleet, he who sped over the sea on an ill wind and left the enemy weltering in blood in towers of fire, he of all people, defying the gods, to be struck down in the bosom of his bath O infamy
is it the time of death grasp this alive you are not dead drums your heart drums saying hah hard to die the threshold the light falls
I grasp you astraddle. I clamp down as you shudder awake and the air stirs gold dust over us. You alone have breath and a heartbeat, who will be down to the bare bone in no time. One more streak of parchment glued to a spine, one more shade fled into the dark and a quick end to the wake. Sniff the stir, the red crack, the slit of day in this rock and take heart, you who are some woman’s son, father, lover up there, and she tearing her flesh day and night in grief. The shades flock as thick as the stars and not one that does not envy you even as you are starved, parched, blind, bled dry
so sip this water
a mother to you
as yours to me
and I say live on
night is falling
up that one last
back to life
over the earth
my lost one
as long as
and here below
This Water Page 15