The Lady and the Spring

     He woke to the sound of her feet on pine needles, or a sound before that, fallen upon him sleeping, and gone now as if not existed, a thing in her alone, a greeting perhaps, a word or a cough, something she alone could know as he woke, stirring, standing, and soon awake, where before what were her words had woken him as a spell, to bring him back to this place, their place, the waking world.

     And he, in the first of the day, cold, shirtless, unguarded and numb from the magic wound of that same sleep, rose to see her there in the red of her clothing and the black of her sword that she carried in word filled silence where she stood, not settling the rope which held the sac and the things in it that she would, with him, bring to the spring high in the hills today, with Him, on their path, their journey, now in the blessing of their visible breath and dawns warning, headed now to where a way would be found, into that mountain, and where without those words, they both must go.

     She stood as a gift, and a warning.  Come as a storm displaced bird, or a deer from those crowded woods higher up, were it not for her calm and capable face, the hair brown, long and wound with red linen, her travel worn clothes, her skirt as if made from the earths gifts itself and her bare feet dressed in old paints and the new brown of these good low lands.  Seeing her there and he just awoken, he was back in the pains of the histories of days and years and times that live now only in the scars that cross his legs and back.  For there is a courage that arises in weakness only, born when the failure of the sword of night is revealed in the strength of some greater sword, the will of the day, not here, but coming, as a threat of death, even his death, is on its way, and near, and the almost lost, and the nearly defeated, and the weak beyond repair, and even the broken, find that thing that is repair, amelioration from a deeper wound; the fear of night, and what night is, and what night brings, and for a word, it is healing. 

     He followed her, and in it they walked, as though on new feet, though a flood of the old worlds demons worked slowly from them, down from drowning, to the touch of foot on stone where no stone thought could be, to where he was now, behind her in the failing dark, sewn with morning and that mornings light with that old darkness moving down to his waist, his knees and some strength returned, until that boot that had rested on his neck for the stones in his hands, was the damp earth now alone, as he walked past with as much love as he was able to hold for a world, following after her.  On they walked resting only when that failure of fear became the victory of some greater thing, a new courage or forgetfulness, a tardiness of vows, a work rested from too soon, and now too bright to see clearly and too warm to be real in this cold womb become their dawn.  A gift beyond the imagining of sleep is the sun on dew chilled skin.  And the world of things that woke also, standing, they too brought through what to him was a great and natural evil, and they without feet to flee a storm had been washed over by it, emerging with him, on standing feet, past and through the horror of darkness to live again, and he saw the world this way. 

     On a clearer place, some ways up the lower parts of the mountain that held the spring, she stopped them, and with small efforts a fire lit and a small pot boiled, and in it was placed a bag, tied tight with string, of herbs, of powders and soon, there was a tea.  And with it and her hand, his shaking stopped, and that dark blanket that was his wound so cruelly lain in him, was for that time, lifted away as a pain can be lifted away, and a deep rest filled him, and his breath slowed, deepened, and his shoulders fell, and his voice now able to be spoken thanked her.

     The scars on his back hurt now in some strange trade between pain and suffering.  The gourd looked warm in her hands, an offering, hers to him and for drinking it, him to himself.  A supplication.  The medicine calmed him from those things and sat him on an older stone, there at the small fire beside her. 

     We go to the weep and the well, he said to her, as if woken at last, as if the hour they had walked and all the time that had flowed between them since she woke him up, was also a part of that dream.

She nodded and smiled to herself, though he saw it.

     I don’t deserve this, he said and waited for her to see him.  She nodded and said that She did not deserve this, that everything was a gift in a way that made him, for a moment, grateful, even for the tears he now cried, impossibly.  I mean that it is wasted on Me, he continued.  She paused, relaxed, and said that, It was not wasted, if She did not waste it.  It is only wasted if You waste it, she said again, and rose pouring the warmed water on the bare earth, moving other earth over the embers and looked at him and placed her hand on his shoulder, and saw his grief.

     At the weep she knelt.  The words she said he could not hear.  He rested by a tree grown white with the vapors of that place for being there, and he thought of how the sun could stain a thing and how life giving waters could drown, and remembered how the torches back then had crazed the light across the hay wild field, where he had stood with others, tried to stand, stronger and weaker for as many reasons as there were men.  The weight of his regret was all that was left to stand with him now.  That fear had melted away with time, and in its place a sadness and a love came, and filled up every scar and hole the fear of that night had wrought.  Heavier was the sadness then the whole terror of night, and though his pain alone might take the horns from the demons and fold and put away their wings.  If there was only one place, one real place, one place where he truly was, it was there, always, the memory of the field, that field, that night, when his failure to save, to try to save, to offer his own life up, to take another, all those decision’s who’s agency he felt divorced from by time now, and fate or possibility then, had found their only way to live on, to live in him.  Pain. 

     At the spring, high in the mountain, from under the those living white shingles of the tree, he could see her arms raised, the smoke from incense rising and swirling into the mist, the power of that place awaking to her, and then without climax, without a booming voice or show of form, she rose, turned and came down to him and brought him the water and painted his face with glowing loam, and said the words.  And he closed his eyes, and he healed.

     There is a spirit of the air, she said as he traced her steps slowly backwards around him.  And she loves a spirit of the water, but time passes and the things that do not stay the same will change.  He loves her and keeps her there inside this mountain.  His love is a love of holding, hiding and resting.  When he sleeps, she begins to forget that love, and she, in the silence of dark caves, begins to return to herself, and who she was, a queen of winds and airs, a confounder of treetops, a thief of kites, a maiden of ice covered peaks.  Though she is now a wind inside water, she was herself once, a wave of only air, alone, and though he drinks her now, he cannot swallow, and his love of her makes many selves out of the one, and those shatters of her immortal soul, shiver and rise through his depths, and up they run through the smallest cracks in the stone, to finally burst the surface of this spring of his forgetting, to leap into the air, a leave his spring, and meet with the sky again, and though they yearn and lean into the remembered winds, the greater winds break them, and take them in, and they are devoured, even the smallest of faces, and they are lost and are gone.  She stops to breath, her hand still on his chest.  He creaks inside as though he himself stretched up into the wind and was bent by it.  He thought she cried but not all pains can bloom, and may drown by their weight of themselves, lost within a heart that is too frail to feel them completely.

     She continued.  Deep below, he wakes, and before she herself is able to rise and escape, he loves her, and holds her and in loving drowns her again.  And she drowns, in him, until she remembers him, and her love for him, and in him rests again, and on and on again until in time, again, he sleeps, and she, a thing of air left alone in a world without it, walks, then wonders, and in his long sleep, begins to forget she is loved.

     Did you heal me, he asked.  She stops her slow tracing of a circle around him and turns to him.  His voice is deeper, his face somber, and no longer tortured, and a fatigue lays on him like knowing.

I did not heal you, she said, and her face betrayed her surprise that he did not know it.  It is the water that heals, and the prince of that spring that healed you.  But I heard you make your offering to the air, he said, as his arms chilled and leaves scintillated and shivered in a breeze now cold, as though the spirit of wind was loosed, and her domain was there above him now, and he held a gift that was taken from her without blessing.  A warning rose in him.  I would not stir the lover of the healing waters, she said.  We take but what is spilled, to be well again, is a symptom of his grace.  The gift I gave was for the queen of air, trapped by her love and by her lover.  Her lovers home and her prison is to forget, trespassed by my feet.  We take the cup, and drink from it to avoid her wrath, and we praise her beauty.  She leaned against him as though he could not fall.  His head was spinning, her hand, a wonder,came upon him again.  We kneel at her thrown to worship and to despair, she said, then began to walk away. 

     I don’t understand, he said.  She smiled, and turned back to him, putting her arms around him, and bark for skin he knew, seeing her tears, he knew how her sword was the world, the journey was a hope, and as all words are, they were not meant for him.  And standing he fell inside though standing still as a tree, he saw her, saw how he was, who he was, how he was there, still, standing, and how he never left, how he had grown there, a tree, and how she did not pass by but came to him, and for her hand and her smile and her words, he was for that time, that short time, a man, and she with some great sadness only he might for a moment take away, for being there, and who he was, and the beauty she saw in him, and his sadness, alone now for too many years, the last in what was now a clearing, at the foot of where, she had made her way past him, upward, alone, and to that ancient spring.  And she sang there with her eyes closed, crying, on her knees by the tree who might have been a man if love could have lasted long enough, and if the sun was bright enough and the water strong enough and if the queen of air had been released and had reached down and pulled him into the world as a man, as he longed for as he pray to the prince of the waters for, as her voice longed for and he stood there, still as that stone, and he listened forever, to her, to her voice to her singing to that song, and he came home. 

Who can love what I can love

Who can say what I have seen

Who can sleep within his arms

Who can be where I have been

Who can hold him only I

who wept and fought and died

Who can fear him only I

who loved and lived then said goodbye

Who can tell me where I’ve been

and will they wonder why

Below the ground I live with him

though all I am is sky

Nowhere To Go and The Cave of the Old Offering

You were standing below me somehow, on the bent'ness of the falling stones, no longer falling, but reclined in a descent that must take years for them, to reach the egress of yearning, to requite the love of that slow strong arm of the deeper earth, pulling always, down, down, down. 

 And while with some effort, you retied your shoe, and repacked your bag after retrieving some article of comfort from it, I stood a little higher up, closer to the entry to the cave, frozen by it, and I could not enter.

The weight of its dark mouth, the terror of the nearness of that roof of stone piled so impossibly high and stung by an opening that would have otherwise been hidden by the rush and force of falling waters, I stood, with that cold curtain gone now, and that river that hung it long ago dried, diverted or just stopped from being altogether.  It was just a trail up to a cave now that you and I ended by reaching it, a bit of cliff, and hole beneath it.  The inside of it terrifies me, like death, like suffocation, and I am the one that wanted to come.

I stand as I always have now, at its mouth, at the beginning, having my guts pulled from me and thrown by those forces into the whirling wind, into the void of the cave, into some other world beginning here, inside of myself, and going where on such a pitiless wind?

I am just standing there.

I try to look around, look for old handholds for what must have been a hard climb when this was a river, worlds of time ago.  What could still be seen?  What could still be here? 

“This is it” you asked and said.  Your voice was more a taste in my mouth than an interpretation of those shaking hands, the tongue of dark children.  I could barely see, and could not escape the feeling of pissing myself, though I had no proof of it.

I could not walk into the cave, could not pass the mouth.  I could only stand out front, balanced and leaned against a peculiarity of rocks, too small to be climbed, too large to be disregarded.  Hampered by the sliding and shifting sand and dirt and gravels of the world dissolving, always dissolving and never done.

“There’s a place here, it’s like a shelf” you tell me.  You tell me that it is mostly flat and that he could have lain there or sat.  That it was a very low ceiling, that there were no bones, of animals of anything, that they were all gone.  You told me that is all there is, there is no other place, no deeper entry, no greater room.

What would proof look like?  What would the sign be if the thing I thought had been there, had been there, and gone now surely, but a hint remaining intact, to be seen by the careful eye, looking for just that, but I cannot go in.  I turn and face the way we came, my back the you and the cave, crouch to sit, and when hunched in that great direction that is down, feel a piece of myself again, return from the howling void in the mouth of that impossible cave, and for the briefest of moments, I am there. 

You found things of course, a weird shape in the sand of the cave, a jutting of a rock the size of your arm, an ant lion colony, all natural wonders and beauties of their own.  Mostly the cave smelled of unsettled dirt almost dust.

For all the convenience and wonder of our ship, we have no flashlight, and no cameras.  And after letting that thing go which is right before me, un-touched though the desire to do so brought me here with you, from unverifiable distances, I stepped back, and stepped down, and put that thing away that brought us here across time, to see, to hope, to wonder.  And though I was turned and sitting, I turned and sat again, and the thing that is not tears, but is still tears, was upon me, and I was tired, having met that thing inside myself that I had hoped would be found in a cave; a proof against the impossibility of it, an idol of a thing not man, but not different from one.  A desire to live, to not pass like memories from a world where i was, where we were, from the failure of its own authority over us, from the mouth of the cave I could not enter nor the threshold within myself that I could not cross, here on St. Anne, or in my bunk on the ship, when tears alone come to my own defense, against the evil of time, its way with us here, and me now, dying on a rock beside a door I will not open, a cave I will not enter, and under a truth I cannot honor with words.

There is tea on the ship and we drink it.  Hours pass in silence.  At times, the soft plinking of projectiles on the hull of our ship become a light rain, a natural wonder made common in the experience of it.  The violent skies, just lights that cannot hurt us now. 

I see it.  I see it always.  I cannot turn away.  It is as though I have taken the mouth of that place within, and am struck dumb by it, and all of language is but an itch, all ideas a turn of the head, a meaningless focus of attention upon the starboard panel, a cushioned seat, where you sit, curled, reading, observing a vast emptiness filled with wonders, while I cannot tell the difference between all times, and this cooling cup of tea.