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
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