I brand you witch / the iron rests in my gutted embers / in a fire of known origin / in a source of doubt and new beginnings / your skin once pure soon tarnished / our dreams of a seventh heaven scattered / collected mail & unposted airways / I brand you witch : wood worm and treeless
the crow’s canticle hollowing out the cruel dark wet grass of me
november hills are run with wolves, the orphanhood of a woman-bodyI have hung the starry pelts above the flame, I have hunted my own otherness
Artemis-pale in the autumn woods, flaxen over cronelike cults of waterI have parted my lips where the moon meets with wine-red sea, froth
and annihilation; a thin blue thread I have parted and dispersed into nowhere’s illusionto say the unsayable; the sad, child longing to be beautiful; the long dizzy
silk dream that is ever unreconciled – things I cannot admit to being minewho I have been – or am – as myself: the one who holds her tongue
and waits for words to die
night’s dream stains a star-touched, blue feather
near the silo of my gathered hand; her,on the cloven hooves of dawn, ear stilled near
the pulsing raven plinth, neck or dandelionhowls rove the mist-thick woad, recalling
with the terror of flesh the wool of anothercolors once loved, now colored dully elsewhere –
a poppy nodding a red-heavy head, lips languishedI pry mud-spangled fingertips over the indifferent
reign of tides, mimetic animals sloughing sideways wherenight has emptied her entrails into the crook of my arm,
where I once held the sea, slipped from cerement’s scythe
and moonborne dew; earthen, wax-drawn figure
I bring you to my hidden room and speak
this yellow nothing
I fear that I have perhaps ruined myself. That I have been quiet too long. That there is no more mystery, that there is only mystery. That, somewhere, on the final garden’s edge she stands at the heart’s thin-bled blades and I am lost between them. Unendurable, red-winged thicket, I become stone of eyes, slashed maw, the gape of searching statues. Outside, the oily hands of men assert themselves without a god. I am no better. I have been too different, small, estranged; a swallowed tongue among the maggots of having never really been.
sad, dimensionless dream
mirror black, mirror night
mindless fish tread their
sepal dragonscales
over swathes of water’s
membraneI am
hunted againnot daring
to breatherivered here nor there my ghost
hands star-touched and eternalwith a childhood’s loneliness I
scatter like so many
moths solitary blue
& bewingedremembering not so much of the furrow
but that yellow-coffin silence
like so much wheat lost and
rotting to war-gnawed fieldsno, blanched bone
I have been soured by arrowsthe stir of uncoiling sea-beasts
that clamor with cloven black feet
towards uncertain landthat was my own, once
before the bog-eyed kelpie
maimed the sugared soul
and kept its tiny
shattered pieces
belonging to shadowlanguage which sends ravens
through the wild fir: I cannot afford
your indifferencethe cool touch
of your slack hand like
death in the earthen brancheslike a lover I slip from the moon’s
cerement, I become instrumentfigurative as wind, or roan wood-dreams
that are at once held and forgottencan I or will I? unfix such
wounds again, my final belongingsthe unendurable strangeness of
looking upon an earth too changed
and shaped by his hands bloodied
with violationI will make it mine again, or let it
be nothingso long as waking begets its own
monstrous silver, eos, as my own
garden
estrangedthis is survival, and nothing more
the tending of this thin and dire thread
to which my whole life
now belongsit no longer matters what these fields
had been but that they are, as I amsundered open, emptied like the flesh beneath
the wicked hooks of a dawn-hot sunwhatever else it is
I cannot bear to say any more
I can feel myself awaking. There are birds nearby, I think, but I find it hard to make out any specific sounds indicating their presence. There should be birds nearby, there should be bird song. I am alone in my parents’ cottage in the forest. I was dropped off yesterday by Grace, my mother, as my father Barry had his weekly Friday meeting at the club. It is my first time here alone, a trial my parents had called it on my eighteenth birthday a week earlier. At the time I saw it as a cheap present from someone who did not care, now I wonder if there was something more sinister behind their insistence that I should stay the weekend by myself. To get my bearings of being an adult, they had proposed, alone at their cottage in the forest. Forests have trees. Trees have birds. Birds sing, or should sing at this time of the day, I think. What time is it anyway, I try and open my eyes, but they remain firmly shut. Odd, I say but nothing is said, and nothing is heard. My lips do not part as instructed. But how am I going to brush my teeth if my lips do not part. I need to brush my teeth now, I think, as I always brush them in the morning and this is morning, I decide, without any evidence of the contrary.
There is a knock on a door, or a window, there is no difference in my mind right now. Someone shouts ‘Harriet, are you there,’ and I shiver as I realise that they might be addressing me. I try to respond but no words are heard. My lips are not moving. I try to stand up, to swing my legs over the wooden bedframe but my limbs are not responding. I remain in my bed, stuck without knowing how. There is no pressure on my back, I think, so I must be hovering. I have never hovered before. This thought stays with me for some time.
‘Harriet!’ the voice much louder now. Closer. ‘Did you give her all of the instructions as we discussed,’ the voice now just outside the window.
‘Yes dear, both verbally and in writing, the checklist you made, remember?’ a calmer, lighter voice this time.
I am right here. I am right here. Nothing. Silence. Darkness. Why am I still hovering here. Why is my mind not racing. I should be worried. I am always worried. Why am I so calm. Is this what it is like to be an adult, a grownup. Always calm. I can live with being an adult then.
‘Here’s a copy of the checklist. Look, it is all there in your “Everything needed to survive a weekend in the Cottage – by Barry Hoople”,’ the light voice said.
‘But there is a page missing, Grace. Where is the page about the ventilation for the gas heater? Where is the warning of carbon monoxide poisoning.’
I scurried down the unlit corridor. The lingering stench of his old memories and poorly wrapped-up thoughts grew with each corner I left behind. After an arduous climb covering what must have been at least a small pyramid I found myself facing a dead end. Not as dead as the rat in the corner, but … I turned to return the way I came only to find – another dead end. I sat down, exhausted and bewildered. So long a walk only to find: nothing, I had expected much more.
The scribbled note left in my cage days earlier had been vague, no proper signature other than the letter J. The words seemed more like utterings forced into the fabric of the parchment, more like a desire to convey a truth beyond the one mere mortals would expect to find in a message left … in a message… hidden. I had followed it’s direction to the letter and found the opening beneath the crypt. The unlit corridor had scared me at first but now, as I sat here wondering what to do next, I felt a peace inside. I felt I was on the way of discovery, of finding my truth.
Whoever this J is… they better not direct Slouch anywhere near the Tower of Turning…
The Lady in White bleeding gums and scissors a handshake that never was I LOVE YOU I sighed through rotting teeth I kissed you goodnight as prayers echoed through the graveyard of infinity The Lady in White my mistress in birth & shiverings faded
Oh Hollow Earth that calls me [ I walked the circumference of your lips, wanting to taste the fullness of your breath / your chest a mountain I could never climb / lips on lips and so we tried / I grasped and hooked and let it go as a boy drowning: . . Oh Hollow Earth ] // +++((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((( scorned // — ))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) ashes My lips wanting blood and stained glass virgins
