Laquered white board, found photograph, neuropathology specimen, pharmacetical glass

Lacquered board, found photograph, neuropathology specimen, pharmaceutical glass

She now lies dormant

There will be no survivors.

The cloak she wears is one of brooding indigo clasped by a single withered rose at her throat like dried blood on a wound.  Bearing a face as pale and unforgiving as a February moon, she sits on a rock and toils at unfurling a tender white bud.  Without mercy or regret, she pries open the tightly laced petals, peels each one back and rips out the burgeoning stamen within. 

There is a gentle savagery in the act that is somehow satisfying to the queen.  

She is emptied; spent.  Observing her reflection in a dim pool she discovers that she has adopted the slump of a losing general after the war is over.  What she sees in herself is the husk of her garden’s former abundance.

Once wildly fecund, she now lies dormant. 

She doesn’t want to remember the faithful tide of campanula and violets, morning glories that had shrouded the gates in a vapor of cerulean.  She senses that she knows something about the way the tulips spread out their waxy fronds to capture the rain, but she does not want to possess such knowledge any longer.  The lilies, the lilies she wants to forget most of all; the heady festival those extravagant flowers dared to promise.  This sadness within her is as deep as the sea and it creates a pulsating in her chest like a song she can’t help humming. Her heart is a fluttering insect caught in a fist.

What she tries most not to remember is milky skin, a luminous veil beneath which radiated the heat of a newly formed star. There were moments meant to be sealed in amber and laden with the flower haunted breath of bees that she thought would be hers to savor again and again.  She now wonders whom it might have been who had come in the dusk to return her to a biography of spring.  Had she conjured this other who had come and filled the shade with a timorous light?  She is possessed by a simmering wind carrying the scent of so many quaking bouquets, a wind that had swallowed her voice as she pleaded with the river gods to not reclaim their maiden.

The queen, who had always been weary, had not felt so in the presence of the girl.  Something in their meeting had allowed her to feel mythic and extraordinary. With the girl, she was a woman with snakes in her hair; red and winding with silver wings.  She was the lone moth who had escaped the tyranny of the silk trade, satiated until her life waned on mulberry and sunlight. 

A primeval knowledge had glazed her lips like nectar stolen from the rarest of orchids.  Then it was washed away by a day in the sun, a change in the moon.. She throws the shredded flower to the ground and with eyes almost transparent in the light, she regards her world with a painful clarity.  She knows now that with plentitude follows loss and regret.  She fights an urge to wail and lament like the women of ancient tribes. Instead she silently longs for the desert, the weight of the sky pressing into the earth, the rhythm of the dunes, its constant erasure. 

She breathes into her hand leaving a drift of violet-tinged soot on her palm. I am so thirsty, she had said to her mother as she drank from the well.  She drank deeply and still it was not enough.  She dips her hand into the pool at her feet and watches as the dark water is resurrected as a trail of green fire.

la la

 I dreamt last night that I was invited to see an artwork on the dark side of the moon. My escort was  a tall woman with white hair who informed me that we would need to take a twinkle along.  A twinkle? I ask.  Yes, she responds, we will need to carry a twinkle leftover from the stars the night before to keep us warm,  to light the way.

Moon Cat

 The cat with his lunar moth markings and river eyes would pummel her with his wide white paws at her belly, her breasts, and her temples. He pushed and pulled at her with the force of infant and beast, demonstrating a delirium that both thrilled and comforted her. His claws stained with wandering would rhythmically tangle through her hair lulling her to sleep.

Each dawn after the cat had leapt out the window at the setting of the moon, her snowy coverlets and silken sheets of forty thousand silk moths would be marked with the imprint of his muddy paws.

The residue of hushed night roses.

She always denied having anything to do with the mess when the maids came to change the bedding. She claimed the cat was possibly a conjurer and had come in through the window to mark her with a dark spirit as she slumbered. But it was she, who would arise in the moonlight and open the window upon hearing his cries. Cradling him in her arms, she would bury her face in his fur, that smelled like dampness and woodsmoke and secret wild places, and she would transport him ceremoniously as one would a demigod to her chamber of whiteness.

Winged

So, it happened that the moth sang to the queen through this distant fluttering. It sang of soft white cocoons being cradled in the bosoms of women who lived in dry places. It sang of toil and earth and sadness. It sang of ceremony and extravagance. 

It sang of a dress.

A dress that must be made of the silk spun from the cocoons of forty thousand silkworms.  In that lyrical beating of those fragile wings, the queen learned how silk was made from the cocoons of moths that were never allowed to emerge from their transformative slumber.  It was the cocoons that were needed and not the moths.  As fat caterpillars, they ate their ambrosia of mulberry leaves to gain strength to spin. They spun their nests with an instinctual hope of liberation. To spin would gain them a freedom they had never known.  But they had been duped.

There would be moths she learned, that would escape one at a time and fly into her courtyard, bringing along residual threads of their silk cocoons attached to their wings.  Because the journey was long and the moth’s life short, they would die upon arrival.  The queen must be patient and observant. She was to collect the silk and the wings of the fallen moths and fashion a dress out of this detritus.

 A dress, the moth confides to her that would be able to fly.

 The queen looks for the fallen creatures as she ambles about her stone courtyard that is lined with an army of white tulips, rigid and blanched as a marble balustrade.  She scoops up the husks in her delicate palms and places them in a cut glass urn with a cobalt lid.   As if informed of their mission the moths eventually arrive in desperate light-winged fleets.  Soon her garden floor is covered with a dusting of gauzy moth wings and broken petals.  The queen commissions larger urns to contain the moths and their unraveled threads until her bounty expands to the point where it is necessary to store them in a cask of polished birch; a cask as tall as her own body.

She spins and sews and when at last she completes her dress of ivory silk, she ceremoniously hangs it on a hook by her window.  The dress dances in the breeze, occasionally tormenting her with the promise of departure, as it hops about, brushing its hem against the sill. But like a bird with a broken wing, it is animated but never able to take flight. 

She decides that perhaps the dress must be worn to fly.  She puts it on each morning returning it to its hook at night.  Soon the weight of the silk makes her stoop and she grows weary. Eschewing all other garments, it becomes the only dress she owns and she wears it every day.   She weaves a set of sheets with the remaining threads she gathers and embroiders upon them a banquet of pomegranates and meandering vines.  She makes a coverlet and pillows, which bloom abundantly with white needlework.  She adds a canopy then a pair of curtains bearing the gleam of moonlight. At night when the abandoned dress hangs suspended like a talisman at the window, she presses her head to her pillow and imagines she hears the moths vibrating inside the silken cases, chewing their way through the threads in a collective sigh.

 

 

Bone Stars

 When the queen was a child there was a span of time when she and her family had lived in a desert. Baptized by white light and pale sands, salty stars thrown across a cover of onyx, she sleeps beneath an awning of indigo and crimson. Years later as she raises her eyes in her forest kingdom the verdant canopy takes on the appearance of the congested galaxies of those desert nights. Gilded leaves dance like the monumental orbs that torched the nocturnal terrain of her youth. There is the flapping cloak of the tent scented with sage and myrrh, the stone taste of tepid water from the canteens as her mother lifts it to her lips.

In those chalky mornings before the sun presented its steaming daggers, she is allowed to wander at will in the dunes.  She shuffles along the fissures, slicing at the air between land and sky with her long angular body.

The child had been instructed in the ways of the nomads. She took readily to banishing mirages in the half light of dawn and twilight. She knew how to sniff out the difference between arid sand and sand that had known rain within the month. She observed what it meant when the camels twitched their tails right rather than left. She could identify which plants pointed in the direction of the oasis and which ones denied their allegiance to it.  And eventually she would come to understand that the sand, the stars, and the hot winds that blew before dawn were ignited by the same elemental force as her mother's tears.


During these walks she became a gatherer of bones.

Bones were the only objects to collect in this vast and empty place. Bones that lay white as promises, each one radiating its own sun. Bones shaped like things that had nothing to do the geography in which they had emerged. A small clavicle looked like a butterfly, a rib a petal from a lily.  The jawbone of a creature she could not name took on the shape of a sailing ship. Upon a shard of femur that seemed to her a petrified piece of moon, a bit of dry flesh remains. With thumb and forefinger she gently pries at the edges of what appears to be lingering connective tissue.
A scalding gust carries it away into the granular monochrome.


A shred of jerky to be swallowed by the living.

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

----Samuel Taylor Coleridge