Fin. And begin again.

I’m finally closing this site.
It’s time.

A very limited selection of the archives will remain and comments will stay open, but I won’t be publishing here anymore.

However, some posts and poetry from this site may end up being re-published at my new site.

That’s right… I said new.

If you like, I invite you to follow me over to Translúcida.
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Image: Flickr

Learning to Sing

Quiet now, the whole resonant room of you, quiet. Except for the sound of rain, which cannot be commanded. And the song of the Moon which cannot be heard above the tides in any case.

And Night, dressed as Summer herself, comes sneaking through the windows you opened at dusk. Parting curtains, it brings stirrings of sweet air and a train whistle wavering toward us like truth along a far away bend of wind.

A rhythm, remembered as something like love, will soon begin to circle this room like a spirit in a darkened church. And when I kneel this time, I will receive, not more of the starch of confession, but an intelligible sugar on my tongue. The wine of secrets, passing through.

And the mysteries of your tales unsaid will speak as they must, as they are: written across your face without the rehearsal of your words. And I will listen there in the dark for the bitter endings, feeling for the spaces between the lies and your beautiful mouth, groping, fingering your features like a blind woman until…

I can’t hear you anymore. And the ghosts of all your unmarked longings begin their hymns, and we both begin to sing in that other language we lost so long ago.

The Rhymer’s Queen: Part Two

My erotic retelling of the tale of True Thomas and the Fairy Queen, elements of which are also found in stories such as Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin.

Read part one of The Rhymer’s Queen here: Thomas’ Leavetaking

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Part Two:  A Feeding in the Murky Wood

“My love, my love. Wake now.”

Thomas opened his eyes to find himself languishing on the soft ground of a quiet, green wood, his head held gently in the lap of the Queen. Stroking his hair, smoothing his tense brow, she sang to him: “My love, my love, my poor unseeing one…”

Her voice lullabyed him. The softness of her dress and the scent of her beneath it… such a strong sweet medicine to him. Sighing with the dream of it, he moved to bring his hand to touch her where the silver green silk of her skirt made a valley between her thighs. But… his hands… his wrists… turnings of rough rope wrapped behind his back… bound!

A black anger shot through him, a twisting struggle to free himself. But he struggled only to prove that his ankles were also lashed together, bound in the same chaffing rope. He voiced his protest, he tried to cast the thought of it, the shock of these bindings, from his mind.

Calmly, she stroked his face, smoothed her fingers against the stubble along his jaw. Because she was both Queen and woman, she soothed him, waiting until he calmed enough to look at her. And when he did, there was a sweetness about the betrayal in his eyes, the accusal, the helpless pleading that rendered her whole body more soft but also more ruthlessly alert.

“Ah, my boy,” she smiled and bent to kiss his cheek. “Did you think I would not protect you? Serve your need? This land is dangerous.” Her hand, almost lazily, made its way over the broad expanse of his chest. It lingered as her fingers brushed across his nipples tightening beneath his wife’s careful fine spun linen. Her smile at that moment was a secret one, turned carefully away from him. “It’s best this way.”

Thomas, shocked beyond his capacity to understand his predicament, glanced wildly around him. He lay upon her, bound, in a twilight wood. A sky of gray and a glimmer of silver swirled above. And the trees… the trees were of a green he had never seen in all his living days.

When he looked closer, he saw that those trees were not simply made of a strange color, but that they were… sentient… dare it be true… breathing. Were they trying to speak to him? He was indeed mad, enchanted now, he was sure… in the grip of a wanton dream.

But the sound of her laughter overtook that other barely discernible language he thought he heard — the ancient green sound of the trees.

She saw his wondering and said, with a kind indulgence: “Oh, my love, my poor boy… never mind those sounds, those old moldy mutterings. They are not true. Not true.” She laughed to herself and added, “not yet, true.”

Then, changing her mood like the light, she shifted herself and pushed Thomas’s bound form upright in one graceful movement. She gently helped him arrange himself into a sitting man. And when he was situated such, she kissed him, a chaste little kiss, first on the cheek, then another on his forehead, and then…

Thomas began to fall down and down into his mind, down through long years and miles of longing. And as she slowly lowered her head into his lap and kissed the place where he was already rising to her, he groaned from the very bottom of his breath and thrust himself toward her mouth.

…and when She tastes you, that Delicious Queen, once She tastes you, you will become forever famished…

Her delicate fingers quickly undid the lacings at his waist and brought forth his root. Thomas sighed with the sudden freedom of it, as all men do, but when her hair brushed across the velvet skin of his cock, he whimpered and curled and twisted in on himself. He became like a dog on a leash, crouching and pawing before a punishment.

He wanted her mouth like he had never wanted a woman’s knowing before. And to his happiness, she brought her lips to him there and licked the impossible tautness all around. She tasted him and took her own languid pleasure in doing so.

She laughed at his groaning, his little thrusts, and placed one kiss upon the crown of his shaft. Then just as quick as he had risen to her, she flicked her small tongue out to catch the one perfect pearl he offered there.

When Thomas dared to let his gaze wander down to her, he saw not the golden-haired woman he expected, but a long yellow snake flicking her tongue, coiling into his lap, opening her jaws…

A long frozen moment passed before Thomas realized that the scream he heard came from his own throat.

The trees began to shake then (with laughter?) and she raised her head unhurried, to smile at him with such understanding and compassion that his heart leap from his chest and the short quick burst of tears that sprung from his eyes splashed down hot and shameless between them.

“Lady,” he gasped and sputtered, “I saw… you were… you were not…”

She touched her fingertips to his mouth to close the words there and explained, “You saw nothing… nothing that you did not intend to see.” She looked into his eyes a very long time, to calm him, to keep him there. His soul caught in the timelessness of her eyes as surely as his body was caught in her ropes, Thomas came eventually to realize that her hand was stroking him.

Maddeningly, slowly, she drew forth his seed. Suddenly, with a kind of pain, he cried out and against his own will, overflowed in her hand. He gave himself, poured himself out to her even as he sat enchanted, prisoned by her eyes.

When he had spent himself complete, she calmly took one last slow slide of her fist along the length of his cock and, without taking her eyes from his, brought her hand to her mouth and began to lick at that harvest of creamy seed.

He watched her mouth, the way her lips puckered, how her pointed little cat tongue lapped at her own slick fingers. Before he could imagine what was about to happen, he felt his jaw go slack, his lips part for her. And when she began sliding her fingers into his mouth, his head seemed to tilt back of its own accord.

He heard her sigh and he closed his eyes and suckled at his own seed like a hungry animal. The bitter taste of it entered back into him like a deep, ancient enspelling, a dark widdershin working.

In his mind he saw a picture of his own ending… a circle of a snake enraptured with its own tail. She was feeding it to him, his own death, like a witch mother feeds her dark makings. At the sound of her low groan in his ear, he abandoned himself to it, this obscene feeding. He sucked himself from her hand, a man famished for his own demise.

A long delicious time later, he heard her voice, distantly, sweetly instructing him: “You may not partake of any food in this land that does not come from my own hand.” And with that she began to gently thrust her fingers in and out of his mouth. “Do you understand, my love?”

Thomas could only mutely nod his head and gaze at her through his half-mast eyes. She thrust her fingers deeper, her long nails grazing the threshold of his throat. “Suck,” she hissed, and her face darkened, and her whole body tightened toward him as she rose up on her knees to hover over him. “Suck your own seed, your own spent life.”

Thomas struggled to do as she said, he struggled to suck, but she only forced her fingers deeper. His eyes watered and he struggled to breathe, to accommodate her command, this terrible invasion. Finally, he could take no more. His mind wild now, he panicked. How could she be so strong? He struggled in earnest now not to obey, but to escape the force of her violating hand.

But as he began to buck and arch for breath under her, her other hand slid behind his skull. Long fingers weaving themselves into his hair, she held him still and waited with him for a breathless second before she finally buried her fingers, her entire small hand, deep in his throat.

“Suck yourself!” she snarled. Her nostrils flared and her out breaths came in loud half-moans. She held him there like that, fucking his throat with her small delicate hand until his whole body undulated in its bindings, until his eyes went wild and fluttery, until the trees themselves began to whisper their warnings.

Finally, herself breathless with effort and abandon, she pulled her fingers from his throat and wiped them, slick and hot, on his cheek.  Poor Thomas gasped and grabbed for the sudden air. Half crying, half in rapture, he finally found his voice. But try as he might, it would utter no words. Only the hoarse grunting animal sounds of relief came from his throat.

The Queen watched with a feral attention as her Thomas regained his breath, grappled toward what composure he had left to claim. And when the chaos of hurt and anger which stamped his face finally turned to a quieter arrangement of acceptance, she said, her voice hard and demanding: “Thank me, Thomas, for I have fed you. I have fed you the only sustenance that will keep you alive in this land.”

Already taken deep by the drag of the unwilled within him, already long ago enthralled, Thomas obediently whispered his thank you like a gentle dreamy prayer.

Immediately a loud cracking slap cursed his face. “Say it to please me!” she corrected. And a series of humiliating slaps followed. “Say it in the way I want to hear it! Say it true, Thomas!”

Thomas, suddenly unashamedly crying now, wailed out his thank you. Screamed it again and again. In his full voice, he sang his thanks to this Fae Queen, this demon thing, for the awful sustenance she had forced upon him.

As his litany of thank you’s began to fade into the deep of the wood, Thomas felt her calming, felt her pleased. He felt her unbinding his hands, his ankles. And as he began to float away into some other world, he felt her rubbing his wrists, kissing his palms, cooing to him, dark dark words in another language.

Just as he began to fall into sleep,a horror came upon him, a horror he was powerless to fight against:  he felt his heart open to her, to love. Love! No… he could not. But she was licking the insides of his wrists, rubbing her soft cheek against the back of his hands, murmuring a song he once heard the river sing.

He could not…

But she moved to stretch out then, and lay beside his sleepy form. She was a long tawny cat purring her pleasure against him, slowly rippling her body against his. She was a woman, warm and full, pressing, wrapping her warmth around him. She was the pungent earth itself, sucking him in.

He could not…

But even through the blur of this tumble into his magical sleep, he felt his root beginning to rise again for her. He would give his life to enter her, to lose himself there… he would do anything…

. . .

Hours or decades or whole oceans later, Thomas awoke with a start, and his mind sickeningly disorganized itself around him. He sat up too quickly, only to see her fully dressed, calmly arranged and watching from her perch on a low branch of the tree that arched above him.

“Come Thomas,” she reached her hand down to him and flicked her fingers once. “Come. Rise up.”

Thomas’s stomach lurched, but at her command, he scrambled to his feet, weak, but unbound now. Was he still dreaming? “But my Lady…” he began, trying to find a way to tell her of his dream (even now it was fading, slipping though his mind of time), to ask her what place this was… to demand of her a reason for this journey…

She reached down to him, to silence him, and he was lifted, impossibly, to his place beside her on the branch. She arranged him into the crook where the branch joined the massive trunk. She quickly straddled him there and opened her gown to him, her hands guiding his face to her breasts.

He nuzzled and nipped at her skin, the softness of her neck, her shoulders, the mind-numbing forgetting he found there at the palace of her heart. He heard her speak quietly: “We are in my country now, Thomas. Here, all is Dream. You must obey me in all things… for your own safety.” And as she almost absently caressed his hair, she added, “and mine as well.”

After a time, she pulled his hungry mouth away from her breasts and bade him to look out beyond their perch. Thomas saw an endless murky wood all around, covered by a flat dark smoke-colored sky. He suspected firelight in the distance, but couldn’t be sure. For all he knew, that dim flickering light was the Sun himself, called down, brought to heel by this dangerous Queen, this woman-thing he now held to like a forbidden mother.

Her voice came suddenly sweet and girlish, “Pay no mind to that light. It is a silly thing.” She fastened the front of her gown, and brought his attention back to their perch in the tree. “Here is where we will stay tonight, my love. Here in this bower I have made.”

And at her words, Thomas found them tucked into an elaborate nest, a silken-pillowed bed. Delicate Spring flowers scattered around them, and the sharp russets of Autumn leaves. Urns of luscious fruit appeared on little carved tables and curtains of gauzy white encircled them.

Thomas looked at the Queen in shock, but she only smiled as a mother smiles when her child first discovers any common magic. “For you, my love. All for you.”

Thomas’s mind struggled to listen for the sounding of its own sanity. He struggled, but only for a moment. Her soft hands were pushing at his chest, urging him down and down into the voluptuous bed. And as his body gave way, her voice, her singing self came to him then and wrapped itself around him like a sweet-drugged smoke. At once, he heard a girl’s voice, a mother’s, the distant rattle of the hag… dancing all around him, given into the wind, pulling at his heart.

The magic soundings of her voice began to rise and rise until they became a conjuring veil bearing the fall of dark. And when she finally closed her body over his, he saw only the sky beyond her slender shoulder — the last gentle lavenders of evening quickly banishing themselves in fear… the horrible night to come beginning its slow descent.

To be continued…

The Rhymer’s Queen

Though later than I thought it would appear, here the story begins (finally). However, I feel I should warn you in advance that I am a compulsive reviser (which you regular readers have probably already figured out). And since I’m basically writing this story as I go (which I don’t usually do) there may be more revision compulsion than usual happening in this case.

In other words, elements of this story may change and shift while you’re not looking – all properly fae-like. Or, to put it another way, objects in mirror may appear closer than they are… or different than they were, or completely unrecognizable compared to what you thought you remembered they might become… or something totally disorienting like that.

That said, let’s begin.

Part One: Thomas’s Leavetaking

From the edges of Thomas’s afternoon dream by the river, she speaks as she sings:

My times are many and my voices are sweet and long in your ear. So long have you waited for me, for only me. Hear me singing the river’s length to life, weaving it into your world, in all its tones. I will wash you in that river and suck the water from your skin, the life from your root, only to give it back again. Feel me in the dancing drum of your heart, the spaces between beats where the fear lives, the terror of waiting for the dance to stop. I am there, in that hardening anger, that ache of living. This is where I will rise you from. And deliver you to, dying. And forgive of you, forever. Sleep no more, wake no more, my Thomas. Come and go with me… my Thomas sweet… come, for a kiss complete… come, and go away with me… never again to see…

And from his dream of colors fading, a voice unweaving, its golden threads falling through still water, he awoke.

The sound of hooves. A horse, along the soft river trail? Who would it be, on his land, on horseback, near the river? He sat up from the green bank on which he had been napping. And then he saw her. Or, as one should more properly say: She made herself seen.

To Thomas’s eyes, she was merely light at first; the bright burst of radiant gold that one can only glance toward and sharply away from in fits and starts. Looking dreamladen into that sunset, to his ears came a faint sound of bells.

At first, he heard merely a soft jingling in time with the horse’s hoof falls. As he struggled to listen closer, it became almost a woman’s voice, unintelligible, then suddenly a sickening black roaring in his head and…  she appeared, too fast, before him.

The scent of apple blossoms and new mown grass. A faintness first of vanilla, then amber. Deeper more secret scents, too, befell him, scents which brought a hardening stir, a memory of a want he thought long ago extinguished.

He thought of his wife waiting, making a supper of fresh caught salmon and dark greens. A vague memory of the first girl he had made love to came to him, her long black hair brushing over his chest as she rose from him, his seed still new and swimming hungry within her.

He held out his hand in both greeting and warning to this woman perched above him. “Hello” (he’d meant to say). Instead, as he scrambled to his feet, he called out much too loudly, “Who are you?”

“I am not who you may think I am,” she said from the sky above her horse, “but I am who you wish me to be.” Her voice, a mixture of a jilted lover’s dangerous hatred and a mother’s infinite kindness drifted down to him in small bits, as if sound by sound, the sounds only later making themselves languidly into words, a sentence, meaning.

He took a step back. “This is my land.”

Her horse shifted and the bells tinkled. “In your world, yes.”

He remembered his grandfather’s stories about The Lady of the River’s Bend:

She rides a white horse… her hair of honey gold…

Thomas could hear her breathing, though he was several feet from her. He thought he saw the faint blue color of her breath – like winter breaths emerging and dying, disappearing in cold air. But it was the crest of summer and the air was warm, warm enough to carry her scent to him; fresh ripe fruit now, and green barley grass.

…and when she speaks, the sky opens and a horrible kindness pours down like sun and living rain upon your skin…

Thomas shook his head and wiped his open palms against his thighs. “I’m sorry, but this is my land, private land, and I do not appreciate riders on this trail. Besides, “he added with more apology than he felt, “it’s quite mucky here, your horse could take an injury.”

In answer, she dismounted, weightless as single errant feather falling from a bird in flight. Her dress, an impossible color of wind, flowed around her in an almost sentient drape the likes of which he’d never seen.

Thomas heard the river cascade over the rocks behind them. He heard geese calling though it was late Spring. The warm southern breeze suddenly turned and rose from an ungentle direction and, for the first time ever in his life, Thomas was afraid, fearful of the lay of his own land.

She stepped before him. “Thomas, Thomas, I am not those things you fear.” A tall woman, she stood eye to amber eye with him. In her gaze, just for just a moment, he saw horrible things, familiar things, ancient things. And then they were gone.

He wanted her, right there. He wanted to open her dress, fall on her, lose himself between her legs. He wanted to destroy what he saw in her eyes. He wanted to make her gasp and cry out his name. He wanted to take her… or perhaps to be, mercifully, himself taken…

“Thomas, I come only in this time, in this place.” She reached out to him, to touch his cheek. “I come to ask of you a gift.” Her long fingers brushed over his lips. “And to offer you a favor in return.”

Her voice was like mead wine, going down into him first sharp, then unbearably sweet and heavy. The sound of her loosened all that he had held taut during this day, during the days of all his life. His head began to spin with the relief of it all.

In the distance, his children’s laughter drifted away on currents of air, of river. He heard his wife’s faint voice calling him in for supper. His wife…

He closed his eyes to this strange woman before him, to the too bright sun burning behind her. He tried to remember where he was. He tried to turn away from the question he feared was coming.

…and she will ask of you a simple bond, a fealty fated.  And you will forsake all you know, and gladly, for the sweet sweet yes of it.

“Kiss me, Thomas,” she breathed, her face too quickly close to his, her breath mingling with his, her voice a thousand sudden shades of dark all at once, “kiss me just one sweet kiss.”

And without a thought, and yet, with all his thoughts together, he kissed her. Long and deep, he searched her, took his pleasure of her, found worlds and lifetimes in her. And when he withdrew, he saw his own pleasure in her flushed face, her eyes a brighter color.

She sighed a long sweet sigh and sang his name with a secret sound hummed under the word as only the truest lover is able, “Thomas…”

And the smile she gave him then was
one that spoke a truth that both intoxicated and terrified him. He had kissed her alive.

She drew on her gloves and slowly shook back her long honey hair. “Thomas, you will come with me now,” her voice again of many shades, but not at all light. “You will ride with me to a place where you may serve me as I bid…”

Thomas was in a spell, he knew. And this… thing before him, he knew, was a fae thing, a woman but not.

She continued, “… and serve others as I bid. For, sealed of that kiss…”

His mind tilted. Her name…what was her name… in the old story… if only he knew her name, he could rend her weaving…

But all he could see was her smile, her full mouth forming words he was unable to stop, “… you have given of your life seven years to me.”

He shook his head violently and tried to spit out the sword of sound that was caught in his chest. But the No! he longed to shout was already swallowed, kissed away forever. The will of her voice was stronger now than any word he would ever be able to conjure.

She waited with him while he struggled, while he searched his memory, his sanity. She waited, devoid of amusement, with unnatural stillness until he found his voice, until it came labored and difficult: “Lady, I fear you are the one I cannot bear,” he whispered, “the one who comes for me at the end.”

To her understanding smile, he begged, “Am I dying?”

“Ah, no, I am not that One, Thomas.” So gently she spoke, with a knowing of long abiding sorrows it seemed. “Not yet that One.”

With that, she took his hand and suddenly they were astride her horse. His arms went about her like they had always been there, and his face buried itself in her hair.

His wife’s voice gone. His children’s smiles, all gone. His afternoon rest along the safe bank of his own river, the river of his fathers, gone. Her hair, her apple-scented hair was the whole golden world, the only world before him now. Everything else, forgotten, forgiven, swept away.

She clicked her tongue and snapped the reins. They lurched forward and the river’s rushing tumble sang along with the harness bells. The sky around them clouded over with every blue and gray that could be painted.

…and when she takes you, ah, when she takes you… you will be seen no more. Nor will you have the need, any more, to see.

Thomas closed his eyes and like a man falling into a smiling drunkenness or a child with no reason to be wary, he lay his cheek against the soft fall of her hair.

In his head, he saw lights, green and eerie and flashing like eyes within his own. But as they made their way into the falling twilight, he felt her warm inside the circle of his arms, he heard the sure steady hoof falls beneath him, the happy song of the bells weaving around them both, and all his fear was gone. All gone.

To be continued…

Image: unknown

Initiation

He lit a candle, removed his collar and set it down with care, like the offering it was, before the sputtering flame.

When he finally found the courage to turn and face her, perhaps speak some words of decency to her first, he could only watch mutely as she leaned back and lifted her skirts, the creamy skin of her thighs smooth as any alabaster saint’s in that flickering light.

At the sight of her shimmering like that, a vision in the candlelight, Father Daniel murmured one last prayer for forgiveness and the God inside his mind sighed and turned away. Whether in disgust or anger, or perhaps shame or modesty, he would never know.  And it would never matter.

As she ran the fingers of a graceful hand through the silk of her chestnut hair, he felt his entire life of words and judgements of words coil back on itself, a ravenous circle made full.

But before he could consider that thought, before he could approach the assumptive evil of it with a weapon of learned philosophy or grim belief, she smiled at him.  Within the mirror of  her smile, he saw not a hissing wanton serpent or a temptress made of wretched flesh, but simply a reflection of his own need:  just a man, fallen, back to himself.

Then with neither modesty nor shame, she spread her naked legs open before his gaze. And when she reached out her hand to him, she said his name, just once, in the voice of a lover. He thrilled to the beautiful music of it, the sound of his own name, rightfully returned.

In the wake of her voice, all temptation disappeared, each prayer for deliverance fell away and he knew it was time to begin the long journey, the single step that would take him to where she waited, where she had always waited, for him.

And when he reached her, when at last he touched his shaking hand to the heaven of her skin, all his despot vows flew raucously to the rafters like so many frantic doves set free, finally, to God.

Image: Hungry For Your Touch, Jan Saudek

Moon in Scorpio: Threshold of October

…inside the dark of yourself from the sorcery of yourself you will call me with your emerald firevoice it will ring through corridors twisted before our births our secrets burning inside inside it comes and my mouth will let forth the smoke of your charred heart a sooty thick cloud I will make of that fire my breath a sounding blackness to wrap around the root of your voice and when the shroud is woven complete knotted secure around your useless language I will steal it cackling and make of it a shield that will set me free and oh how I will sing to you then and hold your memories and your shame in my fists while you sway inside my sweetest of tunes my many singing spells how your soul will change inside my headful of magic a changeling caught in my cuntful of teeth my cunt come to claim its full feast of skin reshaped you will tear away from yourself and become more than the one I dare call upon a keening man a kenning thing aching to devour a night spun of my making you will be of my breath attached to my scent and mine alone and nothing but my filthy fingers will hang you cockspent tie you like a screaming prayer on the living tree the sprouted cross dug deep into where you can no longer call your home all its pearl eyes plucked out and the blind bones all of them cracking inside the vice of my bite that madness of instinct that drives us to fall prey fall in rapture as prey to the needwitch who will feed us still smoldering back to the root of life burnt inside the dark of yourself from the sorcery of yourself you will call me…

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Image: Not able to cite source, found here.

In five acts

If you are longing, stop.

If you are sorrowing, stop.

If you are regretting, stop.

If you are lost, stop.

Touch yourself.

Image: Unknown

Lick

I watch while, with each long lick, his closed eyes flutter and his long lashes become wet with thankful tears.

I watch while the taut muscles of his neck struggle to reach, how he opens his mouth and uses his shoulders to push himself toward his own taking of this sacrament.

I watch the innocent cock that hangs down beneath his bound and kneeling form become achingly full with its need to release, its trembling longing to be of use.

I watch in rapt adoration while the dirt of the street that he takes into his mouth, onto his tongue, transforms before my eyes into something so clean, so holy that only a man such as mine could be worthy of it.

I watch while, in his servitude, he becomes not humiliated or unmanned, but set free, lifted far beyond the gritty filth of this man’s world he so lovingly cleans from my shoes.

Image: Morguefile

The Moon’s in Scorpio and I’m in a mood

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

If I were a blackbird tonight, I’d be three hideously big ones who could sing the Runes, in perfect harmony, until your head blew up. If I were a knife blade in the hand of a hunter, I’d be flat black in the night, the thing you never saw coming. If I were a witch… oh, wait, I am a witch. If I were the Moon in Scorpio, I’d melt all over the earth tonight, just like in that Calvino story. But only after I’d eaten the Sun. If I were a tree, in which there were three blackbirds, I’d be Ygdrassil, fucking the Earth up the ass with my big root forever. If I were a Wallace Stevens, I’d be drinking cheap beer in heaven right now and jacking off into the mouth of an angel. If I were a Scorpion I’d be telling you a story about how I could carry you across the river on my back without stinging you. I promise. If I were an Elizavetta Mora, I’d write this fucking post with my three minds. And hit “publish.”

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Quote: From 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens.
Image: A terrible Goddess you don’t want to know the name of, or whatever it was that created the universe, which may or may not have been Wallace Stevens.

Don’t leave me here

Did you paint your smile on, well I said I knew
That my reason for living was for loving you*

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He rose from the bed like a man going to war, or to a life of unending peace – resigned, afraid. He intended to walk away, from her, from that town and all those people who needed him to be… something.

But he had just filled her with more love than he thought he possessed. He had just surrendered to her the promise of everything he was. The only thing she ever asked of him, he had given.

A sigh later, he found himself hunched in the chair next to the bed, turned away from the sight of her, of the holy thing he had made of her. With his face in his hands, he waited for the courage to leave. But instead, a cool breeze from the river disturbed the curtains; a bird outside the window called.

He rubbed his eyes and blinked and there, suspended before him within the frame of the mirror above the dresser, was her sleeping form, like a painting, arranged within an artful drape of linen and silk and chestnut hair; a vision, a floating world.

All thoughts of leaving gone, he couldn’t help but linger in a kind of detached amazement to watch her breathing there, safely curled inside his scent, in that bed, that room that had become his confessional, his sanctuary.

But, when he looked to the reflection of her face, searching for the smile of contentment he longed to see there, he saw only a blur of sunwashed light in the glass. Her lashes, the curve of her ear, the generousness of her mouth, all obscured, but brightly.

And in that terrible light, he suddenly understood that there would never come a moment in which to tell her that he could not be of use to her in this life. Not in this life. She had asked too much. And he had missed his chance to refuse the giving of it.

There was nothing else to do but walk away. But there came a great paralyzing beauty into that room just then, a beauty that struck at his heart and tore at his dream of her. The light on her face had come to its zenith, making her into something else; something ascendant, something already gone.

It was too late for him not to see the truth of what had passed between them, so he did what all receivers of visions do – he closed his eyes.

And, in that temporary reprieve of darkness, he indulged himself, comforted himself, by imagining her lying there alone in the cold mirror, a sleeping beauty, dreaming of his voice singing to her, “don’t leave me here… don’t leave me here all alone… tangled in the vines… lost in the light…”

From the far away country of her sleep, behind the light in the mirror, she smiled. But, in the way of dreams, in a glance it was gone.

With a sigh of resignation, a renewal of purpose, he finished the song in his mind and opened his eyes. He rose to dress silently to the rhythm of her soft breathing. His own clothes felt unfamiliar and, from somewhere far inside his mind, he suspected the ghosts were already gathering in the hollow of his chest. But still, he fastened the buttons slowly and carefully.

Then, without daring to glance her way lest he be lost again, he crossed the room and closed the door quietly behind him, leaving her there to dream forever of the left-over light of him; the memory of his voice.

Only later, after all his songs had been written for her, did he remember that he never bent to gently kiss her warm naked shoulder before he left that day, though he had meant to. He had truly meant to.

.

* This quote is from a song called, I Need You To Turn To , written by Bernie Taupin, sung by Elton John. Ok, yes, I was a teenager in the 70’s and I listened to (and totally loved ) Elton John back in the day. Wanna make something of it?

Anyway, I Need You To Turn To is a waltz, played in this version on a Clavichord no less! And the lyrics are delightfully Gothic-like. Right up my ally. (There’s also this version , recorded years later, with a full orchestra. Just pay no attention to the wig… I mean, you know, it’s Elton John). The 70’s produced some surprisingly odd and wonderful music. Really, the decade wasn’t all Farrah Faucet hair and disco and The Brady Bunch, you know. Wait a minute, yes it was.

But never mind that. This little lullaby-ish song has always haunted me, not because of the sappy story it seems to tell, but because of the kind of frightening story I think it hides. So, in an attempt to exorcise the haunting, I created a little riddle-y snippet of a story that may or may not live inside this song. It’s too early to tell if the exorcism worked, but I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, if any of you would like to share if you feel something Gothic-ly delicious lurking inside this song, I’d be very interested in hearing your take on it. This song haunts me… haunts me, I tell ya!