into the fertile clouds, and who knows what storm it salted there.
It was in Izumo that I landed, face first in the mosquito-mottled grass. Izumo, meaningless village, just over the hills from the stink and sink and sick perfume of Hiroshima.
From far off, I heard my children weeping scarlet, scarlet and black.
KUSHINADA / EIGHTH HEAD
:: Look at you, great enfeebled thing, choking on my sisters, spitting them out of your mouths like chewed meat. ::
Look at you, look at how we sit, like teacher and pupil, you below me with that thoughtful stare, looking up into all these eyes, shaded by the wide camphors like a net of protecting arms. Don’t you think it’s funny, don’t you think it’s a classical pose, all the rituals of dragon and maiden observed? I am trying to decide not to eat you, but it is difficult, difficult.
:: I am naked here, and alone, and I am sure that is all as you imagined it, last girl among all the girls, eight, eight—there are always eight, eight of us and eight of you, the eightfold path, and I am at the end, Right Maiden, Right Prey. It is dark here, but my irises have widened, I can see my own mud-streaked limbs, white as poached snails, and I have rocked back and forth on the forest floor clutching them, and I have wondered, wondered when I would join the others, when you would speak to me in their voices, but you will not, you hold them back from me— ::
I hurt. I hurt so much there is no space left in my throats for the hunger. My belly is gape-open, there is so much blood,
{we} never thought (we)
had so much blood in
me/us,
|we|
didn’t know
*our*
flesh went so deep.
It is becoming confused, crowded, and the smell of flowers gags, oh, it
(chokes)
there was an I before this, I remember it, and all these heads fanned out from it like leaves, and I cannot find it now, it is like looking in a heap of jetsam for the one toy you loved as a child.
:: Look at the monster, holding its stunted hands out to its food, begging surcease. ::
This is your blood, it is all over me,
[we]
drown in it. Make it stop. I am finished with this now.
:: You wanted all the others—am I not sweet enough to join my sisters? I can hear, at night, the city not far off, the hurrying men with arms full of jars and clothing and cups, but all I see is trees, trees and you, green and terrible among them, and this place is sticky with blood and saliva and urine. It is our nest, and you are like a mother, ripped open to let her babies out, but nothing comes from you, they are stuck, stuck like hooks in a carp’s mouth, and I am telling you that I am willing, willing to go where they have gone— ::
Tell me about your trees, Kushinada, tell me what color they will be when they come cracking through
—our—
spine.
:: Far off from the house my mother :: Mother!
[Mother!]
Always Mother, sloughing her children off of herself like old robes, and then she vanishes, yes, vanishes, and there were no trees where I was born, none at all, but your
*our*
mother did it too, she spat you
[us]
out among the flowers and then filled you
/us/
up with fish eyes until it was time to give you
—us—
us, yes, us, give us all to the man who was
{neither old nor young,}
|who was neither handsome nor ugly,|
( who was neither fat nor thin,)
neither, neither, neither
:: my mother was fishing, sitting propped against a stone by a little pond, and the air was golden and still, golden and still under the flowering cassia, the yellow blossoms and the red bark, and the smell of cinnamon floating over the rippleless water :: Mother squeezed
me/us
out into the wriggling silver, the wriggling silver and the salt churn, she pushed and pushed and I
|we|
dribbled from her like pus, like a tumor, like a
:: she held the pole between her feet; it curved like a lazily drawn bow. ::
leech.
:: There were no tugs at the line; it hung limply as a spare koto-string. But, as afternoons will, the late sun brought a fish to the morsel of pig-gut on my mother’s crude hook, and in lurching forward to catch the suddenly taut pole from between her ankles, mother felt something tear inside her :: Ah, Kushinada!
*Kushinada!*
I know that tear! Please, I beg—yes, I beg, I am above