snake, cave, virgin.
It is your prurient nature which makes such things into miasma, it is you who holds up a glass and views her and I, our stainless acts, through the darkly of your clutching, it is you who lie on the grassy floor, redolent with oil and full of someone else’s food, and tell the mustachioed man-god-father that you dream, you dream of the great eight-headed phallus looming over—is she smiling or screaming?—a schoolgirl in her best dress.
You dream of the cave’s moss-veiled crevice, and the girl vanishing into it, and the snake vanishing into her, around and around and around, and you do not know why it reminds you of your mother.
Look at your angel in the ice, arms fanned out like spying stares.
It has your stink all over it.
I
HOKI
Walking is unpleasant. The muscles of my calves bunch new and raw like fundoshi, and my toes are flattening with use.
It is undignified.
My throat forces me to stop and soothe it at filthy wells lined in algae as thick as under-robes, but the water only runs out of me again, oily, seeping up through my skin like ink through rice paper.
I have had to piss several times; sour steam rises from the wet grass. The whole business is revolting.
Prefectural monks rub their heads furiously when I pass—they have not heard of the dragon, certainly such a blight would not befall their villages, blessed as they are of the Kami (and if I were in my right state I would haul seven or so typhoons from my left pocket to splash away those smug, simpering smiles—oh how I miss my limbs of thrashing palm trees and splintering camphor!) but they are assuredly grieved that the poor family of Kushinada, whose hair even here they have heard was as dark as ink pooled in the belly of a crow, should be made to suffer so.
Give me rice, brainless holy, and get back to your kneeling—the sun does love to see you scrape. As for me, my stomach will not shut up, and wants fish. It is not used to itself—ridiculous sack of meat which is always too empty for its own liking. I once had innards of pure light, intestines that served only to translate wind to sky. Where did the other body go when I fell from the floor of my sister’s house? Is it caught in the clouds, in the slats of her golden tatami, light tangled up in light? I want it back, I want my storm-tongue and my oceanic muscles, unfolding like wings, black on blue on silver—she cannot have it, she has no right to keep it from me and leave me with only this stinking, mewling flesh dripping its slime over the earth like sacraments—why cannot I wring my hands and be rid of it as I would any other putrid mire?
The bitch always stole my things.
Even pride of the eldest—who ever heard of a girl born first? But there it was—she came sliding out of Father’s eye like golden pus, and the pillar of the world was lit up with her, Mother-Below was lit up with her, the sky was lit—everything went up like a torch tossed into a barn, a barn perfectly contented to stay a barn and keep its straw unsinged. Only Father saw her for what she was: a silly girl preening in her shining hair, who would never amount to anything more than a paper lantern.
Then came the moon, sick-silver, oozing from Father’s other eye like a wet and shell-less snail. There he was, our paternity weeping luminate, his face made into a gaping wound . . . my brother sloughing light from one fringe of lashes and my sister bursting from the other divine cornea . . .
What a relief I must have been—the rush of cold water and darkness, the mere and the gloam, the wind drying stray drops of effluvia on his open mouth. Out of his nose I came, and from whence should I have come but the curved nostril, in my sharp air and exhalation—I came up from the crystalline lungs like a waft of smoke and curled from my Father with a grace sun and moon could not begin to imitate.
Or I was sneezed out, snot and phlegm, a waste of leftover junk, a tickle in his nose that had to be expelled, but was never meant to be a child. After all, I am not made of light, like the others. The sky