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“… and the Wren called back to the Hawk upon the wind, named him ‘Darling’, ‘Heart-Skein’, and ‘Tempest of the Forge’…”
It seemed I had walked this path always, the voice and the strength occupying previously subconscious headspace coming finally into focus.
The Bright Man smiled, touched my arm with the ease of long familiarity.
“It was in this way the Wren pierced the veils of immortality and secured spirit in the natural hierarchy.” His odd hunched grace, the too wide mouth, the elongated features should have unnerved me. Yet here, in this place, the rational mind was the dream with the same dissevered composition. “No earthbound creature can subjugate one who knows them so completely, that names them in truths beyond language. Not for nutriment. Not for pleasure. Not for sport. Do you understand?”
I nodded, mute. Though to say I understood was an overstatement. I reacted, viscerally. Too many half-articulated emotions grasping for freedom from the tip of my tongue; my head felt over full and cluttered. Opalescent flowers shuddered and bled in the dust.
“’To create of the Self a vessel in which there is no Self’… Remember what it was to be empty and the mirror therein that gave you power. That is the essence of the Wren.” Sadness surged through him, tangled the supple finesse of his too wide mouth as though he were merely the conduit for the concept of ‘sorrow’. “That was her gift to you.” He said, laying one spindly hand across the upper quadrant of my abdomen.
“And you?” I didn’t know why I said it…
The Bright Man rocked back on his haunches, his double-jointed knees sketching zigzags in the ether as mercurial laughter bubbled and boiled from his lips. He threw out his arms, catching sunlight like cinders on his skin.
Is it a blessing or a curse, I thought, to experience each emotion undiluted by the one that came before?
“The Savage Garden!” He cried, heliotrope dripping like clouds of dry ice from his eyes as he pointed at me. “The Kingdom and the Glory, oh, beautiful, bedeviled child!”
Dandelions ruptured into saffron starbursts, withered, and spent their seed twining on the breeze. Downy seedlings caressed my face and clung to my hair.
“The residual self-image of Earth Herself; this is where She comes when She dreams.” The Bright Man smiled his radically outspread grin, and if it weren’t for the childlike delight suffusing the whole of his features it might have been terrifying. Blinking back the glare, I took in the panorama.
Great and fleshy leaves hung suspended from the canopies, pulsing with their own sanguine fluids. Tree-bark glittered with its own near-metallic mysteries; fruit blistered along the trunks in tantalizing clusters. I flexed my toes in the soil as clover tried to snake around my ankles, leaned over and plucked a Jaboticaba cherry. Distended, the peel taut and begging for release, I bit a hole in the purplish skin as I had hundreds upon thousands of times before. A small brindle-brown bird alighted on the back of The Bright Man’s hand as I squeezed.
At the zenith of ripeness, Jaboticaba had never been so realized. The fruit positively wept juice in my mouth, my teeth slicing through the harvest-veins with razor like precision. I felt like the mythic Taliesin, scalding my tongue with those first exalted drops of wisdom. I tore into another, and another, and another. Peels drifted to stain the earth like bruises. The Bright Man watched me with avid yet reticent interest, stroked the wings of the recherché songbird twittering at his ear.
I ate until pearly sap dribbled from the corners of my mouth and the muscles circling my torso began to tick with an obscure, sallow vibration.
“What’s happening?” I gasped. Afternoon throbbed into twilight. Rinds and uneaten fruit rolled out of my grasp as I began to shiver all over.
The pain was an exponential thing, starting as a dull ache akin to fatigue and creeping upward in time with the tintinnabulary ripple pinprickling over my body. I was doubled over, clutching the swollen mound of my belly. A queer skittering sensation registered against my palms.
“It hurts.” I implored The Bright Man, curled on my side in the lush grass beds. He fidgeted above me, the elastic skin covering his face expanding and constricting wildly. I moaned into the ground, unable to summon the breath to scream as the pain crested inexorably higher.
As though coming to a decision, he suddenly pounced to straddle my waist pinioning me with one hand to my throat as he pressed the opposing fingertips into one menacing apex. The bird took to the air around the lambent whitecap of his hair caught, it seemed, in that sovereign halo.
“No – ” I barely got the word out before The Bright Man drove his taloned hand like a stiletto into the soft flesh skirting my navel.
Then I found the strength to scream; then I clawed at the forearm lodged to the wrist in my gut. The sharp, muscadine-like fragrance of Jaboticaba spirits assailed my nostrils even as firewater sluiced from the wound. He heard none of it, eased his hand from the gash with infinite tenderness. His fingers smoldered in chartreuse rivulets. Agony devolved into an immaterial presence hovering in the air between us as he compelled my attention. Violet sparks diffused into violet tinder as our eyes locked.
“Choose.” He said as I gagged on the wine frothing from my lips. The Bright Man was an eternity unto himself surging toward entropy. In my imperfect understanding of age, I withered. Glowworms writhed, devoured, and gurgled in pestilent supernovas from the ever widening cavity howling beneath my ribs. I was beginning to fade, and I welcomed it, detached myself from it.
The Bright Man took a handful of the larvae in his hand and squeezed, popping the tiny grublings in a zit-like cluster until their bioluminescence greased his fingers. Seeming older than the perpetuity of his form, he laid his palm across my forehead in viscerous baptism. Luciferase radiance obscured my vision; I closed my eyes.
“You are a Madonna in the oeuvre of primacy itself. There is no Beauty without Tragedy to deepen it, lend it meaning.” Fireworms stretched, split their skins, chaos shooting candle flies into the milky, Cimmerian haze.
“Be beautiful, earth, flame, daughter, but never forget – ” Was it regret that deepened his voice? Feathery, versicolored wings caressed my face.
“ – that our talents should inspire such grief…”
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"Paindancer,” By Lineia Corell
Copyright © 2010
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