(This Life) Part 10 – Chapter 1: The Dream Catcher’s Tale

 

“I - who once was flesh, chaste – was chased and made unchaste,

Unclothed, opened and displayed,

Tattooed  with the word, at the crossroads of the world….

I am bound, bound, bound…..”

 

We find her beneath the diseased elm –

Sickened roots still supple sucking,

Circuited circles bedded, nippled

To its immaculate mothers’ many wombs,

Their sustaining knowledge, deeply seeded,

Now gently guiding, moving,

Preparing it for the end of its days -

Head crowned with thorned clouds, red sunned,

Stretching silver towards those exquisite

Points of extinction,

Where green melds with blue

And there is no distinction

Between this and that,

That which was, is and about to be,

Silkworms threading her outstretched arms,

Cocoons, each a moment subtly spun

From somewhere, to the left of here and there, nowhere,

Voices, them and us, suffocated,

You and I, dark and light, hours

Waiting to be ripped open and sung.

 

We’re paused:

The dogs’ silent bark echoes in The Ridings;

The wychelm spring trickles down her legs,

Earth’s menses deep red dribbling.

 

We’re paused….watch

Rising pasts rupture, the elm’s gathered stock,

The run of rivers, chasms and canyons chased,

The woodpecker beating out the rhythm of the hearse,

The tik tok of the mourning’s desperation,

Voices, once blocked, locked, conjured now,

Flooding up through the wet earth

And into her, flesh glistening guano white.  

 

We would pass…

She calls my name.

Paused we are  

We are mesmerised.

Her eyes, her eyes, her eyes draw, her eyes pull,

Her eyes, her eyes, her eyes, eye, eye

Into their vortex drowning we fall……

 

“Take my hand,” I hear her say, “take it.”

I

Jump! New line – new paragraph

 

Cutting rain outside. She shivers. The moon hidden behind the kitchen smoke tracing its way into nowhere. They’re leaving in the morning. ‘To be with your father,’ her mother says. She has no notion of what ‘father’ means, has grown up, with her grandmother, surrounded by aunts, real and not, their soft shuffling in the shared house, voices whispering of this and that, the chores of planting and gathering and binding and washing and cutting and grinding and kneading and the oh so so soft ache of being.

Wild, Wild, Run wild she has, leading her dogs through the alleys, across the fields, chasing rats and the choreographed crows which, now, have learnt to hide at her not so subtle approach. She’s been fed brown rice and raw sugar and salty milk, and the hard sweets which she’s shared with her cousins, whose unwashed perfume hangs on her every etym.

And now she’s leaving. Space. This space, which was hers, soon to be vacant.

Her uncle, her mother’s favourite younger, an army man, tall and straight, stands at the door. “Come,” he says, “I have a leaving present.” In his hands shines a five cornered coin. He leads her into the courtyard, away from the house, the farthest corner, behind the banyan tree, its branches festooned with broken dolls, clay frayed by wind and rain.

Wind and rain                             Wind and rain               Wind                  and                    rain

the last image before a thread of wet silk is tightened around her throat.

Dry songs black swing through the ether of memories that mothers hoard,

From behind the bars of her eyes she watches her, still playing, wild, wild, leading her dogs,

Then the hammering of the day breaks her,

AIE AIE AIE the so so hard ache of being,

living beyond the span of her child.