Revenant

The story unfolds in many places: in the modern age

it takes place in Houla, before this in Constantinople,

and earlier still on the hilltops of Jerusalem

(an echo of the descendants of Amalek, may he not be forgotten).

The night falls and brutal men walk within it.

Their footsteps are unspeakable, their weapons split the air

once, then handfuls and dozens and scores and hundreds of times and forever

the air is broken and even the beasts that feast upon carrion are wary.

The door is torn from the hinges, the family huddles together in a corner.

Both men, a day laborer and his decrepit father, are taken quickly outside.

The wife of the younger screams out "Why do you take them?"

and is silenced with a stroke of a truncheon that splits her head

from ear to eye. Suddenly five or six children are running

but the only door is blocked by a titan who leers and laughs

and he smells like a festival of sacrifice and his torch is the moon.

The other men within the house kill the youngest child, a girl, first,

then a boy about six years of age. A girl of nine years lunges

at the savage men like a hero. She falls.

Her older brother falls beside and quietly covers himself

in the blood of his family and he tries not to breathe

and not to cough and he prays silently, which is not his custom.

The other children are dispatched without excessive torture;

the woman who lays unconscious receives the mercy stroke.

The men illuminate the house and, satisfied than none remain alive,

continue up the cobble-stoned street.

The boy inhales the red-heavy rust of the night.

The scene repeats.

Dryad

Summer is near.

His hair is blond and it bears a vague resemblance to cirrus clouds.

On his back he carries a skin of water, a skin of wine,

and a bundle swaddled in blackened cloth (the size of a man's leg).

On his belt he carries a sheath with a hand-length blade.

There are certain appearances that demand the existence

of painters or sculptors, and Morea the Hamadryad possesses one of them;

her irreducible visage shall no longer be spoken of.

He walks up beneath the immense mulberry tree that is Hers.

"Morea, you are looking very lovely." He pauses, his left hand

brushes a tendril of hair that had been obscuring her eyes,

and suddenly a bough on the tree shifts, as if to smash a fly.

He raises his voice. "Your charms are no longer mine alone,

are they? I hear rumors from the birds; rumors that others have,

shall we say, taken many naps in the shade you cast upon the ground?

That you let them crawl on your body and mind... oh, it disgusts me,

like the silkworms you indulge. In every wintry berry you permit

them to pluck and use for food, it tempts me to call upon Megaera!"

Men have thrown themselves upon spear-points to avoid such glares.

She growls.

"Speak of The Jealous One on pain of doom,

Bright One who rides upon the heavens,

for she is more idle than you seem to think

and is not one to give thanks for vain invocations."

"Save your cautions, woman. I did not come to bandy words like a eunuch.

I bring to your hearth and home a sword, and ruin."

She begins to weep and there is a rustling in the canopy above

and she is ancient, unbelievably ancient, to be seventy feet tall and more,

and the leaves fall, first one and then a dozen, and more. She speaks.

"Have you still not found a mirror, then? You fear blindness so intensely;

but I have viewed you many times and still I see. I drank in your power

and still we both have glory! Why do you grudge what is natural?

Why should strangers not seek refuge, why should I not be hospitable?"

Her eyes focus on the bundle on his back

and she gasps. "That... that is no bow. What do you bring to my home?"

He unties the packet, the dyed fabric drops and drapes the clover.

An axe falls down with barely a protest from the earth.

She shudders. The land groans as her roots shift. Insects panic in swarms.

"So that is what you think of me? Prideful as your father, then,

Pythian Apollo: of course Daphne was not enough to sate your craving.

Here, I will help you on your way!" She seizes his belt knife and draws the tip

from her kneecap to her hip. Water and life flow out instead of crimson,

a deep seam of sap seeps from a furrow in the mulberry tree.

"Is that enough for you? No?" She shrieks,

she shrieks and turns the knife to her breasts and the berries fall

as if winter has come with all its snow and she carves herself

and cries. Her wounds and tears are identical. She cries out,

"How proud! How like the sun! It would be different if I had wronged you,

but here I am, rooted and constant, and for what?"

He seems unfazed and lifts his murderous tool. The honed edge bites deeply.

Morea's ankle lets out a sheen of milk or water or wine, and then again

the axe comes down and she stumbles and one foot

disappears; a pile of coarse sand remains.

He continues and each stroke unleashes more rage than the last. Sawdust flies.

The berries blanket the earth. She whispers slowly, punctuated with gaps from pain:

"Why? Why now? When the dark goddess sits on her throne below

and I am but a withered crone, a shell of the mother that fears light,

-none commune with me or seek the shelter of my arms,

and on so many days in that gloomed season we have laughed

together and no hair then hides my eyes and you truly have seen me...

is that why violence comes now, do you loathe ripeness

enough to cull it with forged iron? You would not dare to injure me thus

if I appeared as the old woman of your memories and your future!"

Sawdust flies.

She shivers. "I will tell you this. You make a mockery even of lust.

There will come a time with true lovers, the which you shall never be,

and they will speak to each other through cracks in forbidden walls and later

there will be grim fear in Babylon near a tomb and dark shadowy horrors

that are also lionesses, and on that day in your high chariot,

gaze upon the lands and find my trees, all bearing red fruit.

You will see the truth of love in every bloody berry,

and in that reflection you will see a coward and know that you did less and"

her voice ceases, for she has fallen.

Naiad

Many things have been said concerning the nymph Salmacis.

I have heard a story of a youth that glimpsed her through trees

and their leaves.

She sits on a grey boulder that is surrounded by a stream

(and when old women tell the story the water is cold and

when old men tell the story, the temperature is opposite).

Seeing her there, he says in a whisper,

"Should I pursue, knowing as I do

the danger posed by the lady of the water?

Even children have heard the stories;

of ambitious, amorous men who crept slowly

toward a certain curve in this murky stream,

only to find their feet affixed by reeds,

webs of weeds holding them tenderly and then

without a rain the stream rises higher and higher."

He chooses to ignore his imagined peril,

else there would be no tale. In daylight he approaches her.

When she sees him her eyes are like tomorrow's rain.

She laughs slightly. "I was just about to ask you,

my dear mortal, if it was the case that you were very brave

or very foolish, but with bells on your toes you would be less absurd."

He makes his decision quickly.

"Be that as it may, lady, still I pledge to you my steadfast hand.

As surely as my heart beats in this moment,

I will adore you until I am no more."

She lowers her chin and her eyes are lost in her hair.

In a spray, she whips her jaw forward and grins.

"That is a promise to which you will be held,"

she says. She kicks him in the stomach

and he hunches over. She shakes her head

and he is turned to stone. She pushes at him with her shoulders,

his petrified body rolls clumsily into the brook's path.

"Oh, you'll be the same forever? Such an oath,

though less terrifying than it would be if you could keep it.

Sleep now, and dream of storms."

The tale seems outrageous and in all honesty I would not believe it

myself, save that I have seen his face in the sand of a beach in Miami,

and years later in a low corner of the glass that holds my whiskey.