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hawkwing_lbIn honour of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I'm posting six poems and a short story.
They're not, I suppose, 'professional' quality, but they're the closest I have.
(I'm posting early because I have a theology essay and a Roman art and architecture test this week, and thus do not expect to be sticking my head up for a while.)
The Poems:
"Symmetries of Stone, April 26-27, 2004"
Through dark unhallowed palaces, the kingdoms of the deep,
A thousand scuttling claws skitter on abandoned floors
And weeping sea-anemones comb out their hair.
This is not a darkness where anything may sleep.
Not night-dark, no, but ocean-dark, primordial;
No moon nor sun can ever light these weed-strewn spires
Where polished marble has decayed to pits and scars
And crumbling ruin waits upon unbreathing fall.
Devastation caused by the violent landing of a nuclear star;
When oceans stormed and valleys rose and mountains fell,
And rising seas turned fertile land to green and watered hell,
A furrowed bedrock rift in dark and hollow scars.
Deep in the deep, a nation’s long-lost tomb,
Where eels wind up the empty, crumbling stair
And weeping sea-anemones comb out their hair
Among the ruined catacombs of this long-fallen doom.
Come dance in the streets of which nothing can be known,
Where the unfound foundered and the seas burned,
And the founders first laid pillars in the foundation of the world.
Come dance in the courtyards, in seaweed’s flowing curls,
Where crayfish crouch in hollows and hold their pincers furled
To hear dark unformed silences, the sliding symmetries of stone.
#
"Oct 01, 2005: Letter to another, who could be me"
I came home to write
without having known.
The Rah has declared decommissioning; statements
crawl into the emotional depths that is
God, good, evil, none
Love is above the balaclava and the gun
and gentlemen, please
no proper work done.
I have no take
on current
government.
Otherwise a bad day.
Cynicism congeals,
very vivid dribbles,
but just about me,
me thinking of the
garden
and the first fall;
the faces of the possible.
And understanding is pushing into my sleep sometimes,
over death.
Politicians tell lies.
Despite promises otherwise.
And the armed struggle is mean by nature.
#
"December 20, 2006: For Gallipoli"
Lay your prayers upon the water,
Beside the windy plain, and
Fields of old slaughter;
Covenants of death.
Artillery yields
the thunder of the gods;
Silence, choking:
unspoken breath.
On Scamander plain the Danaans fought, before high Trojan walls -
To an altar here Cassandra clung, doomed Priam's daughter.
Lay your prayers upon the water.
Silence, falling away
as the mortar falls.
Many men have died here for small gain, often,
And rain has washed the rocks
clean of their blood, rocks
that floods have not softened.
Their suns set here, those sons doomed to slaughter
And moonlight ripples on the wine-dark sea
Across the distance between them, and me.
Moonrise could be sunset's daughter.
Lay your prayers upon the water.
#
(April 12, 2006)
I am a stone
Smooth, edgeless; serene,
Surrounded; silent.
I am a stone in the water,
Jagged and wet and deep;
Weed-wrapped and dark-drowning.
I am a stone in the water
That the world has thrown.
I am a stone in the water,
Weed-rounded, deep-drowned.
And the water here is cold.
#
"April 6, 2006: Homecoming"
The roof of the sky extends to infinity
the roots of the earth too deep to know
heads up poetry made in motion
the rhythm of your feet and the need to go
the freedom of your limbs is the rhythm of your laughter
the freedom of your laughter is the rhythm of your soul
this is what the god of love is
this is what it means to be free
in sky-clear woodsmoked April twilight
the grass is a thousand shades of green.
#
"September 19, 2006: Wrack"
the sea, hard-handed,
grinding slow amongst the stones
owns the catch in my throat -
wrought in grey salt
and white-surf spray
sea-goddess turning, infinite
great-hungered and slow-churning
winter-chill woken in my bones
sea-voices spoken
on the swan-winged wave.
storms to follow after
and ships spine-shattered
on a sandbar
not far from safe harbour.
# # # # # # # #
The Story:
"Eschatology of a Witch"
The angel comes in the last bruise of twilight, alighting amid pots of rosemary and thyme on my balcony in the rush of wings. He perches on my kitchen’s gleaming metal counter, a being spun of divinity and dreams, and suffers me to clean the blood from his shining form.
He always comes bloody, when he comes at all.
I hurt him, but he never flinches. He smells like clouds and saltwater and sunlight, but underneath is the scent of flesh. It’s a sign of his fall: his form is human now, as much as it can ever be, and like a human, it bleeds.
"What was it this time?" Bloody cloths go in a bag to be burned. I hitch my hip against the counter and watch him in the yellow glare of the ceiling bulb. He’s beautiful, and I’m a fool.
He shrugs, muscle rippling beneath his pale-gold skin. "Something from the Deep Between. Nothing that would follow me here."
"The place is warded, anyway." Spells burn in pewter candle-holders beside every door and window. I’ve grown used to the odour of scorched metal: it’s a small price to pay for protection from the things between.
"You think that matters to Them? As if your petty spells and Lilith’s thin blood would ever be enough to let you keep your sanity in sight of even the smallest crack in the world between." He barks a laugh, shakes his head. "If you think you could, Isabelle, then you’re a fool even for a witch."
"Oh, I’m a fool, alright. But I’m the fool who’s still willing to watch your back, flyboy, so watch it."
"Yes," he murmurs, and leans his jet-haired head back against a cupboard door. "Yes, you are."
If his skin was not freshly etched with new scars every night, and his pain at his exile not so great, I could have hated him. But he and I are more alike than either of us would prefer to admit. He is bereft of his heaven, and I --
Well. Lilith’s kin are welcome in neither the Garden nor the Pit.
She was good at making enemies.
#
Dublin in summer darkness smells of petrol and asphalt, alcohol and water: the sluggish snake of the Liffey an oily chasm dividing its heart. Traffic rumbles under streetlights and neon; music and noise beating out of bars and nightclubs to join the grating of engines over concrete and cobbles, and working girls ply their trade on the streets down by the Grand Canal.
It’s a city that grows on you, like fungus, or chewing gum stuck to the heel of your shoe, and like every city it has an underbelly, dark and rotten and stinking. Schoolgirls playing at magic; college boys shocking their parents with the trappings of devil-worship; men and women who opened through the wrong door at the wrong time and saw things they should never have seen: the world between preys innocents like them.
I close doors where I can, but I’m only a witch, and I know no other living daughters of Lilith’s line. A witch cannot bear children and remain a witch: Adam’s curse on Lilith’s line, for her disobedience and her pride. Thus a witch is a rarity: but we are born still, and nursed to adulthood on mingled bitterness and love.
Even were they inclined to, not all the witches in all the world could close the doors between and keep them shut.
#
Walking down Lombard Street East towards the Liffey, I pause to lay wards and scratch chalk symbols of protection on a wall where a dark smear -- not a smear to ordinary eyes, not really a smear at all -- indicates the possibility of a door. Maybe it’ll keep someone from seeing things that are better left unseen.
Maybe.
You do what you can.
The Liffey is running high, languid and dark beneath the metal arch of the new footbridge. The Sean O’Casey Bridge: streetlights reflect from its nameplate. There’s an itch in my spine and an oppressive feeling in the dark: something’s out there tonight. Something dangerous.
The angel was still in my apartment when I left, glowering at the walls and leaking blood on the furniture. I wouldn’t mind having him here with me tonight, but wings and gleaming flesh are hard to keep hidden, and I don’t have the skill to ward an angel to pass unnoticed.
There’s a woman waiting for me on a bench on Custom House Quay, shuffling a tarot deck between her fingers. Her called greeting stops me in my tracks.
"What’s the bad news this time, granny?" I lean against the river wall, disturbed. The old woman’s a clairvoyant -- not a witch, but foresight isn’t a talent to lightly dismiss. I don’t know her name, and I doubt I ever will, but she has a habit of turning up to deliver the worst possible news, usually at the worst possible time.
"Is that any way to say hello to a friend?" Her wrinkles rearrange themselves into a sour smile. "And I am your friend, you know."
"Bloody odd way you have of showing it."
"Such language from a young woman." She clucks her uneven teeth, but liver-spotted hands are dealing cards onto the wood of the bench. "What are they teaching you in schools these days? Go ahead, turn them over."
Five cards, facedown. I swallow, and flip over laminated paper with finger and thumb.
The Tower. The Hanged Man. The Moon. Judgement. Death. All major arcana: I've never seen that before.
"Not a good reading," the old woman says quietly. She taps the final card with a blunt fingertip. "No, not good. Be careful, dear."
The grim reaper grins up at me until she sweeps the cards away. The night is even more oppressive than before.
"And now I’m getting out of here," the old woman says, "before whatever it is that’s following you catches up."
"Following me?"
"There’s something hungry out tonight. And it's looking for you."
#
I run, soles slapping the pavement, breath burning in my throat. Fear is a cold weight in my gut, adding impetus to my pounding strides. The old woman is right: there’s something following me, and I can feel it now, all malevolence and hunger. I need walls and wards, iron and flame to protect me from something slipped through from between. I have chalk in my jeans pocket and three iron rings on my fingers. Not enough.
I race up the quays. Hard concrete jars my knees. Sweat soaks my scalp, turns my hair wet and stringy. Traffic snarls the O’Connell Bridge junction: I sprint between cars and trucks and gaggles of late-night tourists and partiers, feeling the hunter in the dark behind me like foul breath on my neck. It’s not human, never was: a thing from the Deep Between. All poisoned hunger, all hate and pain.
I can’t keep running forever. I need somewhere to make a stand, a wall to put my back against. The thing isn’t interested in other people: it wants me.
I don’t think I can count on a rescue.
I slow to approach the doors of a pub at a respectable pace. The doorman doesn’t ask for ID. Inside is hot and sweaty and packed with noisy people: in one corner a trad band is belting out Jack Hall with as much enthusiasm as talent. I squeeze into a seat near the entrance to the toilets, catch my breath, and watch the door.
And my neck will pay for all when I die, when I die --
My chalk is greasy between my fingers. I scratch a rough symbol on the back of a beer mat and crumple the thin cardboard in my fist. A whispered word, and I hold a palmful of ash: fire is a discreet, useful spell.
It’s a shout for help, though I can’t believe any will come.
I could have used the angel with me tonight.
I sketch more symbols in the spilled beer on the counter by my elbow. Minor protections, small wards. They might buy me a heartbeat or two. Maybe I’ll get a miracle.
No point in praying for one. That bridge was burned long ago.
And then it comes, a tall dark shadow with a face full of teeth, and time runs out.
It glides in through the open door, and though the crowd cannot see it they draw back from the ripple of its passage like a parting sea. Their noise dims, and the band’s fiddler screeches a ragged note. It’s a thing from between, and even the faintest shadow of its passage through the sunlit world brings the breath of madness and despair and cold, nameless fear.
Even I can’t see more than a shadow of what it truly is, the shadow it casts on the sunlit world, but even that shadow is enough to leach the warmth from my bones, leach my will away. It’s nothing I can face, nothing I can fight: better to lie down, to give up and wait for the end...
"I am," I hiss through clenched teeth, "not dead yet."
Though surely that won’t last long.
The toilet doors give way beneath my scrabbling fingers. I kick the laminated wood shut behind me and cast about for another way out.
There isn’t one. I’m trapped in a small square room of white tile and plumbing with the clinging scent of alcohol and perfume.
I stop with my back against the wall beneath the narrow window. Fluorescent light yellows my skin. I do have another way out. It’s just one I can’t believe I’ll survive.
But I'm not going to lie down and wait to die.
Chalk skitters on tile. A handful of symbols: the most basic wards I know. I’m pricking my thumb and smearing the blood over my iron rings when the sudden sweet yank of pain in my bones tells me the hunter has overset the minor protections I left outside.
Too little time. Wards drawn on my forehead, wrists and navel in blood; too fast, too rough: my tongue tangles on the final words of the spell as the door swings open and the shadow sweeps in.
I take a last breath and step between.
#
The angel was wrong: I can stand the sight of the world between and not go mad. Not the Deep Between, where time itself is twisted and beings swim in an ocean of nothingness more absolute than the void between the stars; but the Shallows, the shoals where the world between laps up against the sunlit world, sliding into the cracks between the world above and the world below.
It's not a pleasant experience.
It appears as a river. A strange jagged distended river, water radiating neither darkness nor light but something in between. Or perhaps it's a lake, or even a sea. A sea without a horizon in a world without a sky.
But this is the Between, and appearances bear no relation to purpose, or function, or form.
For the moment I stand ankle-deep in a river, because I will it so and my will and my spell together are just strong enough to keep it that way. And the river creeps the living daylights out of me, because even the Shallows are still the Between, and the Between is like that.
If I wasn’t a witch, and a strong witch at that, I would already be mad or dead or both.
That can still happen.
I have a breathing space. The hunter might still follow, but even for an entity used to the Deep Between the transition is jarring and the Shallows confusing. If I can get out of here before something else kills me, I should be able to get behind my walls and wards before it can find me again.
If I can get out of here.
Entities from the Deeps might seldom traverse the Shallows, but when they do, they do so with relative impunity. I’m human, if only mostly. The denizens of the Shallows are drawn to witchcraft like moths to flame: it’s why all witchcraft needs to be done behind wards and walls, within reach of iron and flame. Witchcraft makes thin places in the fabric of the world.
I start walking, wading through not-water that tugs at my ankles, trying to pull me down and under. There is not-darkness and not-light, a grey nothingness that obscures more than it reveals. And things, plinking and rippling in the water. Coming closer. Terror is cold bile in my throat. I need time to think, time to work up a spell to bridge back to the sunlit world. Time I don't have.
Another step, with the water dragging at my heels, and the shadow looms out of the greyness, black and poisonous and hating. It's not a shadow here, but solid: the hungry essence of everything inimical to life distilled into shape, and if I look at it, it will drive me mad.
A thing from the Deeps. When it touches me, I'll be worse than dead.
But it doesn't touch me. It stops short, a terrifying pressure on my senses. On my sanity. Want, it says, but not in words. A grinding, crushing, alien thought. Want... hurtful/shining/winged one.
Mother Lilith in the Garden. It wants the angel.
Not me. Not today.
Want, it grates with tearing strength --
And then there's something else there, abruptly interposed between that dark presence and my fragile mortal flesh -- something sharp and painful and blazing with penumbraed light. Something that rips a hole in the Between and drags me gasping out into the warm darkness of the Dublin night.
#
"Lilith's spawn." A disgusted voice.
The pavement's hard beneath my knees. I swallow the burn of bile in my throat and look up. "...hell." I need to swallow again. "Not another one of you."
It's an angel. Not a fallen one: the shimmer of its form has none of the solidity of flesh. He's beautiful, but sexless: there is nothing erotic in this perfection.
His glance alone makes me feel soiled and small. Unworthy. I'm a witch, and he's one of God's own ruthless servants, and that means --
"You have no call to cast stones."
My voice is a rasp, but a strong one. Kneeling there on the pavement, it takes everything to have to meet the infinity of his eyes, but I do it anyway.
I have my pride.
And what are you doing here anyway?
"You called for help," he says, answering the question I never asked aloud. "I answered. If I had known who had called, I would not have come."
"You belong to the Garden." This conversation feels incongruous on an asphalt road, in the shadow of city apartments with their clothes drying on grey balconies in the warm dark. I pull myself to my feet. I think I've had stranger conversations in odder places, but I can't remember where.
He inclines his head. "And the beast belongs to the Deep Between. But you, Lilith's daughter, you don't belong anywhere. What did it want with you?"
A change of tack. "What did it want?" I choke a laugh and jerk my head. "You want to know, go ask it."
He blinks, long eyelashes golden against his glittering perfection. "I don't need to," he says, quietly. "It wants my fallen brother. And neither you nor he, little witch, are strong enough to stand in its way. It is already feeding at the edges of the sunlit world: soon, it will be strong enough that its tie to the Between will no longer hold it back."
There's fear mixed with the anger and bitterness churning in my gut; I shove my hands in my pockets to keep them from turning into fists. "Are you just here to gloat? Because, frankly, unless you have something useful to say, why don't you just go away?"
"What should I say? That it would take the death of an angel, at least, to kill this thing?"
"You want it killed." I'm suddenly cold, suddenly certain. "You and your Omnipotent."
"The Garden wants it... dealt with." He smiled, slowly. "But I am not convinced it is a mortal thing. And though perhaps I could get rid of it, why should I, when my fallen brother may do it for me?"
#
I stagger home in the dawn, shaky and stomach-sick.
The angel meets me at the door. It hurts to look at him. Beautiful and gentle and terrible: still trying to fight his ancient war. Only the battlefield has changed.
"What happened to you?" he demands.
"Nothing worth the mention." The wards settle around me. Protection. I remember his words: You think that matters to Them? As if your petty spells and Lilith’s thin blood would ever be enough.
And the shadow from Between. Want.
And the unfallen angel, that being of spirit and perfection: And though perhaps I can get rid of it, why should I, when my fallen brother may do it for me?
The ruler of the Garden has always been ruthless.
I want to touch him, hold him for the comfort that holding him would bring. I don't. I can't afford to.
"I can tell when you lie, Isabelle."
"And I'll tell you when I'm ready. All right?" Fear turns into anger at the mildest provocation. I wrap my arms around my shoulders to control my shudders, and glare at him.
"All right," he says softly, and looks at me for a long time before leaving from my balcony again, there and gone in an instant.
#
These are the seven angels of the Garden whose names given unto to children of Lilith to know: Mikhael, Uriel, Gavriel, Rafael, Zerakiel, Remiel, Ruhiel. The others are not nameless, as the fallen are, but I do not know their names.
#
I redo the wards, stronger, harder, sharper. Clean the apartment until the odour of burnt metal and incense is almost overwhelmed by disinfectant. Anything, everything, to avoid having to think.
I could hate the angel. Or I could love him.
I do neither. But I don't want to lose him.
I can't keep him.
When I am drained to exhaustion and there no surface remains unscrubbed, I let myself acknowledge the truth: I'm terrified.
#
Sunlight makes me brave. I walk down to the quays in the rushing heartbeat of mid-afternoon, the city a living organism pulsing against my senses. There is quietude in the river and the grey-white façade of the Customs House, in walking between the cracks in the pavement, in not seeing the cracks in the world.
If the angel were beside me, he would mock me for desiring the innocence of ignorance. Unseen does not mean non-existent: if I were ignorant, I would be unprotected.
If I lived a life that left me ignorant, perhaps I would not need protection.
What has my life taught me of angels?
Only how they fall.
They fall through disobedience. And through pride.
Lilith's sins.
And Lucifer's. Who durst defy the Omnipotent to Arms, as Milton said, though none has dared to match his rebellion since.
The ruler of that Eternal Garden is as jealous a master as the lord of the Pit. Caught in the middle is the sunlit world, and all that emptiness Between, and what is a mere witch supposed to do, when none of the Powers will heed her prayer or take her bargain?
#
I take down the wards in sunlight streaming through my open windows. Build them back up again, layer upon twisted layer. But these wards keep nothing out.
I lay them to hold things in.
#
The angel is dripping blood on my kitchen floor for the second time in as many days, and I cannot be gentle with him. Anymore than he has ever been gentle with me.
It hurts to look at him.
"Something from the Deeps followed me last night," I say when the towels are soaking in the sink and his golden skin is no longer streaked with red. "It wants you."
"Ah," he says. Only that. Only one painful sigh, but there is despair in it as well as pain. "It let you go?"
"Yes."
"Don't lie to me."
Don't ask me to tell you the truth.
It'll only hurt worse.
"One of the Garden's seraphim was passing," I say softly. "He gave me a way out."
He leans back against the counter, eyes ancient and hurting.
"Why won't you tell me what you want, Isabelle?" he asks, softly.
What I want I can never have. The first curse in the Garden saw to that. Nothing in my life will ever be untouched by Lilith's legacy. Not even the angel, bright and painful and passing fair as he might be.
It's cold here, without the candles burning. "What do you? want?" I say in lieu of answering, and turn away from him to fill the kettle. My spine itches. I am waiting for the shadow, for the thing from Between.
The wards will not hold it out.
"To see the Garden again," he says softly. "Just to see it again, if only once."
The longing in those words catches my breath in my throat, trembles my hand pouring boiling water into a cup. A cold knot aches in my chest.
I have to turn away.
The spell is wrought in water and earth; fire, iron, and blood both mortal and divine. My blood and the angel's: his taken with neither his knowledge nor his consent; mine given freely in full knowledge of the consequences. It's a spell to summon and one to bind, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm about to commit betrayal.
My left hand sketches a glyph in the air: it takes less than a breath of effort to trigger the spell. The angel doesn't notice. He's still staring into a distance I will never see.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then there's a brief flash of heat, like a match sparking, and the unfallen seraph stands in my kitchen, his expression a study in shocked disdain.
"Gavriel," I say, and watch shock turn to horror in his unfleshly beauty. Strong man of God, that is the meaning of the syllables of his name.
There is power in names.
"Isabelle!" My fallen angel has grabbed my shoulder. "What are you doing?"
"Child of Lilith," the seraph says, a whisper perilously near a moan. "What have you done?"
"Bound you." I tilt my chin up to see my fallen angel's features, and my voice is caught between whisper and prayer.
"Bound you both. I'm sorry."
I release my second spell, the one it revolted me to build.
The one it sickens me to need.
I can't let the hunger from the Deep Between swallow the world. And I cannot trust a seraph from the Garden to stop it, or not in time: the Garden's whim has ever been capricious when it comes to the sunlit world.
"It's coming," the seraph Gavriel says, and his tone is grim. He looks at my fallen angel. In that moment I see the Garden's arrogance, its certainty, fall away. In its wake is something that looks almost human, calm but still afraid. "Stand with me, brother?"
There is something in that glance that looks uncomfortably like love.
The world splinters before I can hear an answer. Shards of consciousness like fragmented glass. Hot water scalds my hands and freezes there, burningly cold. The aching void of the Deeps howls into my apartment.
The angel shouts and I can't make out the words. The world goes black and white and shaded silver-grey. I bring up the wards and cast a layer of protections around myself.
The angel is backed against the cabinets, wings mantled, from nowhere a sword flaming in his fist. The shadow surrounds him, darkness penumbraed, a twisting of the world, and the seraph Gavriel is snarling, burning, tearing at its heart.
I scratch more wards on my frozen countertop. My teeth rattle in my jaw.
The shadow swallows my angel, and Gavriel screams as it reaches out to enfold him also and I shout with every ripped fibre of my heart, calling on the Garden and the Pit, on the sacred and profane, on all of the bitter humanity of Lilith's long-cursed line, on sunlight and life drunk to the lees, on everything that is not lost and twisted Between, on every last flicker of brightness in the darkness of the world --
Heat flares. Something burns. Someone screams, and I think it's the seraph but perhaps it's me, broken open and bleeding to the core --
Darkness.
#
When it is over, I am still here, and the shadow is gone.
So is the angel.
Both of them.
#
Lilith's sin was pride. In more ways than one, I am heir to her legacy, and I cannot repent of my choices.
I am one of Lilith's daughters. In the end, all that is left to us is to choose the manner of our damnation. For such as me, there can be no absolution.
I would not seek it if I could.
-30-
# # # # # # # #
And in the spirit of eternal hope and chancing one's arm:
And since copyright works differently on the other side of the Atlantic, this is me reserving my rights just in case. :)
They're not, I suppose, 'professional' quality, but they're the closest I have.
(I'm posting early because I have a theology essay and a Roman art and architecture test this week, and thus do not expect to be sticking my head up for a while.)
The Poems:
"Symmetries of Stone, April 26-27, 2004"
Through dark unhallowed palaces, the kingdoms of the deep,
A thousand scuttling claws skitter on abandoned floors
And weeping sea-anemones comb out their hair.
This is not a darkness where anything may sleep.
Not night-dark, no, but ocean-dark, primordial;
No moon nor sun can ever light these weed-strewn spires
Where polished marble has decayed to pits and scars
And crumbling ruin waits upon unbreathing fall.
Devastation caused by the violent landing of a nuclear star;
When oceans stormed and valleys rose and mountains fell,
And rising seas turned fertile land to green and watered hell,
A furrowed bedrock rift in dark and hollow scars.
Deep in the deep, a nation’s long-lost tomb,
Where eels wind up the empty, crumbling stair
And weeping sea-anemones comb out their hair
Among the ruined catacombs of this long-fallen doom.
Come dance in the streets of which nothing can be known,
Where the unfound foundered and the seas burned,
And the founders first laid pillars in the foundation of the world.
Come dance in the courtyards, in seaweed’s flowing curls,
Where crayfish crouch in hollows and hold their pincers furled
To hear dark unformed silences, the sliding symmetries of stone.
#
"Oct 01, 2005: Letter to another, who could be me"
I came home to write
without having known.
The Rah has declared decommissioning; statements
crawl into the emotional depths that is
God, good, evil, none
Love is above the balaclava and the gun
and gentlemen, please
no proper work done.
I have no take
on current
government.
Otherwise a bad day.
Cynicism congeals,
very vivid dribbles,
but just about me,
me thinking of the
garden
and the first fall;
the faces of the possible.
And understanding is pushing into my sleep sometimes,
over death.
Politicians tell lies.
Despite promises otherwise.
And the armed struggle is mean by nature.
#
"December 20, 2006: For Gallipoli"
Lay your prayers upon the water,
Beside the windy plain, and
Fields of old slaughter;
Covenants of death.
Artillery yields
the thunder of the gods;
Silence, choking:
unspoken breath.
On Scamander plain the Danaans fought, before high Trojan walls -
To an altar here Cassandra clung, doomed Priam's daughter.
Lay your prayers upon the water.
Silence, falling away
as the mortar falls.
Many men have died here for small gain, often,
And rain has washed the rocks
clean of their blood, rocks
that floods have not softened.
Their suns set here, those sons doomed to slaughter
And moonlight ripples on the wine-dark sea
Across the distance between them, and me.
Moonrise could be sunset's daughter.
Lay your prayers upon the water.
#
(April 12, 2006)
I am a stone
Smooth, edgeless; serene,
Surrounded; silent.
I am a stone in the water,
Jagged and wet and deep;
Weed-wrapped and dark-drowning.
I am a stone in the water
That the world has thrown.
I am a stone in the water,
Weed-rounded, deep-drowned.
And the water here is cold.
#
"April 6, 2006: Homecoming"
The roof of the sky extends to infinity
the roots of the earth too deep to know
heads up poetry made in motion
the rhythm of your feet and the need to go
the freedom of your limbs is the rhythm of your laughter
the freedom of your laughter is the rhythm of your soul
this is what the god of love is
this is what it means to be free
in sky-clear woodsmoked April twilight
the grass is a thousand shades of green.
#
"September 19, 2006: Wrack"
the sea, hard-handed,
grinding slow amongst the stones
owns the catch in my throat -
wrought in grey salt
and white-surf spray
sea-goddess turning, infinite
great-hungered and slow-churning
winter-chill woken in my bones
sea-voices spoken
on the swan-winged wave.
storms to follow after
and ships spine-shattered
on a sandbar
not far from safe harbour.
# # # # # # # #
The Story:
"Eschatology of a Witch"
The angel comes in the last bruise of twilight, alighting amid pots of rosemary and thyme on my balcony in the rush of wings. He perches on my kitchen’s gleaming metal counter, a being spun of divinity and dreams, and suffers me to clean the blood from his shining form.
He always comes bloody, when he comes at all.
I hurt him, but he never flinches. He smells like clouds and saltwater and sunlight, but underneath is the scent of flesh. It’s a sign of his fall: his form is human now, as much as it can ever be, and like a human, it bleeds.
"What was it this time?" Bloody cloths go in a bag to be burned. I hitch my hip against the counter and watch him in the yellow glare of the ceiling bulb. He’s beautiful, and I’m a fool.
He shrugs, muscle rippling beneath his pale-gold skin. "Something from the Deep Between. Nothing that would follow me here."
"The place is warded, anyway." Spells burn in pewter candle-holders beside every door and window. I’ve grown used to the odour of scorched metal: it’s a small price to pay for protection from the things between.
"You think that matters to Them? As if your petty spells and Lilith’s thin blood would ever be enough to let you keep your sanity in sight of even the smallest crack in the world between." He barks a laugh, shakes his head. "If you think you could, Isabelle, then you’re a fool even for a witch."
"Oh, I’m a fool, alright. But I’m the fool who’s still willing to watch your back, flyboy, so watch it."
"Yes," he murmurs, and leans his jet-haired head back against a cupboard door. "Yes, you are."
If his skin was not freshly etched with new scars every night, and his pain at his exile not so great, I could have hated him. But he and I are more alike than either of us would prefer to admit. He is bereft of his heaven, and I --
Well. Lilith’s kin are welcome in neither the Garden nor the Pit.
She was good at making enemies.
#
Dublin in summer darkness smells of petrol and asphalt, alcohol and water: the sluggish snake of the Liffey an oily chasm dividing its heart. Traffic rumbles under streetlights and neon; music and noise beating out of bars and nightclubs to join the grating of engines over concrete and cobbles, and working girls ply their trade on the streets down by the Grand Canal.
It’s a city that grows on you, like fungus, or chewing gum stuck to the heel of your shoe, and like every city it has an underbelly, dark and rotten and stinking. Schoolgirls playing at magic; college boys shocking their parents with the trappings of devil-worship; men and women who opened through the wrong door at the wrong time and saw things they should never have seen: the world between preys innocents like them.
I close doors where I can, but I’m only a witch, and I know no other living daughters of Lilith’s line. A witch cannot bear children and remain a witch: Adam’s curse on Lilith’s line, for her disobedience and her pride. Thus a witch is a rarity: but we are born still, and nursed to adulthood on mingled bitterness and love.
Even were they inclined to, not all the witches in all the world could close the doors between and keep them shut.
#
Walking down Lombard Street East towards the Liffey, I pause to lay wards and scratch chalk symbols of protection on a wall where a dark smear -- not a smear to ordinary eyes, not really a smear at all -- indicates the possibility of a door. Maybe it’ll keep someone from seeing things that are better left unseen.
Maybe.
You do what you can.
The Liffey is running high, languid and dark beneath the metal arch of the new footbridge. The Sean O’Casey Bridge: streetlights reflect from its nameplate. There’s an itch in my spine and an oppressive feeling in the dark: something’s out there tonight. Something dangerous.
The angel was still in my apartment when I left, glowering at the walls and leaking blood on the furniture. I wouldn’t mind having him here with me tonight, but wings and gleaming flesh are hard to keep hidden, and I don’t have the skill to ward an angel to pass unnoticed.
There’s a woman waiting for me on a bench on Custom House Quay, shuffling a tarot deck between her fingers. Her called greeting stops me in my tracks.
"What’s the bad news this time, granny?" I lean against the river wall, disturbed. The old woman’s a clairvoyant -- not a witch, but foresight isn’t a talent to lightly dismiss. I don’t know her name, and I doubt I ever will, but she has a habit of turning up to deliver the worst possible news, usually at the worst possible time.
"Is that any way to say hello to a friend?" Her wrinkles rearrange themselves into a sour smile. "And I am your friend, you know."
"Bloody odd way you have of showing it."
"Such language from a young woman." She clucks her uneven teeth, but liver-spotted hands are dealing cards onto the wood of the bench. "What are they teaching you in schools these days? Go ahead, turn them over."
Five cards, facedown. I swallow, and flip over laminated paper with finger and thumb.
The Tower. The Hanged Man. The Moon. Judgement. Death. All major arcana: I've never seen that before.
"Not a good reading," the old woman says quietly. She taps the final card with a blunt fingertip. "No, not good. Be careful, dear."
The grim reaper grins up at me until she sweeps the cards away. The night is even more oppressive than before.
"And now I’m getting out of here," the old woman says, "before whatever it is that’s following you catches up."
"Following me?"
"There’s something hungry out tonight. And it's looking for you."
#
I run, soles slapping the pavement, breath burning in my throat. Fear is a cold weight in my gut, adding impetus to my pounding strides. The old woman is right: there’s something following me, and I can feel it now, all malevolence and hunger. I need walls and wards, iron and flame to protect me from something slipped through from between. I have chalk in my jeans pocket and three iron rings on my fingers. Not enough.
I race up the quays. Hard concrete jars my knees. Sweat soaks my scalp, turns my hair wet and stringy. Traffic snarls the O’Connell Bridge junction: I sprint between cars and trucks and gaggles of late-night tourists and partiers, feeling the hunter in the dark behind me like foul breath on my neck. It’s not human, never was: a thing from the Deep Between. All poisoned hunger, all hate and pain.
I can’t keep running forever. I need somewhere to make a stand, a wall to put my back against. The thing isn’t interested in other people: it wants me.
I don’t think I can count on a rescue.
I slow to approach the doors of a pub at a respectable pace. The doorman doesn’t ask for ID. Inside is hot and sweaty and packed with noisy people: in one corner a trad band is belting out Jack Hall with as much enthusiasm as talent. I squeeze into a seat near the entrance to the toilets, catch my breath, and watch the door.
And my neck will pay for all when I die, when I die --
My chalk is greasy between my fingers. I scratch a rough symbol on the back of a beer mat and crumple the thin cardboard in my fist. A whispered word, and I hold a palmful of ash: fire is a discreet, useful spell.
It’s a shout for help, though I can’t believe any will come.
I could have used the angel with me tonight.
I sketch more symbols in the spilled beer on the counter by my elbow. Minor protections, small wards. They might buy me a heartbeat or two. Maybe I’ll get a miracle.
No point in praying for one. That bridge was burned long ago.
And then it comes, a tall dark shadow with a face full of teeth, and time runs out.
It glides in through the open door, and though the crowd cannot see it they draw back from the ripple of its passage like a parting sea. Their noise dims, and the band’s fiddler screeches a ragged note. It’s a thing from between, and even the faintest shadow of its passage through the sunlit world brings the breath of madness and despair and cold, nameless fear.
Even I can’t see more than a shadow of what it truly is, the shadow it casts on the sunlit world, but even that shadow is enough to leach the warmth from my bones, leach my will away. It’s nothing I can face, nothing I can fight: better to lie down, to give up and wait for the end...
"I am," I hiss through clenched teeth, "not dead yet."
Though surely that won’t last long.
The toilet doors give way beneath my scrabbling fingers. I kick the laminated wood shut behind me and cast about for another way out.
There isn’t one. I’m trapped in a small square room of white tile and plumbing with the clinging scent of alcohol and perfume.
I stop with my back against the wall beneath the narrow window. Fluorescent light yellows my skin. I do have another way out. It’s just one I can’t believe I’ll survive.
But I'm not going to lie down and wait to die.
Chalk skitters on tile. A handful of symbols: the most basic wards I know. I’m pricking my thumb and smearing the blood over my iron rings when the sudden sweet yank of pain in my bones tells me the hunter has overset the minor protections I left outside.
Too little time. Wards drawn on my forehead, wrists and navel in blood; too fast, too rough: my tongue tangles on the final words of the spell as the door swings open and the shadow sweeps in.
I take a last breath and step between.
#
The angel was wrong: I can stand the sight of the world between and not go mad. Not the Deep Between, where time itself is twisted and beings swim in an ocean of nothingness more absolute than the void between the stars; but the Shallows, the shoals where the world between laps up against the sunlit world, sliding into the cracks between the world above and the world below.
It's not a pleasant experience.
It appears as a river. A strange jagged distended river, water radiating neither darkness nor light but something in between. Or perhaps it's a lake, or even a sea. A sea without a horizon in a world without a sky.
But this is the Between, and appearances bear no relation to purpose, or function, or form.
For the moment I stand ankle-deep in a river, because I will it so and my will and my spell together are just strong enough to keep it that way. And the river creeps the living daylights out of me, because even the Shallows are still the Between, and the Between is like that.
If I wasn’t a witch, and a strong witch at that, I would already be mad or dead or both.
That can still happen.
I have a breathing space. The hunter might still follow, but even for an entity used to the Deep Between the transition is jarring and the Shallows confusing. If I can get out of here before something else kills me, I should be able to get behind my walls and wards before it can find me again.
If I can get out of here.
Entities from the Deeps might seldom traverse the Shallows, but when they do, they do so with relative impunity. I’m human, if only mostly. The denizens of the Shallows are drawn to witchcraft like moths to flame: it’s why all witchcraft needs to be done behind wards and walls, within reach of iron and flame. Witchcraft makes thin places in the fabric of the world.
I start walking, wading through not-water that tugs at my ankles, trying to pull me down and under. There is not-darkness and not-light, a grey nothingness that obscures more than it reveals. And things, plinking and rippling in the water. Coming closer. Terror is cold bile in my throat. I need time to think, time to work up a spell to bridge back to the sunlit world. Time I don't have.
Another step, with the water dragging at my heels, and the shadow looms out of the greyness, black and poisonous and hating. It's not a shadow here, but solid: the hungry essence of everything inimical to life distilled into shape, and if I look at it, it will drive me mad.
A thing from the Deeps. When it touches me, I'll be worse than dead.
But it doesn't touch me. It stops short, a terrifying pressure on my senses. On my sanity. Want, it says, but not in words. A grinding, crushing, alien thought. Want... hurtful/shining/winged one.
Mother Lilith in the Garden. It wants the angel.
Not me. Not today.
Want, it grates with tearing strength --
And then there's something else there, abruptly interposed between that dark presence and my fragile mortal flesh -- something sharp and painful and blazing with penumbraed light. Something that rips a hole in the Between and drags me gasping out into the warm darkness of the Dublin night.
#
"Lilith's spawn." A disgusted voice.
The pavement's hard beneath my knees. I swallow the burn of bile in my throat and look up. "...hell." I need to swallow again. "Not another one of you."
It's an angel. Not a fallen one: the shimmer of its form has none of the solidity of flesh. He's beautiful, but sexless: there is nothing erotic in this perfection.
His glance alone makes me feel soiled and small. Unworthy. I'm a witch, and he's one of God's own ruthless servants, and that means --
"You have no call to cast stones."
My voice is a rasp, but a strong one. Kneeling there on the pavement, it takes everything to have to meet the infinity of his eyes, but I do it anyway.
I have my pride.
And what are you doing here anyway?
"You called for help," he says, answering the question I never asked aloud. "I answered. If I had known who had called, I would not have come."
"You belong to the Garden." This conversation feels incongruous on an asphalt road, in the shadow of city apartments with their clothes drying on grey balconies in the warm dark. I pull myself to my feet. I think I've had stranger conversations in odder places, but I can't remember where.
He inclines his head. "And the beast belongs to the Deep Between. But you, Lilith's daughter, you don't belong anywhere. What did it want with you?"
A change of tack. "What did it want?" I choke a laugh and jerk my head. "You want to know, go ask it."
He blinks, long eyelashes golden against his glittering perfection. "I don't need to," he says, quietly. "It wants my fallen brother. And neither you nor he, little witch, are strong enough to stand in its way. It is already feeding at the edges of the sunlit world: soon, it will be strong enough that its tie to the Between will no longer hold it back."
There's fear mixed with the anger and bitterness churning in my gut; I shove my hands in my pockets to keep them from turning into fists. "Are you just here to gloat? Because, frankly, unless you have something useful to say, why don't you just go away?"
"What should I say? That it would take the death of an angel, at least, to kill this thing?"
"You want it killed." I'm suddenly cold, suddenly certain. "You and your Omnipotent."
"The Garden wants it... dealt with." He smiled, slowly. "But I am not convinced it is a mortal thing. And though perhaps I could get rid of it, why should I, when my fallen brother may do it for me?"
#
I stagger home in the dawn, shaky and stomach-sick.
The angel meets me at the door. It hurts to look at him. Beautiful and gentle and terrible: still trying to fight his ancient war. Only the battlefield has changed.
"What happened to you?" he demands.
"Nothing worth the mention." The wards settle around me. Protection. I remember his words: You think that matters to Them? As if your petty spells and Lilith’s thin blood would ever be enough.
And the shadow from Between. Want.
And the unfallen angel, that being of spirit and perfection: And though perhaps I can get rid of it, why should I, when my fallen brother may do it for me?
The ruler of the Garden has always been ruthless.
I want to touch him, hold him for the comfort that holding him would bring. I don't. I can't afford to.
"I can tell when you lie, Isabelle."
"And I'll tell you when I'm ready. All right?" Fear turns into anger at the mildest provocation. I wrap my arms around my shoulders to control my shudders, and glare at him.
"All right," he says softly, and looks at me for a long time before leaving from my balcony again, there and gone in an instant.
#
These are the seven angels of the Garden whose names given unto to children of Lilith to know: Mikhael, Uriel, Gavriel, Rafael, Zerakiel, Remiel, Ruhiel. The others are not nameless, as the fallen are, but I do not know their names.
#
I redo the wards, stronger, harder, sharper. Clean the apartment until the odour of burnt metal and incense is almost overwhelmed by disinfectant. Anything, everything, to avoid having to think.
I could hate the angel. Or I could love him.
I do neither. But I don't want to lose him.
I can't keep him.
When I am drained to exhaustion and there no surface remains unscrubbed, I let myself acknowledge the truth: I'm terrified.
#
Sunlight makes me brave. I walk down to the quays in the rushing heartbeat of mid-afternoon, the city a living organism pulsing against my senses. There is quietude in the river and the grey-white façade of the Customs House, in walking between the cracks in the pavement, in not seeing the cracks in the world.
If the angel were beside me, he would mock me for desiring the innocence of ignorance. Unseen does not mean non-existent: if I were ignorant, I would be unprotected.
If I lived a life that left me ignorant, perhaps I would not need protection.
What has my life taught me of angels?
Only how they fall.
They fall through disobedience. And through pride.
Lilith's sins.
And Lucifer's. Who durst defy the Omnipotent to Arms, as Milton said, though none has dared to match his rebellion since.
The ruler of that Eternal Garden is as jealous a master as the lord of the Pit. Caught in the middle is the sunlit world, and all that emptiness Between, and what is a mere witch supposed to do, when none of the Powers will heed her prayer or take her bargain?
#
I take down the wards in sunlight streaming through my open windows. Build them back up again, layer upon twisted layer. But these wards keep nothing out.
I lay them to hold things in.
#
The angel is dripping blood on my kitchen floor for the second time in as many days, and I cannot be gentle with him. Anymore than he has ever been gentle with me.
It hurts to look at him.
"Something from the Deeps followed me last night," I say when the towels are soaking in the sink and his golden skin is no longer streaked with red. "It wants you."
"Ah," he says. Only that. Only one painful sigh, but there is despair in it as well as pain. "It let you go?"
"Yes."
"Don't lie to me."
Don't ask me to tell you the truth.
It'll only hurt worse.
"One of the Garden's seraphim was passing," I say softly. "He gave me a way out."
He leans back against the counter, eyes ancient and hurting.
"Why won't you tell me what you want, Isabelle?" he asks, softly.
What I want I can never have. The first curse in the Garden saw to that. Nothing in my life will ever be untouched by Lilith's legacy. Not even the angel, bright and painful and passing fair as he might be.
It's cold here, without the candles burning. "What do you? want?" I say in lieu of answering, and turn away from him to fill the kettle. My spine itches. I am waiting for the shadow, for the thing from Between.
The wards will not hold it out.
"To see the Garden again," he says softly. "Just to see it again, if only once."
The longing in those words catches my breath in my throat, trembles my hand pouring boiling water into a cup. A cold knot aches in my chest.
I have to turn away.
The spell is wrought in water and earth; fire, iron, and blood both mortal and divine. My blood and the angel's: his taken with neither his knowledge nor his consent; mine given freely in full knowledge of the consequences. It's a spell to summon and one to bind, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm about to commit betrayal.
My left hand sketches a glyph in the air: it takes less than a breath of effort to trigger the spell. The angel doesn't notice. He's still staring into a distance I will never see.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then there's a brief flash of heat, like a match sparking, and the unfallen seraph stands in my kitchen, his expression a study in shocked disdain.
"Gavriel," I say, and watch shock turn to horror in his unfleshly beauty. Strong man of God, that is the meaning of the syllables of his name.
There is power in names.
"Isabelle!" My fallen angel has grabbed my shoulder. "What are you doing?"
"Child of Lilith," the seraph says, a whisper perilously near a moan. "What have you done?"
"Bound you." I tilt my chin up to see my fallen angel's features, and my voice is caught between whisper and prayer.
"Bound you both. I'm sorry."
I release my second spell, the one it revolted me to build.
The one it sickens me to need.
I can't let the hunger from the Deep Between swallow the world. And I cannot trust a seraph from the Garden to stop it, or not in time: the Garden's whim has ever been capricious when it comes to the sunlit world.
"It's coming," the seraph Gavriel says, and his tone is grim. He looks at my fallen angel. In that moment I see the Garden's arrogance, its certainty, fall away. In its wake is something that looks almost human, calm but still afraid. "Stand with me, brother?"
There is something in that glance that looks uncomfortably like love.
The world splinters before I can hear an answer. Shards of consciousness like fragmented glass. Hot water scalds my hands and freezes there, burningly cold. The aching void of the Deeps howls into my apartment.
The angel shouts and I can't make out the words. The world goes black and white and shaded silver-grey. I bring up the wards and cast a layer of protections around myself.
The angel is backed against the cabinets, wings mantled, from nowhere a sword flaming in his fist. The shadow surrounds him, darkness penumbraed, a twisting of the world, and the seraph Gavriel is snarling, burning, tearing at its heart.
I scratch more wards on my frozen countertop. My teeth rattle in my jaw.
The shadow swallows my angel, and Gavriel screams as it reaches out to enfold him also and I shout with every ripped fibre of my heart, calling on the Garden and the Pit, on the sacred and profane, on all of the bitter humanity of Lilith's long-cursed line, on sunlight and life drunk to the lees, on everything that is not lost and twisted Between, on every last flicker of brightness in the darkness of the world --
Heat flares. Something burns. Someone screams, and I think it's the seraph but perhaps it's me, broken open and bleeding to the core --
Darkness.
#
When it is over, I am still here, and the shadow is gone.
So is the angel.
Both of them.
#
Lilith's sin was pride. In more ways than one, I am heir to her legacy, and I cannot repent of my choices.
I am one of Lilith's daughters. In the end, all that is left to us is to choose the manner of our damnation. For such as me, there can be no absolution.
I would not seek it if I could.
-30-
# # # # # # # #
And in the spirit of eternal hope and chancing one's arm:
And since copyright works differently on the other side of the Atlantic, this is me reserving my rights just in case. :)
