Let this one think I am a tyrant. And this one think I am a king. This one will be afraid of me. And this one worry I won’t live long enough to see her wed. And that one never understands. Which hurts me most. I will name her Sea. And she, the quiet one, is Flood. My favorite I call Moon. We pace the house. Even when she is supposed to be asleep, she wakes and comes into my room. Her flimsy gown almost invisible. She must be cold, but she is good and, though I never believe such stories, she says she has bad dreams. Come walk with me tonight, but only for tonight. Tomorrow, the sun dispels the dark, and you have another hemisphere to light. And so we lived as long as we could. Then she went her way, and I went mine. This will be the only kind of parenting I know. The shaping of the moon in lines.
stories
What Seeking Means
Whole days feel like funerals. Nights come and go. Days too long for recording. I go, and asked the mountain top, Yes? And then it occurs to me. The wind is a thing on a list of things, too. Still, who can feel good facing a new direction, when the old one seems so here, so present? I wrote a thousand stories in the book. The book assumed the characteristics of its writer, and when I looked it wasn’t me. It wasn’t the man who initially put his pen to paper. I called for experts to test the results. And they did. And I asked them, Well? The answers they gave were satisfactory, but just. And just… Tonight, I seek to step out of my house. Seeking is enough. Seeking means this isn’t enough. And just as I am about to die, I ask, What else? And finally the words of a book I used to know by heart come rushing in to fill the waste. This isn’t hell, but paradise…
A Map as Large as the World
Believe me, the moon said, and I almost did. But then I woke. The room was full of darkness. She lied, I said. And then I descended, and the first floor was just as dark as the one above, and the basement darker still. And still I went further until I reached the darkest water. There I stopped. There I drank every drop my stomach would hold. I felt drowsy. I said, It won’t be long, it is enough. And so it was, it was. The moon knew that. The sea knew everything the moon knew. I remembered the mark of the moon gliding along the dark surface of the sea. The swollen belly. The far away ships, the stars. And I remembered everything before I sunk into sleep again and dragged with me the names of every constellation and all the stories ever told. They are tattooed now on my skin. A map as large as the world.
One Whose Name Is Writ In Water 