The sun on the rice-pools is like a disapproving eye, reflected over and over. The night is so warm, so warm, and it is pleasant, if only to think that the heat comes from her, from her furnace-ribs, rising and falling in the distance, and her breath stealing over the water like sleeve-hidden hands.

FIRST HEAD.

I am the first body/daughter./ The name my lower intestine whispers/the sound of the taste of myself on a tongue mine/not mine/is Kazuyo. I was born first of eight burdens under brittle stars/my throat emerged first of eight gullets from the mother-dark-and-wet when the sleeve-stars were high/and a roof of thatched cypress bark.

It is quiet in the length. My cells are/its cells/are my cells/are its/cells are my cells/my cells my own/its/mine. Meat on /meat /I am translated, child into serpent/worm.

When I was myself/when I was myself and did not hold a girl in me like a steel pin in my hip/and did not wear a coat of monster, I lived in a village, in a house, and the mats on my floor were neither thin nor fat. I was born in winter, in the dead days after the last snowfall but before the ice of the air shows any crack. I was a small infant, blue in the face and hung like a criminal from my mother's womb by the noosed length of my own umbilicus. My mother said later that it looked like a shell-less snail lying over my tiny neck. And like a weed-stuffed garden pest, it was cut and thrown onto the refuse heap, its silver scrap reflecting the moon as though it too was pregnant, swollen with light it was meant to have delivered into my little navel.

And so I was born without the light I ought to have owned, with a stomach curiously empty from the first moment I drew ragged, gap-ridden breath. The earth ate it, slowly, with teeth of grass and stone. In years hence a persimmon tree grew out of that heap of cast-offs, and we re-planted the little sapling-so carefully, as if it were a baby itself, in warm red soil. My sisters used to play in it, pelting each other with orange fruit whose meat smelled of spices we would never purchase to scent our skins.

I remember that now, in the dark, grafted to smoke-flesh/hanging from me like a necklace I bought long ago and lost in a drawer/like that old dark wood-my sisters throwing sweet scraps of my birth-flesh at each other, staining their dresses with sugared oil/the heartwoods of my throats playing catch-me with their own pulpy wombs.

When I was a girl I gutted the fish my father caught, and their intestines slithered over my fingers, over and under, like weaving silver-their eyes went into our soup, for which the we were modestly famous, and rest of the village came to our stall in the marketplace at festival time, to slurp up the murky broth with all those sightless eyes floating in it, eaten staring at eater/and it is always like that, you know, the thing which cannot help but be eaten ogles the thing which will eat it, and always, always, the moist eyes are beautiful, their dark centers salty and sour/but the fish eyes, the fish eyes were too soft for my taste, runny eggs dripping their iris-ichors on my tongue, the black soup that stank in our house all year/Yours, Kazuyo, were smoky and sere, persimmon-dusk, and they rolled over my tongue, so soft-do you remember that, how you saw me as I swallowed you, saw my uvula bobbing over your limbs as you fell into me?

Hush, now. I have not gotten to that part yet. (And I/you/say this to the self/notself which is not myself/but is myself, my selves, my daughterbody and my snakebody all wound up together like yarn/the self embedded in green muscle wall/hush, self, hush, quiet, bones, blood says be still/the self of/cell-to-cell, I say this to the eater which is eaten which is eater again/and hungry.) The soup of eyes brought men to our threshold, men with chickens hanging limp like claw-stemmed bouquets in their hands, with rice balls like diamond rings. They came to get the eye-girls for their own, to fill up their bellies with salty-sour tear ducts on off-festival days as well, and we were lined up, eight in a row, only I even old enough to boast breasts. Our heads bent like black daffodils, nodding mutely at the earth. They looked at our teeth; they tested our jaws and our water-carrying muscles, the length and dexterity of our stirring fingers. And, as they will, a man indicated that I was sufficient to bear his children and clean his house and boil his broth for all the rest of my days. He was not ugly, nor old, and his eyes were very black. I thought, idly, what they would look like staring back at me from a bowl of soup/only ask, daughterflesh, and I will fetch them for you like a pair of buttons to shine your breast/hush, hush, I've told you. This is what virgins think about when their wombs are sold.

It was midwinter, I think-in truth I cannot recall, but it seems to me from the vantage of these copper-blooded innards that the trees were bare and bone-rattled, that the sky was impassive and pale as a face. /It was midsummer, you silly girl, and I watched you walk out under the eaves from a bower of green, and the sun was beating my back with switches of yellow light. So much green, so many leaves, all my heads lolled out of the trees and you saw nothing but bobbing fruit.

It doesn't matter.

I wanted you then, like a husband, in your clean white wimple. Only I didn't know how to be a husband, it is not my natural state. All I have are these mouths, these mouths and these tongues and these coils, and they all cried out for you that hot, still day, and I thought you were very beautiful in your dress, and I wanted to eat you, but I wanted to love you, but I wanted to eat you, but I wanted to love you/but I wanted to/I wanted/I wanted to love you.

The man who was neither old nor ugly took my hand and led me from the threshold of my house, and the sun was neither yellow nor grey, and I looked back over my shoulder at the persimmon tree, which was very tall by then, tall as a standing serpent, and if something moved in the branches I thought nothing of it, only that it was empty of fruit, that the bark of my afterbirth was barren as a rotted root. I wanted to/see something of myself in the wood, something of my umbilicus wavering in the grain, something silver and unnamable which was my own flesh grown sap-ridden and forked. But there was nothing there, and I left my mother's house, and all my sisters, heads still bent like a tidy row of carrot-flowers, with nothing for a trousseau but the thick white linen of my headdress and the secret of the soup of eyes nestled next to my heart.

It was on the beaten road south-winding from Izumo/it was near the temple/it was nowhere in particular but somewhere between these when I/when you/when the empty-we-I came reeding by. Do you remember, is it round in your mind like an orange fruit/it is round in my mind like a floating eye/I remember how your hair shone like a braised pig-stomach in the summer/it was winter/in the summer which was so still, and so warm.

And you/I/said to me/you/as if you did not see the man who was neither old nor ugly at all/I do not want your soup of eyes. I do not want your womb hung up in a tree, to give me persimmon-babies every fall. Come with me/go into this/and I will show you the place where monster and marrow and maiden/and meat and bile and voices/pool. Come away from this man who is/neither old nor ugly/young nor beautiful, and I will love you better than he/I will love you better than he. Be my soup of eyes, be my festival morning, let me drink you down with due reverence, let me press your irises against the roof of my/my mouth until their sweetness bursts into salt, and all will be well/I will be well/and all will be well, /and you will be well, /and all manner of things will be/well, in the dark, well and one.

I/I/do/I/I will/yes./yes.

You swallow like a child, milk-desperate.

II.

YASUGI.

Mother, Mother, I mourn.

I claw at the clay, the red furrows reek in the earth like kanji, ideograms of grief, need-glyphs. Mother, let me in, move aside the stones for me, for your poor boy who loves you. Mother, I cannot find the way down, I cannot find my way under the mountain-open a canyon for me, a cave, a door. Where are you? Why do you not answer your son?

If I kill a dragon for you, as heroes are wont to do, if I damp the soil with blood, will the stain become a gate, a hole, a passage into Mother, into the dreamed-of hell?

I am the only one who mourns her. The rest have all forgotten. And yet, and yet. Am I really her son? It is not an easy genealogy to parse-would she open the ground for me if I were not her son but a lover, a suitor, an ardent and earnest creature seeking only to lay his head on her knee? I walk in the woods like a wild innocent-could I not lure her out with this purity, worn on my breast like grass-plait?

Yasugi is a knobbled field spackled with huts, and clouds roam over it like clapping mollusks. Mt. Hiba dresses itself up in blasted rock, red as rusted blood and pitted like a crone's breast-it protrudes, it leaks a sickly milk of clinging snow. I am tired-I am hungry. The soles of my feet refuse to harden, but bleed openly, crack, gape pale and womanish on the grass. I have asked at sake-houses and bath-houses and fish-and-rice-houses after the passage of a snake, a monster of any sort, even a particularly tall or lumpish man. They know nothing, they see nothing. They are so slow, so dull I can hardly stand to smell their breath, their bandaged thumbs-if my descent-body disgusts me, theirs buckles my legs with retching. If I were my right self I would bring the waves up, blue and black, over this whole valley and scrub it clean of their crawling and crying. They nibble the suckers off of white and fleshy stalks of squid, and suggest I go further south, to the city. They know everything in the city.

South, south, ever south.

The sun slaps my back as if it loathed me specially-which, of course, it does. What sister misses an opportunity to annoy her brother when he is least eager to be annoyed? She knows nothing of Mother, she cares nothing for her, she drives me south to the city, the wretched city where there is no Mother, there is no Monster, there is nothing but fat men sweating in steam baths and dead, stupid statues draped in garlands of sweet-potato blossoms. They write precious little poems, delicate as eel-fat, and call themselves brothers of the sun, because it is a winning image, evocative enough to ply a pink-kneed girl behind their screens. But the sun is my sister, and rides my bones hour upon hour, and oh, how she burns, she burns. There are no eel-poems about us, only lightning, and wind, and red, red heat on a man's brown back.

I hate her, Mother. Why could you not have sown me alone in Father's flesh, like a persimmon tree growing without saplings in a prairie? The things I would tell you are not for her flaming ears.

I hesitate to recall it; I do not wish it to have been. I came across a shrine yesterday-I suppose it is the fate of the Kami to be forever plagued with monks and shrines. They stamp the landscape like ant-farms here, lumpish tunnels arching over well-planted fields and bubbling through the shimmering squares of floating rice, worming through the world, digesting it and exuding it from their pasty bodies as if earth could be offal.

But, like any ant-commune, they have great stores of food, and will occasionally part with crumble or wash when a man passes by and asks after their statuary. I did not mean to imply that theirs was in any way spectacular, but ants will be proud of their collected corn-cobs and strawberry stems. It is, however, a singularly uncanny sensation to look up at a statue of oneself, snarling and dancing and stomping, yes, I swear it, eight small snakes.

My breath was lost, unsure which way to blow, frozen under my own face, and my skin seized as if run through with rain, for oh, oh, since Izumo I have often thought-worried, suspected-that I am walking through a story that has already occurred, and here, here are the relics of it, here are the stations of the holy, here are the oft-walked pilgrim trails that repeat a journey I made long ago but am still making, but have not yet made, and yet the ants-the ants! The ants, they seem to have catalogued my every step, and swathed the grass-impressions in bronze, and held festivals to mark my left foot falling in Yasugi. Little librarians, and their scrolls have already illuminated my killing of the serpent, the thin-spun beauty of Kushinada under its coils-all of this is in their greasy hands, and if they know this, if they know my family secrets, do they not also know the way down to Mother, and if I will find her, and the shade of her face in the dark? They must know, wretched things, it is their business to know, they do nothing but know-I am chronicled, chronicled, and soon I will not exist at all but in their scrolls and their mute clay statues- I wanted to talk to them about this, to close up with them behind geometric screens and ask them how the story goes from here, ask them if they think, perhaps, I was in the wrong when I went to my sister's house, if what I did there was wrong by their ant-measure. Their little white-capped heads must belong to oracles, scryers, magicians, if they could have formed this terrible statue from raw dirt, tunneled it into being-I wanted to hold them by their throats against their moth-eaten reliquaries and cry: who am I in this body? How long will she punish me? Where is my mother? Where is the snake? How do you know these forbidden things, you stupid, mewling men?

But in the incense-pregnant shadows of the interior rooms-lined with gold statues in that same eerie pose, foot raised over the squirming nest of heads-they only piled my hands with rice balls and salted plums, raw salmon and cups of soy-broth, smiling inanely, heads bobbing like lolling daffodils.

"Who am I in this body?" I asked, having devoured four plums and a quantity of bland rice. The monks scratched their heads beneath white caps and looked at each other like a gaggle of birds at seed-time. They smiled pleasantly and spread their hands.

"You are musuko, you are our son-all men are sons of the gods, all men are sons here, in the house of the gods, and beloved."

"That is not what I mean," I answered gruffly, clutching my chopstick as if to break it.

"What else could you have meant?" Their clean, white smiles did not falter. They did not know me, my blood chortled-rice-gobbling peasants know me by sight, but men trained to worship my kneecaps cannot recognize their god when he walks through their door. This is useless, said the blood, useless and comical, if it were not pathetic.

"I think you do not know half so much as your statues," I sighed.

"Most likely," they agreed heartily, "this temple is dedicated to Susanoo-no-Mikoto, Storm-God and Deathshead. It was he who came last from the nose of Izanagi in the beginning of the world, when the Great Father had finally rid himself of the foul dust which emanated from the body of the witch Izanami, who dared speak-"

I would like to say I did not bellow like an ox in heat, that I did not lurch out of my cushion through the scented air and smear rice and salt-plum into the noses and down the throats of the monks, just to shut them up, to stop up their stinking breath, greased with lies, that I did not screech my mother's holy name while I tore at their sun-colored robes, shredded their ridiculous hats, claw at their soggy skin, skin that already smelled of death, of putrefaction and again, again, of lies, that I did not rip the cat-gut that strung together their looping beads, and laugh when the pebbles clattered onto the floor like rain falling on copper rooftops.

I would like to say these things.

But under the gleaming, muscled knees of that awful statue of myself I bound them with what prayer-twine were left, back to back in a ring like soldiers in the grass, and panting, seething, sweating salt through these meat-pores I never asked to own, I began to read those fools, those orange-swathed ant-farming fools, I began to read to them their lessons under the tamarind trees throwing up their branches into the black-bustling sky like frenzied arms. Did they quail? I did not look, I did not care. No one listens to me, but these mouse-eared men would. If it is possible for a god to be filled with the evangelic, I boiled over, and they were the scalded stove, and they would hear, they would hear me, or I would open them up and spit scripture into their grinning throats.

"Listen to me, listen to me when I tell you: this is how it was in the beginning of the world-"

SECOND HEAD.

Men, even gods-in-men's-skin, believe passion means (to adore, to lust, to be exalted through love.) They are foolish. Passion means to suffer. It means (to endure great sorrows.) Passion is the grasp of blister-ridden hands, breaking its thumbnails on the floor of heaven. (Passion is fear, like a peach tree planted in the navel, when your sister comes not wandering back over the cicada-emboldened hills.) It is hoarse, needling, the great iron vat in which flesh becomes oil. (It is eyes floating in murk, eyes crusted in salt like tears.) Its pelt is deep-shaded, like love-red and black, wine-dregs and sour mash-but it is (not) love. (But then, then you said it was, when you opened for me.) Passion cannot weep. The tracks of once-liquid sorrows run down its face, jaundiced and leprose-rose, a warm line of marrow-dust pooling on its collarbone like the burst bow of a violin. (Passion cannot weep, but oh, oh, it cries!) Passion hollows bones to flutes and seeds the flesh with baobabs, baobabs and women like baobabs, dark and deep in the muscle walls, growing like recalcitrant children, gnashing their agate teeth at intestines of twisted ivory. (I gnash, you gnash, we gnash at each other and eat each other and swallow and excrete each other and look at our passion, look how it gleams, look at the peachstones of our suffering in these caves!) I am the second body (daughter.) Quiet, quiet, second children do not speak. The neck behind the neck of the primary tongue is less than nothing, less than scale, less than true (less than true, less than firstborn, but I never understand you) myself (when you) we (are like this, old snake.) I pat my belly and you are within it, second daughter (second sister, second length of ropy emerald musculature) and your name is embossed on my innards like the brand on an iron kettle. There is one belly; there are eight heads (there are seven of us) soon, my (own, here in the dark) self in self (and have we yet learned to love the dark, to call it our mirror, to call it our flesh?) We are thrall to it, it serves us. And you are stoppered up in our body like a cork, and I am full of you all the moon long, and I too want to be called by my name, but your names, Kameko, your names crowd the (our) my mouth like krill.

(Have I not called you) us (by your name) as we are?

Call me Suffering, call me Fire, call me Gullet, call me, call me (what shall I call for, this city of dead girls and snake-guts, streets thrown over throat and thorax) meat smoking in piles (yes, call you city of the dead, city of wraiths in wells, city of reptilian meat smoking in piles) second daughter, do not speak (second head, what shall I call you?) Call me Kameko (call me) you (by my own name) for that is the nature of the filled throat. I still have them (us) inside me, all who have ever been eaten, pushing at my phosphorescent ribcage, blue and brown and green eyes blinking in aortal seizures (but they are your eyes now, we who float in the bitter broth of you, and do you not love our eyes? You said you loved them) the serpent-heart forgets, it is strange-gilled and fickle (as if a girl's heart is air-hungry and constant under every possible sun) but the Belly does not forget (it bakes us) itself (like seven round cakes, and when we are finished, oh, we all have black serpent's eyes) the coils heave and flail in the same sacred dance, helplessly repeating their susurrations in the sand. Flesh bears a thousand marks, a thousand fingernails, a thousand teeth. Every time it is the same time, and the body recalls all its usual acts of passion, all the expected responses, secretly weeping (crying) for all those it loved once but can never devour again. To endure passion is to burn and bleed the black of all voids.

(I was only a child; I didn't know anything about devouring. You could have let me be.) A child, yes, only a child, but I suffered for you.

(After my sister went into you, like a finger slipping into a ring, her husband, who was neither fat nor poor, returned to our house where the smell of frying eyes wafted from the pans so sweetly, and I saw his mouth water. He said that Kazuyo was gone, and he would not say, but he trembled, like a worm sighting a crow overhead. He demanded another girl to replace her-his loss would have to be answered, or he would call the magistrate and inform him that we had breached our contract. He was quite red in the face, and I thought, strangely, of the persimmons blowing into each other outside the house, flesh into flesh.) Men are foolish. But they are beautiful, (he was neither beautiful nor old) and they suffer so. They do not understand the nature of the Mouth, which is (to ingest, to carry within,) to draw the Beloved inside. I am the sacred Mouth, my body, my heads only hold it, like a many-colored reliquary, eight together in one, cradling the wide lips which open to encompass the conflagrations of all possible skies. Give me a wine I can bite, a human child I can drink.

(Quiet, second head, do not speak. You have had these things, and they have had you.

And he had me. I stepped between my mother and the soup bubbling away, and offered myself with head bent low, offered myself to this man whose face was neither pocked nor greasy, and he pinched my arm for the muscle there, and said he would take me, and a pair of black chickens to make up the difference between a first and second daughter, a first and second choice.

But he insisted, you know. He was a good buyer, he knew how to tell if a horse is older than it seems by the hooves and the gums-he insisted on my virginity that very night, in case another serpent should befall his new wife, and he be left again having paid for nothing but a lump of blood and lymph left lying on the dry grass.

He asked me if I was born when the persimmons were thick on the branch, like my sister. Holding my arms over my small breasts as though they could protect me, I answered-no, I was born under the plum trees, when they were dark and pink with flowers. My mother was carrying the well water up to the house-and here he took my belt away-and the bar was so heavy on her shoulders, like a yoke-and here he took my robe-and she stumbled-her belly was so thick with me, thick as an uncut melon.) Yes, it is like that, when I am full of you, of your voice and your plum-laden scent, and the well-water rolling in you-(She fell forward onto her taut belly-and here he opened my legs with hands neither calloused nor small-and her thighs were wet with the water of the well and the water of her child-and here he pushed inside me with a grunt like a boar nosing for mushrooms in the loam-and she did not weep at all, but squatted in the garden and pushed her baby out among the quince and the mustard weed. My toes tangled in the raspberries, and I have never walked quite right-and here he stiffened and rolled off of me, and his hair smelled of oil and eyes.

"Soon you will carry my water, and give a child to my plums, and then you will be happy" he whispered, and fell asleep. He neither snored nor spoke in his dreams.) Happiness (enlightenment-father says happiness is suffering, and enlightenment is a soup with no eyes) can only be reached when you have eaten the world, when you hold it inside you like a content child, rocking slowly on the drift-currents of your blood. He thought you would be content when you held another creature in you-he thought you were a Monster, like me, but you were nothing yet but a girl with wet linens. Still, it never works, it is never enough. I cannot rest until the Mouth is sated, yet it can never be full.

(He wore my maidenhead on his sleeve like a bright button, like a charm, to keep him safe when Kameko walked the road that Kazuyo walked. He called me his turtle-child, he called me his mare, and the sun was very high, like a pinprick in the air.) Men believe that Beauty will keep them safe. That nothing beautiful is to be feared. And this is how they come to me, innocent, pure as ethyl alcohol, unknowing and sweet, dragging Beauty behind them. Their faith in the order of Man and Monster is profound. They never expect me (us) to be beautiful, never expect the colors of my (our) flesh, never expect that Beauty calls to Beauty, never know how the sheen of your hair calls to me. (How the sheen of Kazuyo beaming from your long, swan-bright neck like a lantern lit only for me would propel me into your stunted, clawed arms.) And under the lights of my skin they gasp, their minds blown clear as glass, in rapture, in (passion.) They lust (for me, for the snake, for the thing we make together in the dark?) with a clean and singing strength-and lust, like passion, erases all but itself, imprints only its own image on the sweat-kissed eyelid, repeated like the refracted light of a star. Their stars become my eyes, boiling white and deep.

His eyes were full of sons, and you were so beautiful, limping behind him.

And when you were empty of all but the sight of me, (but the sight of my sister, laughing behind your eyes which had neither pupils nor irises), we began our too-brief courtship, under the high, wild cries of the migrating terns.

(Like nested dolls we are, the snake and the maiden and the ninth daughter floating in me, gills like crystal, eyes without color, awash in the salt-soup of my) our (body, tiny as a needle, dreaming. It is not unlike a serpent, all Mouth and Belly, suckling at the womb-walls of this long throat, woman choked with woman choked with woman, and I) if there is an I (un-maidened and un-mothered, and where are the plum-trees who would hear my daughter's first cry?) It is all one flesh, that monstrous swell, curve of globe beneath the Skin, heaving and tossing with an ecstasy that has taste and smell-quince and mustard and rotted persimmons.

III.

ONOGORO.

This is how it was in the beginning of the world: a churning sea, and no earth, and a great bridge hung in the world: a churning sea, and jellyfish macerating themselves into starry foam on the wave-tips. In the beginning of the beginning of the beginning, of the tips of the beginning of the waves. This is how it was pillared in black, and it was so black, and its suspensors were strung with light like mala beads, and jellyfish crushed themselves into raw foam on the tips of the world. A bridge hung on the tips of the waves. This is how the bridge was pillared in the beginning of the world: on clouds, and mist, and the depthless sea.

It was all confused, then, the air and the saltsea, and the darkness.

In nothing, some part of nothing seemed to flow into a space that was her and a space that was him, and his eyes on the undulate sea were as the hand of her flesh on the glittering suspensors, at once through the void, the void seemed to flow into her, and in the briefest beginning of the beginning of moments, the shadows were perfumed.

Izanami and Izanagi opened their eyes on the bridge that spanned heaven, and the feet of Izanami on the floor of the jeweled bridge were strong and pale. Her hair was as black as the nothing, and the void seemed still to cling to her, into her and out of her and into her and out of her. The eyes of Izanagi, in the days before flame, were the brightest objects of all objects in the span of space. The dusk sat on his shoulder blades like clothes, and he said nothing, and she said nothing, and they were the first of all things in the world.

Steam rose from their shadows.

Together, they pulled one of the suspensors down from its anchor, and the sound of it was like a harp breaking, and the lights were upset, red and gold and green, but in the hands of Izanami, who rolled the strand like a stalk of fennel against her thigh, it became the Amenonuhoko, the jeweled spear of heaven, and it was the third object of all possible objects.

Together, neither one before the other, they plunged the spear into the churning sea, where there was no earth, and the spray wet the underside of the bridge, and their faces crusted with the salt of it, and the light-grime of the bridge, and altogether salt and spray and grime were tasted for the first time, on the first tongues. Under the light-clotted spear a thing became bulbous and green, and, after a time, it became an island, rich of dirt and loam, and there were dead jellyfish scattered on its shores like shipwrecks, for they threw themselves against the hard earth as they had thrown themselves against the sea, and discovered first of all creatures that land and sea are not the same. On this island was an empty house, an empty house with a great pillar in its center, and shadows were on the long grass, the long grass and the jellyfish like a smear of diamonds. And this was the place called Onogoro, and it was morning there. Stepping down from the creaking, starry bridge, Izanami and Izanagi's feet squelched in the first mud of the world, and the smell of it was so new, like skin.

As they walked up the beach-head into the house, the jellyfish kept up their suicides, for the lesson of land and sea is a difficult one to learn when there has never before been any land, nor any sea, nor any jellyfish at all.

When they entered the great house, they saw that the floor was many-tiled and green as turtles would be once turtles were conceived, and on the wall, which was blue and black as the bridge had been, was written: The Room of Eight Footsteps.

The letters were scarlet and gold, and Izanami wondered at them with eyes raw as peeled apples, while Izanagi was concerned with the pillar rising up out of the tiles like the trunk of a tree-save that Izanagi did not yet know what a tree was, so the word hung in his mind like a uvula of amber. He gestured to her, and she pulled herself away from the ember-lettering.

They touched the pillar side by side, neither before the other. It was smooth, dry, cool-and yet all these words crowded in a parade through their hearts, for smooth and dry and cool had never before been, and their scent was searing.

Izanami and Izanagi walked around the world-anchoring circumference of the pillar, in opposite directions, like planets orbiting some stony sun. When they met, Izanami, whose hair blew back and brushed the floor like reeds scouring it in summer, spoke first of all the things that ever spoke, and her words were the first sounds, save for the terrible, soft rasp of jellyfish on the sand.

"Oh," she cried softly, "what a beauty you are."

Izanagi frowned, and the corners of his mouth were like books burning. His brow furrowed and he looked through her, as though she were part of the wet detritus of crystalline flesh down below the bluffs.

"You should not have spoken, first of all the things that ever spoke. It is not right that a woman's voice should echo in the void before a man's. I should have been the one to open the silence; it should have been I."

"I am sorry," Izanami whispered, perplexed, and looked down at her feet, still grimed with the light of the Heaven-Spanning Bridge.

"No matter," said Izanagi through teeth clenched first of all clenching things, and with the flail and clutch of a newborn, fell onto Izanami in the shadow of the pillar. She tried to open for him, gracefully, but in his eagerness he crushed her foam-cooled thighs together, his knee awkwardly thrust into her muscle, and livid bruises bloomed there like chrysanthemums. His breath was on her neck as she tried to smile placidly beneath him, tried to keep any further words, any further cry, pressed under her tongue. Her body was caught into a pillar, calf to calf, arm to waist, and the pillar was bounded on all sides by the shuddering body of Izanagi, who quivered in the darkness, and could not find the way into her.

On the green-tiled floor Izanagi stiffened, and first of all spilt things, his seed pooled onto the tortoise-floor, useless and pale.

Outside, the soft slush of the jellyfish went on. He would not look at her.

Izanami pushed her long hair from her eyes and smiled sweetly, said things which in the long days of the world would become usual, but Izanagi would not be comforted, and his brow deepened into its furrow, and his eyes were haughty as they looked on the only woman on the shores of the churning sea, and it was cold in the perpetual morning of Onogoro.

THIRD HEAD.

I am the third body-daughter-Kiyomi-of-the-dogwood-smiling-Kiyomi who was never good for anything. Kiyomi who could not make the soup. Kiyomi who could not stitch her own sleeves-Kiyomi who tasted like mulberries and snail-shells, Kiyomi who dog-snarls-Kiyomi who disappointed her mother, who shamed her house-Kiyomi who lies curled in my heart like a slippery eel, suckling at the walls of my blue-green ventricles.

-Festival days are hot, even in winter. Bound up, tied in, veiled and flowered: ritual clothes itch, and in my life my obi has never lain straight-I watched, and the Mouth salivated, even from behind its shield-wall of hills. All those girls lined up stiff as poles-and we stand all in a row, looking down, offering the loveliest side of the bowl to the men who come for the soup of eye and hymen, the soup of plenty, borne by virgins-I suppose then I might have been able to stop, to seek out other girls who were not of a height and thickness, who did not link hands like a chain of perfect ducklings in the water, who did not look into each other's eyes with a silence like a child they had conceived together, without even the glance of a man to seed their single black, invisible womb-but even in that row of bent heads like bobbing bluebells, I was a blight on the delicate flowers of the dresses, in the flavor of the soup-but seeing the rest of them like that, six little maids all in a line, as though waiting for the door of myself to open and let them in, I could not turn away from them-I alone of my sisters was no virgin, and my mother said the house stank of my sex-six sisters with their suckling silence between them, and something in the turn of their mouths told me that they would want the jaw and the tooth.

-Mother said I had to serve, even though I could make nothing but sludge of the delicate, fishy broth, and had sat by while my sisters learned stew-craft, sat by and pinched my lips to bring the red up. And he touched my finger as I passed him the soup-bowl, a breach of etiquette severe enough for banning, if I had cried out, but I was always bad, always, and I said nothing, did not even blush-I only saw the cut on my belly after the turtle-girl pulled me over her body like a shell-he saw what it was in me which would not turn away from bare flesh, the knotted leech in my stomach which slept, slept until that finger brushed my finger-after Kameko. It was still thin then, but it throbbed when Kiyomi was near-slept and did not know it meant to suckle blood-bright and gasping at any teat it was offered-in my nest behind the mountains, it throbbed when Kiyomi was near-and so when the moon peeked out he took me behind the shacks under the white and stinking dogwoods, such beautiful cloud-blossoms, but their scent like wet fur and saliva-I dragged my belly after the third girl, with the second girl still writhing-and he picked me up like a bundle of rags, my back against the rasping tree trunk, my legs hiked up round his waist, bruised by his bony hips-dragged my sliver-belly over the grass-and I whispered: "Did you know I was born under these trees? The smell made mother sick, the smell put its thumbs in her nose as she pushed me out-and the cut throbbed its three syllables: Ki-Yo-Mi-and the green pollen dusted my fists, dusted my tongue, dusted my hair still clotted with blood-it was still thin then, and it stung when I saw the third girl, the grass, and the red.

"Kiyomi," he gasped, "be quiet. I don't care about the dogwoods."

And he pulled from me amid a shower of green pollen-the Mouth once it finds a delicacy, demands more of the same, and I could smell the pollen on you, quiet Kiyomi, the pollen on your mouth, between your legs-he came again in the morning to ask for my hand and I laughed, I laughed like goats bleating, and I would have nothing of him, for I already knew the sound of his gasps, and that he did not care about the dogwoods. Mother said I was a demon-child, fit only for demons, and would not let me near the soup again-fit for demons, yes, for demons, for serpents and worms-she closed me into the rear room and laid me out on the bedroll. I was not afraid, for this was mother, mother, and mother would not harm me, but she held a bowl of foul smelling paste-green pollen, and sap, and intestines from the little garden snakes-and with a mouth like cut paper she opened my legs and smeared it into me, whispering that I was a whore, a whore and I would learn to be a good girl, for she did not raise whores in her house-even later I could smell the little dead snakes, their little dead venom-sacs, I could smell their musk like family-and oh, it burned me, oh, it scalded the mouth of my womb, still wet with the festival-man, it bubbled within me and mother waited, blowing on the sickly stuff until it dried, and I tried not to cry, I tried not to cry but the tears spilled down, and the bed-roll was wet with salt and paste and I said nothing to her but could not look in her eyes as she held my legs open-you were still marked with your passion when you came to me, his fingerprints and hers-until the smear had done its work, and I felt nothing at all there but the echo of the burning, as if I had once, long ago, born a child made all of fire- In the well of my-our-throat I-we-too still taste-feel-it.

-When the man who was neither joyful nor sorrowing came back from the road to his village, came back with no Kameko, no Kazuyo, I did not care. I mourned my sisters but it meant nothing to me to go into that man's arms, I told them all I would happily go, with a smile and a proper girl's bow-and-shuffle. And I took him into the dogwoods-I care about the dogwoods, your dogwoods, Kiyomi-no, Mouth, you tell us what we want to hear, every maiden's dream, to have a monster all her own-you are no maiden, and without dreams, except of the burning, and the dogwoods-I took him into the dogwoods and let him lift me up against the stubbled bark, and the green seal broke and I thought I would die of it, I wept into his neck but he did not stop, I cried out and the moon looked blankly back, and the fire was in me again, the fire-baby shoved back inside me, and I bit my own hands to keep from biting him-I bit your hands to keep from biting his-and he was pleased with me. He kissed my damp cheeks. He took me by the hand when morning came up the road of Kameko and Kazuyo, the dust-dirt road over the hills, the snake-road, and when I saw the snake I was no more afraid than when I saw the man-I held you all in me, and it was, for a moment, perfect, as you bore up beneath your passion, and disappeared into my heart. You were all through me, and the dogwoods were full of fire-and the burning was by then so great that I fell to the ground before it and begged it to cut me in half-so beautiful, and foolish, they will come, always, dragging wives behind them like quail, and I will teach them about passion, and we will suffer together under the trees and the stars-to eat up the flames and I together, I did not care, I did not care, a whore never cares- IV.

Ohoyashima

Mother did her best, you see.

But with the dew forming like infant pearls on infant oysters, clinging to his matted thighs, Izanagi seized the pillar which had been Izanagi by the rope-taut length of her hair to the pillar which was stone in the center of the Room of Eight Footsteps. With the dew forming like infant oysters choking on their litters of pearls, clinging to the only woman yet in the world in the fist of the only man yet in Onogoro, he hissed at her.