Lancelot And when Sir Launcelot awoke of his swoon, he leapt out at a bay window into a garden, and there with thorns he was all to-scratched in his visage and his body; and so he ran forth he wist not whither, and was wild wood as ever was man; and so he ran two years, and never man might have grace to know him.

-Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur Vespers-The Psalm of Forgetting Perhaps I never saw her at all. Perhaps I never caught the curve of her hip in my eyelashes, through the rain-speckled window. Did I never stand below the queen, like Gyges, and dream myself a ring slipped onto her finger? Did I never die on her cross, crucified on the gold-dusted frame of her body? Did no spear pierce my side, the wound irising closed like a cataract?

The faces confuse in my memory-was it one woman or two? I remember the waters closing over me, and a black-tipped breast brushing my lips, and milk flowing into my throat like myrrh and sapphire-but no, that was when I was a boy, when the Lake swallowed me and I saw the paintings on the walls of her belly. When the Lady of the Lake peered up out of the water and thought how well she would like to have a son. But a Lake has no womb-so she took me from my nurse whose cheeks were so fat, and taught me to breathe her blue.

I fell so far, so far. She whispered to me in the language of salmon and bullfrogs, taught my uvula to twist itself into the semblance of herons and leeches. I drank the milk of her body for twelve years, and it tasted of belladonna and lemon rinds, it tasted of verdigris, it tasted of the smoke and mist from an unnamable sea. My heart swelled with it, it replaced my blood, the secret currents of snow-bright mercury pooling in my thirsty ventricles.

She opened her mouth and the Lake rushed out of it, and I had no voice but to adore her and call her my mother, my lover, and my terror, to fall into the tide of her beckoning and kiss the brine from her wavering lips. Her cool skin was my bed and her glassy bones were my meadhall-I drank and drank and there was always more of her to fill my mouth. In the night I slept curled into the blue-black shadows of her hair, and I dreamed that once I had been a human boy, and lived in a house with a red roof, and rode a gray horse.

I live with a skein of waves over my eyes even now, and in my fracturing vision I see their faces merge and separate, the reflections of fish just below the surface, skittering out of reach. Was I, then, the Sword in the Lake? I rose from it by her hand, which dripped with the scales of newborn trout, fluttering from her arm like dandelion seeds. I rose from the water and the reeds sang their canticles. And the king took me in his hand and I have been nothing else since but a stupid sharp thing hacking at bags of blood. If I am the Sword I am innocent; steel cannot sin. If I can be nothing but a dumb blade, I can be forgiven. If I am metal, I have been always in the hand of my friend, and never smelled of his wife.

The last moment in the Lake-mother's arms I wept, and that was the first time I felt the madness coming on, the separating of my skin, the light coughing out from my teeth. I choked, then, who had breathed the Lake for air, and the moon rolled out of my mouth. I stood on the shore, my lungs blazing like saints, and watched her black-flecked eyes disappear, sinking away from me.

Did I suckle at that woman for all my youth? Did I trade my flesh for hers? Or was it all that other she, the one for whom I am punished, the one who will not now hear my name? It is always a black-eyed woman, and I am always prone at her feet, I am always raving at the waters for the false mother-but how sweet the taste of her salt milk, for all her lies-to take me back and wash me clean, take me away from the woman I should not want, from what I have done, from the laughing throat which made me forget that I am only a tool, heavy as a hilt, and all my limbs fold together to make the sleek white edge-I am the musculature of the Lake-knife, and I am not allowed eyes, or blood, or a cock. Yet I strain towards her, always her. Even if I cannot, sometimes, tell the primal her from the secret her.

But I feel it again, I feel the light breaking from my skull like seraphic needles. She will not forgive me, she will not believe me. Her navel spoke to me while her eyes shut my face from the room. It hissed that I was poisoned, poisoned by the Lake, and that I would never be pure enough for the cup to pass to me, I would never be clean of that witch. It hissed like a white serpent and called me damned, and my eyes bled for her, the stigmata of the ruined man.

With my hands in her black hair I screamed the heron-hymns of my youth into her mouth, and she was afraid of me then. She wept and her tears burned constellations into my cheeks, and I'm sorry, I never knew, I didn't know, my love, my love, I thought it was you. But the queen wouldn't listen, she wouldn't forget. And now I am losing her, my Guenevere, I am losing her face in the multitude of faces, and her black eyes bleed into my mother's, and the other one, the one who was not Guenevere, but wore her skin like a dress.

I fell so far, so far. She spat on my hands, and my bones broke like a gate in the wind, and the moon rolled out of my mouth.

Terce-The Psalm of Metamorphosis It was not only that a hole opened in the world or that in the hole was a garden in which I was the eaten fruit, it was not only that I reached out for a woman and drew back a burned hand. Perhaps I could never have done anything else, and it was all meant to happen as it did, and I was meant to circumnavigate this desert and no other, and pray only to the skulls of buffalo and hare.

I was never innocent, I confess it, as freely as my asthmatic brain will allow. I was a verb, white as opium smoke. I acted, I never stood still. I was the thrust and cry. Somewhere along the way a thing snapped or bent in me and now I can feel my organs expanding like novae, galaxies of liver and spleen, nebulae of bile, of cilia, of obliterated marrow, pounding pulse-rate signals into the blackness of my vast interior-vast enough, anyway, to contain the tumescent moons that spin through me like plates.

But if the geometry of my lover changed underneath me, it did not stop the motion of my hips grinding into her, it did not lessen the red marks of my teeth on her shoulder. The Euclidean planes of her face shifted like glaciers, and her eyes snapped from black to blue. I am guilty, it matters not if I thought that it was the body of Guenevere I loved-it was my fault. I did not die to escape that bed.

But I was not innocent, though I came to that thorn-bed hoarse with faith. I saw it, I saw her lips swell and crack the skein of Guenevere, I saw the Elaine-fruit break its pod, I saw her shiver and her hair flay itself, black slitting to reveal red. I saw it and I did not stop, but I screamed, how I screamed as I felt myself caught inside her, caught as if on a nail in her womb, screaming as I shattered over her body, the glass of my bones pricking her nipples, and her mouth was a trumpet-blare, and the color of its triumph was red, red, red.

The light sluiced from my skin, and her sternum sang my dirge, it gaped between her breasts and I called out her name, her true name which was Elaine, not the white but the clay. I called out her name and her name was the word and the word was the grail and the grail was her womb and my heart cracked like a rotted apple and I was dead in her, I was dead but my son was alive and I could see his face in her belly like the Shroud of Turin and I was lost in the maze of her breath, her wet mouth, her lily-sweat. I was not Theseus, not the hero with the thread of silver, but the mute and rabid Minotaur, raging against flesh-walls and tossing my horns at her phosphorescent ovaries.

Her body seemed to be a cup, and I crushed the goblet to me, and wept into its bowl, and Elaine seemed to smile and promise that she was the only grail I would ever touch, and her mouth was the only life I could ever drink. It was over, over, over and I had betrayed my queen and I clung to the chalice of her, soaked in tears and blood and semen, and her fingers were laced over her liquid belly where the embryonic diamond had begun to swallow its mother in long draughts, the gilled Galahad-thing which I could not now escape.

What a poor beginning for my son, all dressed up in the methane-blue betrayal of morning and grimacing in the light of my skin which was not the light of revelation. But whosoever drinketh from his mother shall have madness until the end of his days and the desert gaping like a jaw at his left hand. I stumbled from the bed and retched a pool of jaundiced stars into the corner, and Elaine was still as stone, listening to the grail-child unfold inside her like origami.

Compline-The Psalm of the Desert Father I passed out of the world. I ran out of it. I sought out the driest of lands, those red and ochre, burned white and thirsty. I sought out the sermons of the saguaro and the yucca bell. I went deep into the waterless earth, the Lakeless air-in the yellow silt I broke open my skull, and four black opals spilled onto the rock.

Each held a clemency I could not touch, each whispered of purification and hands cleansed of the imprint of Elaine's body. Each reflected my face a hundred times, the hundred Lancelot-selves which I came to bury, the watery proliferation of mirrors I could no longer believe would bear my weight. I gathered up the stones in my arms and cradled them like daughters, daughters I never had, daughters with her hair like cats' pelts, thick with wild scent.

The sun told me a lie, and the lie told me a hymn, and the hymn told me that I belonged to the earth alone. The moon told me a riddle, and the riddle told me a rhyme, and the rhyme told me that only the white sage could heal me, the eating of smoke and darkness. The Mojave opened up to my limbs like a box of secrets, and I went to ground believing in absolution.

The rocks know our story, I do not even have to say our names and they know my sin, they know that there has never been a creature I loved that I did not betray. Oh, but even these red and riotous stones I see through the sick-silvern veil of my mother's skin. They ripple under her water and I am trying, trying, to empty myself of this liquid horror, to exorcise myself in the heat and bleach-dry bones.

Can I never escape these endless bodies, bodies I have entered like a mendicant, asking only for a shower of coins from their eyes, the lustral basins of their throats in which my poor forehead pressed-can I never escape the bodies I have possessed, the plague of hers which were the objects of my aiming?

I went to the waterless lands and still I saw the shore.

I stood on a pole in the desert, and the afterimage of it flashed forwards and backwards, a pin holding a chain of like-footed martyr-lunatics trying to fit the sun into their mouths. If I stand very, very still, and never come down until the coming of the sea, I will be pure again, the wind will move through me like a hand, it will curl up in the cathedral of my skeleton and sing choruses to itself, it will rest in me and breathe, and breathe, and breathe.

If I let my flesh wither to air, I will not be the sword or the lover-destroyer, I will be the saint of the ways, I will be forgotten and the world will close behind me like a drawn curtain. He will smile at her again, and she will laugh. I am the gray-blue stain between them, and if I go, if I go, if I stand and stand and do not move, it will be as if I never came to that castle between the blessing hills.

It is so clear, the glare of light in the desert, the holy emanations of adobe huts and turquoise ring-traders, the desperate clenching of skin against the sand, the divinatory mesas with their pyre-colors. The red crumble of it, studded with those night-blue stones like a spray of seraphic blood-the jewels which have rolled from the skulls of all the mad saints who lost their names in this place, this desert which is all deserts, and if I am good enough, if I am empty enough, it will take my name, too.

This is the end of the world.

I tasted the dust and it was an undoing, and all the wine of the earth became water. I have come as far as I can, there is nothing for me beyond this. The grail was her waist in my hands, and now the cup will never pass to me, except that I touched its rim when I spilled a son into a needled womb, except that I lit with the tongue of that red-haired girl the twelfth star in the crown of heaven.

The open rock begs for rain, and I am a ghost of cloud and salt-I wanted nothing, I swear, I meant only to embrace the mindless loyal sol invictus blaze of man and gold, I meant to be stupid and mute like all the other men adoring his light. But the moon is the ruin of me, it always grins, its landscape terrible and sere, knowing it holds me by the screaming scalp, and her apocalyptic touch woke me into shadow, gave me refuge from the topaz sheen of his nodding head, and I was in the Lake again, cool against the belly of a black-eyed mother.

But help me now, help me, wheel of fire, burn me white and chaste and empty of all things but the red rock and the turquoise, make my bones translucent, fill me with light and I will be the spear instead of the cup, I will be tipped in oil and pointed ever skyward, I will stand still as a temple, only take this away, take her away, take all the hers from my tongue, I will never utter the word again, take it, take me, let me become the skull of a buffalo and the jaw of a flat-footed hare.

Yea, though I walk through the valley in the shadow of death I will fear, I will fear and fall, I tremble in the shadowless weeds, I will know nothing but the emptying of my body, the liquefaction of my cyanic organs, the flagellation of my scalded back, for whosoever drinketh from me will inherit a throat of clay and dust, and whosoever eateth from my body will not die, but burn forever in the desert of the lost, and the sun will not forgive.

Sext-The Psalm of the Sun The mad go to the desert to become holy. Or the holy go to the desert to become mad. It is hard to tell the difference. In the desert, madness is nothing of note, among all those bands of gold dirt. The long bones of the sky metamorphosize the psoriatic brain to sainthood. They become wise men, holed up in caves clotted with beatific filth. Others seek them out, wearing white burns on their thighs, and demand that they create bread from dust, to demand that they be fed, at last, from a hand without shadows.

These are easy words-shadow, sun, dust, mad. They do not touch the salt-scrim of the painted earth, the roads that wend over it like hungry fingers. They do not touch the foot of my spindled pole, the saint's phallus, with its thin shade falling binary and severe onto a pebbled stone tablet. The shadow is not a law, to be scribbled and footnoted-it is an equation, the simple line AB, bisecting crust and mantle, web-gray and endless. Where it falls commandments shiver.

And I above it, with one crooked leg, ridiculous bird that I am, wait to be hollowed, wait to have the muck and grime of her ground away, wait to be dried utterly, to be a magnificent husk, a cicada fossilized into amber on the basin floor.

It is difficult to balance. Like St. Sebastian I can feel holes opening in my skin, pores elongating like throats, rods of light slamming into place, through liver and pancreatic labyrinths, marrow and sweetmeat. Yet I am still wet, water still trickles from my kneecaps, and where it falls the mathematical line wavers-yucca bells spring up, bloody and scowling, from the sand which admits no other life. I am trying so, I have made all the correct calculations, all the alchemical designs inked on my shoulders and scalp, I put myself into the jaw of the sun, and still the yucca bells bloom.

It is the sun, always, which shows truth. When I woke and the sylph beside me was caught in the morning light, I should have killed her. I should have opened her breast before the milk could crack her veins and swell her into a mother. I could have sewn Galahad into my leg and left her a ruin, craggy towers and a vivisected torso. I would have walked with a limp, my thigh slowly becoming round and fat, an egg-thigh, and I this great deformed eagle, lumbering through clouds and the wind-reek of winter. With my moldering beak I could have smoothed the hairs on my leg and whispered to the blue-gilled Galahad, suckling at my sugar-white femur, his little hands opening and closing in the tides of my blood.

And somewhere, somewhere secret, I could have cut open the muscle and spilled out a grail-son onto a nest of sand and pine needles, and hushed his squalls and brought him to the cactus-kings to swear fealty, as I once did, sweating underneath my helmet. And he would have been pure, then, motherless-I could have given him up to the coiled whips of the sun, cauterized his mouth to a thin line, a shadow, an equation.

But I failed him, I let him be born in water and woman, like me, surrounded in that sickening blue, breathing her poison, adoring the sound of her breath. I let him float in the Elaine-lake, where nothing but the detritus of bloated carp can thrive, their coral scales peeling off like pages. I left him to be born in the mud and reeds, a sallow egg, roe, a tadpole-a swamp creature, whatever he becomes. Her fecundity is the rich stink of a dead marsh, and I abandoned him to that false grail, brimming with algae and wet grass.

I am punished, oh, I am punished for it. The sun will not forgive me, it sits on my spine and gnashes its skies. I am not hollow, I cannot be, no matter how I affect this perfect pose, no matter the agave-eyed boys who come to sit at the foot of my pole and stare, playing blackjack on the bedrock, taking bets on when I will fall. I am filled with all this clay, dead loam from a dead river. My heart's chambers press frantically on a glut of schist and volcanic dust. I am the ash-soldier, blasted against the adobe wall by Vesuvius, who could not forgive, either.

But the desert is full of madmen who have found the grail. It is not impossible to find succor in the clattering embrace of ox-skulls and snake-hides. It is not impossible that I may be able to escape the last of them, the water-wraiths that rise from every well and draw me down into dark and silence, into the death of their lips. They pull a son from me, they pull betrayal, they pull what was pure and pale as a tooth from me-all these things spilling from my mouth like a magic trick, scarves shooting endlessly from a painted gut-cobalt, olive, silver, turquoise, orchid, smoke, ink.

It is not impossible that I may find that cup of sage and sweetgrass, and vanish into grace.

Prime-The Psalm of the Roadside Stand Apples and cherries, grapes and oranges, peaches, apricots, plums and ears of corn like arrows. The desert has no right to these things, this sugar water bursting at variegated skins. I have no right to them. I dimly recall, when I first came, being disappointed that the Mojave was not empty, was not the wasteland I craved. Black-eyed witches and nicotine-toothed magi chewed tobacco and held out hands full of fruits and jewels-I reeled from them, my skull full of tangerines and white jade, groping for hermitage amid all these unmovable faces.

It was the apples I feared most. Everyone knows that red means poison, means a swollen tongue turning black, means years in a glass coffin. And when I was a boy, my mother's breasts tasted of apples, her hair like apple-leaves, and under the surface of the Lake, my mouth was always full of the papery sweetness. I put my mouth to her throat and it was like pulling fruit from a branch, huge and red as a heart.

And there they lay, exuding that same earthy smell, in row after row of identical red-I covered my eyes and behind the lids were only ghosts, with their slim arms full of apple-roots. I went into the salt-flats, where the cool flesh of those fruits could not survive, and I ate mice, cracking open their delicate bones for the marrow.

And still, I could not escape these peddler-crones, holding out their beans and dried peppers like relics to be kissed, mouthed-these idols in orange and scarlet-habanero, poblano, ahi, guadillo, mesilla, shiny with wax and the tender hands of the faithful. Even in the emptiest of flatlands, one will appear as if she had grown out of the rock, slate-gray hair braided under a green bandana and a wide-brimmed hat, and wordlessly hold out the husk of a pepper, desiccated into gold, insisting.

The stars last night huddled for warmth in the shadow of the cliffs, and I shared my fire, my mouse-feast, and the rattling pepper-net I could not refuse, which they quarreled over like wild dogs, tearing into the red and yellow skins, snarling and lapping at the spiced rope.

Afterwards, the stars sat around the flames and I confessed that I was mad, that I was fleeing the water and the threat of apples. They hunched together, coronae bristling like tangled branches, and told me that the curvature of the moon meant rain was coming, they told me that the lizards and sparrowhawks were dancing for rain, that the poppies were singing in opiate harmonies to call down the rain. They told me that the Grail comes up from the bleeding soil, that the rain tells it secret things, and it spins up like wild onion. The bowl of its cup is blue, the leaves are dusty white, sage-white, willow-white, and I will know it by its water, for it will hold the rain perfectly still and not spill a drop.

They accused me of heresy, of turning from the water that gave them the perfume of saguaro flowers, washed their haunches, and fattened the snakes under their feet. I was no madman if I could not weep, they snapped, and weeping is nothing but water. They stroked my stomach with fingers that smoked and sizzled, promising that I would never dry myself to the ruby shell of a roadside pepper, that I would never bind my flesh with those rough ropes or taste the sun's meat.

I wept, under their hands like midwives, and they mocked my tears for water. They pointed at the moon, overturned like a broken bowl, and pulled at my jaw, trying to fashion it into a lunar basket, lips and rushes woven water-tight. They told me that no one with hands so dry could touch the cup of the desert, which was an avatar of liquid things: blood, sweat, milk, tears. They laughed like ravens over carrion at my legs which had not borne a child. They prodded at my old wounds. They sidled into my ears and whispered the names, the terrible names I could not let into me, those acetylene syllables searing through my inner ear, the secret ear which hears only shame: Arthur. Guenevere.

It was a poor madness, they said, which remembers all its sins.

But I do not have to remember-the desert knows those names, they are written on every hut and dry riverbed, they are in the cave-wall glyphs and scrawled like graffiti on the Anasazi cliff-houses, they are stamped on every fruit in every stall, on the tongue of every turquoise trader, emblazoned on the door of every red-tiled mission with their great lonely bells. It is deafening, it is blinding, and in the night the names couple wildly and reproduce themselves in new crevices, on the backs of whipsnakes and iguana, burros and turkey vultures. Even the stars mouth those names, mash them with toothless gums, roll them over their cold tongues and push them into the earth again, where they will germinate, and under the moon's first rain will detonate into lilies and poppies and knowing anemones.

Arthur. Guenevere.

Nones-The Psalm of Remembering I walked these last days with my head skyward, until I was blinded by the bleach-boned sun and the expectation of rain. I feared it, I feared its worm-droplets burrowing under my hair, I feared the taste of it mixed with my sweat and blood-dust. I feared that it would know me, and burn at a touch, for all that I have done.

I was not allowed eyes, or blood, or a cock. These things were not given to me the day of my oath. A sword, yes, and a title. But flesh, a tongue, desire? None of these-but when she leaned over me-she, not him, Guenevere, not Arthur-and touched me with the Lake-blade, the diamond at her throat swung forward and brushed my forehead, and I smelled her skin, which smelled of no other thing but apples, and I felt the water floating again over my face like hands, obscuring the vision of king and ceremony, until only she filled me up, the brush of her rainwater-jewel and her lion-braids hanging low like the tongues of church bells.

And later, when I knew what her mouth tasted like, and the milk of her body, when she had miscarried twin daughters, and when her dresses smelled of us, a miasma of apple and horsehide, I could not stop, I could not breathe unless I was inside her, unless I could wend her hair in my fingers and shriek, hoarse and dry, into her neck.

It has always been so. I am always the little boy climbing into the laps of women too big for me. And I am always surprised when they close over me, and I cannot see the sun for the ripples of their tides.

I climbed into the lap of the desert, too, clambering over loose stones, caked in dust that should have been Aramaic, crusader's dust, Byzantine at the least. I scrabbled under scrub-brush and hubcaps for the disc of sainthood, the nova to surround my head, the balm for my drowning, and there was nothing. There is nothing in the desert, there is nothing in women, there is no revelation to be gained by swallowing the sun or by pulling on the body of another like a shirt.

Am I cured, then, by the birth of this homunculus, this black little cherub somewhere in my lower intestine? Should there not be a heroic burst of music, fiddles and drums and low, hooting pipes, as befits the geography? Should not the railroad keep the time, the chuffing trains play metronome to the coyote-sopranos?

The moon is almost upside-down. I lay beneath it and it boils my skin white, white as the tail of a starving deer, white as that mange-ridden stag which bumbled into the wedding feast, gobbling the cakes and shitting noisily on the draped dais.

The signs were there, for anyone to see who cared.

When I left Elaine, Galahad-heavy, she saw-she saw, the most perfect of the pronouns that bury me-and Guenevere's glance was the same as it had been on that long ago day, the day she married, when she watched a poor white deer, its mouth smeared with sugar and honey, stumbled into the feast-hall, start and cry out feebly as it was gashed by a dozen arrows. It crashed through the goblet and plate as it fell, legs spasming, spattering the altar with filth. And she watched, calmly, as they carried out the ruin of that sick beast.

Here, too many years hence to admit, my hands still trained to the shape of her waist, I wait for it to rain. I pray, I keep the liturgy of the wolf spider, I ring out the hours on the bare rocks-I pray for the only promise I have left to show itself-that the Grail will bloom out of the desert like a blood-colored marigold, and that I will be pure enough, just enough, to fall into it and cover my body, this mewling body, the splayed thing, hung head-earthwards on a six-spoked wheel made from the twined legs of three women, this horror, cover its shame with light.

I am not cured. I have learned to speak the dialect of the mad saint, which consists mainly of fire and bone, and printed the lexicon on my ribcage, stamped in perfectly even letters, the typewriter-hammer slamming home each time, expressing the virtue of exactitude. But when the bread and water were carried from Rome, they passed me by, deeper into the desert, towards the pepper-stand woman and the star-pack, and I, in my grubby sandals and mantis-hung beard, could not catch them. Canonization is for those who find God in the desert. I found only the smell of the earth before rain, and the memory of wetness exploding in my chest, the ecstatic drops on my blistered lips, my cracked chin.

The moon rolled over and presented her throat to the stars; the stars closed their mouths over her white fur.

Matins-The Psalm of the Rain The fruit stands packed up more quickly than I would have thought possible, collapsing into neat heaps like decks of cards. The pole-children scatter like sullen crows. And now it is truly empty here, as I imagined it, the cross-hatch of railroad tracks binding the expanse of land like a corset, the mesas that clothe the world and meet the sky, and through the heat I seem to see the air shape itself into many-towered Camelot.

But I cannot touch it, the mirage of a well-appointed castle, a castle swollen with happiness and nobility-why would anyone claim such a thing, when we lie around its walls like corpses, genuflecting maniacally, mired in the wreck of it all?

This is my confessional flesh, wet and kneeling even when I stand. Wet and kneeling when the moon empties herself onto my desert, my red rock and whittled canyon. Thin tracks appear over the flats, a race of rivulets, mercurial, sparse as strands of hair. Thatches of green are opening in the cliff walls like eyes, and the rush of water fills my ears, my mouth, closing over me, familiar and silent.

There are arms now, arms in the desert, spinning like the thousand arms of copper-bellied Buddhas, spinning in cattle-horns and barbed wire and agate and gold flecks, serrano peppers burning like sacred hearts, train engines and thirst and burro-haunch, spinning until they are nothing but water, water, and she is here, she is all around me, I am inside her again, beneath the Lake, and her arms around me are as blue as those idols, Lakshmi and Kwan-Yin and the Lady, always the Lady, whose cheek presses against mine.

Her cool skin pools in my hands, and those old black eyes croon over me as if I was a baby again, her own changeling child, down in the deep and the dark, with her and in her and over her. My mother has never said a word to me, but sung in her own liquid language, her burble and splash, her deep thrum which vibrated then in my jaw, but now quivers in my belly. I put my arms up to her, pleading, humble, begging for some surcease, some end, opening my body in supplication to her nebulous form, begging for the Grail from her hands. She gathered me to her breast, and showed me again the place to drink, tipped with black water-and I shut my eyes when she flowed into my mouth, the taste of apples and apple-petals, apple-bark and apple-sugar. I shudder, I shudder, and pull harder against her, sucking her into me, the apple-fire snaking through my veins like honeyed lightning, and the names disappear from the wind, evaporating into nothing, just meaningless letters, wafting up to the sky like ashes.

Arthur. Guenevere. Elaine. Galahad.

There is only the Lake, and the Lady stroking my hair with an azure hand, and my hand twisted in her lightless hair.

When I let her fall from my mouth, and reel upwards at her moon-dark face, I am calm. She holds something in her hand, something I cannot quite see. The small of her back glints in the shadow-and-light of the water, and at the base of her spine I can see a strange root whose tendrils wrap her inky waist. It winds up, around her ribs and cupping the bottom of her heavy breast, curling at last over her shoulder and into her open palm.

She turned to me, and the grail was nestled in her fingers-a flower which was not a cup, and a cup which was not a flower. Its squat stem opened over her hand in white stone, in bundles of white sage, in gnarled lily-roots. The chalice was not a blue blossom, and it was not a black jewel, hollowed like a gourd. Its glass-petals wavered in the current, and it held the rain perfectly still, it did not spill a drop. I looked into her mirroring body, and its light was unmistakable-the light of blood and dark caves, the light of rotted wood and iron, mother-light, the light of the womb filled with stones grinding aside. It cast no shadow, but shone simply as a star.

I reached out for it, extending my fingers in innocence, and she drew away from me, drawing the cup back into her body, under the waters of the Lake, and the light was gone from me. Her eyes (black, still black, black as dreams!) did not blink, or look away, but I knew that I was lost. I fell so far, so far. It was not for me, not her body, not the Grail. It was for the webbed hands growing in a far-off belly, and I could only see, could only watch her open herself into a Grail, and close again. I had drunk and drunk of her, but her Grail-self was forbidden to me, who had killed a deer on the day of a wedding, and clutched a hip which was a lie.

Her hands unlocked from mine, and as fast as water disappears, as fast as the yucca bells close in the desert, her bright body receded from me, flowing back, black and blue, the wave rolling back to the sea.

The stars became waterfalls, and the wasteland was alive with grasses blowing silver and green, brittlebrush and chicory, asters, datura, and bee-plants, verbena, milkweed, and toadflax, globemallow and Spanish needles, creosote and saltbush-and cereus, their white bowls opening with a rush of perfume. Hares snuffed at the suddenly thick air, and sleek mice pattered through the brush.

I looked back towards the road, the great black line bisecting the desert, linear, simple, an equation.

I opened my jaw, and the moon rolled into my mouth.

VI THE LOVERS.

Balin and Balan Then afore him he saw come riding out of a castle a knight, and his horse trapped all red, and himself in the same colour. When this knight in the red beheld Balin, him thought it should be his brother Balin by cause of his two swords, but by cause he knew not his shield he deemed it was not he. And so they adventured their spears and came marvelously fast together, and they smote each other in the shields, but their spears and their course were so big that it bare down horse and man, that they lay both in a swoon.

-Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur Balin Thou shalt strike, he said, thou shalt strike. Thou shalt strike a stroke most dolorous that man ever struck. And he put his hand, speckled like an owl's with veins and liver spots, on my shoulder as if to absolve me, or pity me. What entrails or petrified bones did he consult? What cards, what runes, what bird-flight told him that my hand would find its way to so many throats? And why was the stroke so dolorous, of all the strokes I have made? The spear in the king's thigh? Or you, my brother, my brother, on this crane-nested island, alone and armored all in red? My brother, my twin, my other face, how could you not have shown me the eyes I loved? How could you not have made some sign?

But I suspect the old fortune-teller meant the spear and the wasteland. Fratricide is nothing to them, easily pardoned with the old bleach-gold words: ave maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus-what is it to them, who never shared a womb, who never locked translucent fingers with the child whose skin was white as a mirror, who never rested within the symphony of three hearts beating?

They all want to talk about the spear, that horrid spear, the great ash-wood thing dripping with blood, all hung with ripped altarcloths stained with sacramental wine, a paste of host wafers rubbed into the wood. Wasn't it obvious, they say, that it was sacred? Not to be touched? It didn't belong to you, it was plainly meant for someone purer and more pious, how could you, how could you, how could you?

How could I? It was easy. My sword had shattered in the battle like a looking-glass, pretty and useless. Room by room I ran with the clamor of men grunting and cutting themselves into corpses rattling in my ears, until I ducked into the chapel and saw the spear.

It was dreadful to see, slick with warm blood-but it was light, it had good balance, a solid heft. I thought nothing at all of it, I took it from its frame and sunk it into the king's thigh-it would have been his heart, save that at the last moment my hand slipped in the blood seeping from the ash and the stroke fell awry. It went into him smoothly, as though his leg was its sheath, and I spat on his beard.

But what is that, what is that compared to you, my brother, spitting blood into my lap? What is that king's coarse nettle-beard next to your downy face? Oh, you were never able to grow a proper beard, it sprang up soft and sparse, moss on a classical statue, and how we used to laugh. What is his gaping thigh next to your chest sucking at the cold island wind, to the birds waiting for us to lie down and change from men to feast?

Why should I weep for the wasteland when we are dying here, together, and the cattails are playing our dirge?

I was there only a moment ago, it seems, in that castle, with my spear in the old man's thigh. And then the pillars began to bleed, too, and the rafters cracked, loosing a clutch of dove-corpses-poor beasts cooked up there by the summer heat-and the thud of their bodies on the tiled floor (in the Moorish style, of course, Pellam was nothing if not stylish) was flat and wet. Then the windows gave, the glass bending horribly before shattering, a spray of pink St. Catherine's nipples and the jaundiced yellow of a dozen angels reciting the Dialogue of the Seraphic Virgin. The shards slashed cheeks and earlobes, and the walls came down like Jericho, like the earthquake of '06, like a blast of steel trumpets.

And I was caught, under one of Pellam's precious black agate busts of Mary, the back of her veil inscribed with the precise genealogy connecting his family to those barn-huddlers, out to seventh cousins and step-uncles.

But the old man came and put his owl-hand on my shoulder, and (thou shalt strike) led me out of the wrecked manse onto the clean grass, the strawberry fields around the house, still peppered with migrants tending the irrigation and the nascent fruit. I thought he was saving me, a great hairy angel with scotch-and-water breath, taking me from the endless identical fields of the San Joaquin to the redwood-chapels, where I could heal. But he brought me to this murky delta, this chain of islands leading to your tower-how could he not tell me it was yours? And the mouse-faced little novice told me to fight the Red Knight-well, what am I for, if not bashing against things, if not doing what mousy-faced novices tell me to, what am I for, if not for the kill and the reward and the next kill down the line?

What was the Dolorous Stroke? They will tell me it was the spear, that I should have known it for a holy relic-but I know, I know as your body weighs on mine, that the spear was meaningless.

Balan Red. I was Red, wasn't I? For the tower, for the girl with basilisk-eyes, who told me how to slip in under the weak left arm of the last knight, and get my knife up under his ribs? He was red, too, I think-it was so long ago, now. Red for her lips and her cheeks (though I had always assumed girls like her didn't blush) red for her sweet little cunt and her masses of hair that I could wind around my arm like a sleeve. Red for her blood every quarter moon, and red for the moons when it didn't come, and red for the little screw-faced dwarves that took our daughters away after dark.

Did she tell you that I lead with my right side, brother? Was she tired of me? Or tired of all of us, this mobius strip, knight to knight to knight, and all red, all wearing the emblem of having gotten those hundred babies on her, all winding her hair around their elbows until her scalp was raw? Perhaps she saw a way to cut the strip-or perhaps you were simply better than I-after all, you have spent these years killing kings, and I have spent them sowing beans and lettuce.

But your shield-it should have been the crossed swords on a field rempli, why was it the cormorant recursant volant?

I suppose it doesn't matter, not now.

Do you remember when I brought the dwarf to Cornwall? Bowlegged and red-nosed-the red of vodka straights, not of the tower-girl-and his many-colored hat, his deerskin vests still stinking of the animal, his fingernails caked with dirt, always picking fleas from his pony and crushing them between those sharp claws. He was one of the dwarves who performed the trick of disappearing my daughters-I followed him to the sea, and watched him, under stars like averted eyes, put my child onto a birchwood barge, with a black sail, into the arms of a woman with hair that absorbed the moon. She took the child in her arms, and smiled-her smile was a sudden snow on my bones, brother-and the barge vanished over the breakers.

I caught the curdled arm of the dwarf and demanded he call back the wild-masted raft, but he would not. Instead, he told me that you had killed a boy, that it could not be kept secret. And I stood by while he accused you in that rancid cream-voice, putting no more than a hand on your shoulder and urging you to be more careful (oh, brother, we do tilt at every living thing, don't we? Is there a tree, a sapling in all the world that is safe from us?) and eating a little bread at your side. I wanted to be back at my tower, at my red woman, at my beans and my lettuce-already I had forgotten the lost daughter.

I wish then I had told you to stay in the valley where the pumpkins grow like little suns, where the orange trees groan with their measure of sugared gold. It was better for you there-you should never have come to the isles, to the mist and the cedars that hide countless towers, that hide countless cursed women, that hide legions of barge-fostered daughters.

You could always take me, brother, twin, my double. I believed in the Red, I believed she loved me. I believed she loved the way her hair could wend around my arm. I believed her hair covered me when I went out to meet any other man, that it arced over my head like a wedding canopy, and that I was safe. I carried my shield with her limbs emblazoned on it, woman rampant, and I believed in the tower, and the dwarves, and the beans and the lettuce.