The fear of a flat-palmed hand sounding a low note across my throat flowed on faithfully. It became a game, even after the hottest forked flames of sickness had blown over and what remained was merely the mass graves, the pits with long, mushroom-colored limbs stacked within like the rotting bricks of a misshapen pyramid, the tangled once-gold hair of women like handmaids meant to accompany some monstrous pharaoh into the silver sky and the storm. Hollowed cheeks like jackals echoed loudly in those ashen faces, covered in squares of bravely bright green grass.

Later, when I learned geometry, every angle I measured with my clean plastic protractor seemed to be that of a bruised and broken elbow, the acute angles of riddled bones to haunt all the calculations I ever made.

It was only a game, for him to probe my neck and my arms with tremulous seriousness, as though some latent epidemic lay under my skin, straining to burst the confines of my body. His eyes trickled over me with such earnestness, such tenderness, as though my wretched skin might break. In the rainy sickle-bladed stalks of grass we laughed as softly as the susurring leaves, wrapped ourselves in woolen lengths of silence, watched whisperingly the sky and the trees.

We were young by the sea. The salt and kelp towers, foaming terraces, portcullis of coral and brine. Below the flowered balconies pounded the ineffable blue of the ocean, petals like rose-stained feathers drifting down onto its mirrored surface. The sea bore away the wind of the plague, carried it off into the soft cloud-drifts. The sea scoured us clean, made our skin perfect again. The stairs like a shower of peachstones down to the surf became polished and merry again, bright as brass banisters. The universe of our twinship, our two-ness, the low-population cosmos of our lives seemed slide back into the familiar leather gloves of health and flushed cheeks, of hair streaming in the flapping breeze and laughter like the songs of white pelicans.

Of course I never caught the plague. If I had, perhaps the boy would have stayed with me, feeling that I needed his clinical expertise, his gentle fingers, his eyes boring holes into my uninfected skin. If I had begun to perish beautifully, with a trickle of sparkling ruby blood at the corner of my beestung child's lips, perhaps he would have waited for me, knowing how I needed his clean fingernails and quiet voice, he would have stayed because he would have known how I loved him. He would have stayed and told me I would live forever even as the blood vessels burst in my rose-leaf eyes.

When he died I tried not to think of his body being the color of mushrooms. I know, know now forever that I passed the terrible knives of plague into him, that every time he touched me he took the disease out of me and into himself, purifying me every time his fingers pushed into my muscles and bones, making me smooth and white and clean, taking all the purpled darknesses that never rose up like tiny volcanoes into his fawn-limbed body, dying of the sickness I never contracted.

But I knew, secretly, that I was a carrier, and bore like infants the black strains of death within me, the only children I would ever have. That I would live forever by virtue of the demons I harbored, and bring affliction like a silent choking seafog to every boy that ever lived. Every boy I loved would cough up a glut of blood onto my white dress and apologize weakly before he collapsed into an ecstatic seizure of death. I knew always that I had killed him, killed him, killed him. I knew. I know."

27.

The woman's face had become a jagged mountain.

Salted tears coursed from every crack and niche, the secret erosion of her once-beauty and her bitter core.

"I know what I am," she wept, "myself and no other, tumors blooming in every pore." I cannot imagine we were a comfort, my blank stare and the Monkey's accusing indifference. Her tragedy had burrowed into her, and the crone before us was little more than a maze of empty worm-tunneling. I pitied her so, even through my own ant-farm form.

"Still, you are healthy, old woman," the Monkey mused calmly. "I can smell the warmth of baking apples in your skin. Why do you not simply give her what she wants so that we may leave you to rot in peace? I can smell it here. She will hunt it out. Hoo. Your story is your own. We cannot take it from you and we do not want it on our backs." I looked up from her warm knee with a start, at the visage of yet another riddle from the mouth of a primate, another thing I could not understand.

"What do you mean? What is it? What do I want?" He ignored me and the crone chewed long book-strips, avoiding my eyes. He slipped from the jar and trotted over to me, fur rippling in the firelight.

"Darlinggreen, I know you are angry with me because of the chess pieces, and because I am such a sealed box where you believe treasures and secrets are hidden away. But do not think that just because there is a friendly fire and a ceiling, because there are books here that we are not still within the Labyrinth. That a house is an escape."

At this, the woman cleared her moldering throat unfolded her limbs like creaky shutters and rose from her chair.

"Would you like some tea, girl? I have some nice willowbark tea somewhere . . . " She rummaged in her jars, profile caught by the palest of slanting lights entering a round window near the birchwood rafters with their garrison of black-beaked crows. She put the kettle on for tea in the half light of a hut filled suddenly with long shadows of the hearth and of dawn, filling the little tin vessel.

I watched her drawing water, most domestic and ancient of tasks. Draw water from the well, and the moon from the sky. Corn from the earth and a child from the womb. (Wise woman, wise woman, do these things with your strong brown hands.) The hut-which-is-the-world is washed in blue kitchenlight, in the small, smaller, smallest morning. There are no possible others, just us beneath the kettle-steam spiraling towards the ceiling like the trajectory of a strangely-fletched arrow shot above the burnished pot, a little copper sun growing red on the stove. And the tea-leaves where she will divine the only face of her beloved endlessly repeated in the blue, blue light.

As the water bubbled and she made tinkling domestic noises with mugs, I heard her mumbling like an incantation: "This is my house. This is my bed. That is my wine-glass which does not drain, that is my fruit-bowl. I have put those violet flowers in their vase, I have set the saki-cups and the tea-cups and the flour-cups on the table, I have cleaned the mirrors. I have swept the threshold and the closet-floor. I have tended the Library. This is my house, where I have cleared a space for my sickness to curl up like a cat. I am half-sick of shadows-I won't give it to her, I won't."

This last was underscored by the dreaming trickle of brew into a goblet, and her shuffling bare feet moving back to the fire. She sets one clay cup before me, shooting a gruff look at the Monkey, and kept the other for herself, collapsing back into her enormous chair/throne with relief.

"You get none," she clucked, "because you are a nasty little Beast who talks when he shouldn't." I drank, and it was bitter. Piquant leaves and rainy soil, the tang of acorn mash and copper filings.

With his large eyes like equatorial bats, the Monkey looked up into mine. "Look at these Walls, look at the Path from kitchen to fire, look around at the Doors and the Creature in her chair. Hoo, darling, it is the Maze writ small, yet and still holding you within. This is not your home, you cannot stay."

"But I am so tired, I want to sleep, I want to stay. I could get better if I slept."

The crone nodded over her pulpy supper. "Let the girl stay if she wants to, I have plenty of room. But it will not help you to sleep. I have slept and slept, until I could not dream, but it is no balm, it does not heal. You came here because you are sick and this is a plague house, where lepers like us must eventually find our Way. This is where you belong."

"I am too weak, grandmother, too weak. You are right, I am Sickness, I am Death. I ought to go no further. I deserve to be buried in your book-shreds and disappear."

The Monkey stamped his foot. "Hoo! Stop this! You are the color of my birth-tree, it cannot be long now. Come out again into the moon. You will heal, and she loves the smell of her own rot. How many times must I pull you along like a mule? You would not listen before, and you killed all those beautiful Queens and Rooks and Knights. Listen now, the Road is calling like a mating swan." He stopped, breathing heavily. "Please, do not leave me," he murmured, as though he did not want to be heard.

I pretended I had not. "Yes, I killed them," I wept with heaving breasts, "they were kind to me and I killed them."

"Hoo! They were not kind! They could have killed you with that terrible vision, they could have stolen you away! You barely escaped with your lunacy intact! You are separating faster because of them, your seams popping like an old mattress. And now you cannot even move your treebody from a filthy hut."

"I killed them . . . " I slipped into my accustomed, guilty sea, gentle and welcoming, flagellating my back with pilgrim's whips. The crone's eyes glittered blackly, her teeth flashing in the fire light and the growing morning.

"Stay, girl, with your body full of green lesions. There is nothing for you but your disease. It will be a good friend, it will be a faithful hound, it will love you and stroke your hands at night. Remember the Bear, and how his wound was a comfort, how it made him beautiful. It is beautiful to Stop and Rest, to recline and drink one's tea. I will be your mother and tend to your ravaged body as if it were my own. I will mop your brow when you fever, and wrap you in furs when you are chilled. I will lance your boils and clean the blood from your lips. I will rub your feet with oil and make you brews to calm your stomach. I will clean your vomit from the floor and cradle your head in my lap, I will tell you stories and kiss you goodnight. I will love you and check your soft skin for buboes, I will press my fingers into your flesh with tenderness. Stay and be warmed here. We are alike-we carry Death like a swaddled child, with her black eyes. We owe a penance. This is where you belong, here with me."

With her great gnarled hands like walnut branches she pulled a heavy volume from the shelf, bound in leather like silk, dust like gold plate over its cover. Embossed in silver on its surface was a great glimmering hammer, heavy and deadly as though it might truly crack open my skull like a chest of coins. She opened it and ripped a long piece of parchment, stuffing it into her wet mouth. The old woman, face kind and pitying, held it out to me like a Eucharist, pages opened and waiting, offering its papery throat meekly. I reached out a hand to tear a morsel from the thick spine, and saw the proffered page, and the word written across it like a brand on a bull's thigh.

KORE.

I drew back my moldavite fingers sharply, my mouth parting like a pond beneath a ducks feet. I gazed at the Monkey, struggling to understands why the word was spinning through me like a drill tipped in yellow naphtha. He smiled, slow and wide.

"Yes, yes, Darlinggreen, you see. Because you choose a course once, because you choose one sequence out of many possible, do not think it is the only time. You must choose it again and again. Will you take this thing and dwell within forward-motion or take it and wrap yourself in woolen death until you cannot tell if you are a corpse or a woman? You will take it, but will you Stop or Go, and here is stillness, will you rescind it? Kore, Kore, you are the Maiden, the Maiden and the Monster and the Blade, the Sleeper and the Castle and the Kiss, the Apple and the Mouth, the Damsel and the Dragon, the Witch and the Spell. Wake now and take the name she hoards like a fat gem, the old lizard."

Between their gazes, one milky and rheumy as a new moon, the other black and fierce, I keeled like a ringing buoy. How long had I swum within the whale and known my Will was nothing, no meaning, capsized? It would sicken me further, I knew, to go on, to take this name, to reach out and make a gesture, drive me further from what I was when I was myself and no other. It would fly through me like a row of teeth, madness carousing and glad, faster and faster. She wanted me to take it and throw it into the flames, lose it forever, repudiate it and kill it. But I would not, of course, of course, because that is not what a Seeker does, what a Maiden does, she ever after eats the apple and the pomegranate and impales herself on a spindle, its sparkling tip emerging from the crown of her dappled head.

And so I extended again that brocade hand and tore the name from its book, in a long rip of infant thunder. Without removing my eyes from the crone's hungry face, I folded it in two and placed it on my tongue like a sugar cube, and closed my dark mouth over its edges. It melted like chocolate, slightly chalky and full of oil, the taste of gold ink flowing down my throat, coating my organs, liquefied manuscripts with the sweat of pale-eyelashed scholars permeating, incense and myrrh like waves, smoke of burning horsemeat and overripe peaches, the name turning end over end, falling into my belly, downdowndowndowndown.

The Compass needles tore it into frenzied pieces, and it floated on pointed toes into my veins, inseminating my body like a blown milkweed, vanishing into each cell as simply and quietly as closing a Door. It crawled in my fingers, flushing warm in my calves, the name taking hold and sinking like a galleon into my bone-reefs.

I smiled, though behind glimmered the mad lolling of a wolf's leer, I smiled.

I stood without a word and took the Monkey's paw, walking softly towards the next Door, round and rough-hewn. The crone snarled and called after me and wept all at once, her voice breaking open with sorrow like a fruit, pulling at her thin white hair, clacking her rotted teeth like guillotines. Behind us I could hear her ravenous, clawing at the books and shoving them into her. I could hear her strangling grunts as she pushed them into her throat with both hands, choking on chapters and indices, cutting her wrists with glossaries and footnoted, poisoning herself, verse by verse.

The wooden Door opened smoothly and elegantly, sighing a little, and closed behind us with a satisfied jamb-smacking, smothering her coughing gasps. As I stepped into the sunlight, I could see my feet below me, following each other down the Road, and each toe shone pure gold in the auroral grass.

28.

I knelt heavily in the little meadow.

Scalp burning, eyes crackling thorn-violet, feeling a hundred hands on me, judging the Void that is me to be common and poor. Hair hung in a tangled saffron morass, seaweed drying on the beach, lost in gladiatorial sand, foam clinging to the curls and tendrils, smelling of salt and starfish. Walls surrounded the clipped green, covered in salmon-colored roses and lilies of the valley. The air cloyed a too-sweet perfume. The long grass-stalks full of milk lay restful and sweet, as though a woman's hand had smoothed a taffeta dress over her slender knees. The alpine virtue, the perfection and peace. (Which is illusion, it is only that it wishes itself so.) And I was not peaceful in its center, (perhaps because I do not wish myself so. Is it wishing that makes the world, glaring and broken?) full of my own bubbling streams and thrusting trees, full of harsh-branched gorse and cattle-hides. And the Maze doesn't care, it is impassive and huge, it mocks and waits.

The Monkey's fingers twirled clockwise in my sorrowful hair, shifting from his terrible requiring self to the warm lickings of a mother lion in a flash. Curls now the same shade as his rough fur, burnished gold to my jasper waist, my warm-shaded hips. I was a womansun, high breasts with nipples like coins, mouth like a reliquary. I shone with faceted light, blinding, pure. My skin radiated. I could have warmed a hundred ragged-eyed children, huddled together on every inch of me, trying to cover me like a subway vent. My flesh crackled, an orb of dilated copper.

But my eyes are true, still featureless and blank, plates of gold armor set in my face.

"Kore, Kore, my Darlinggold, it is not much further. I see the sun in the sky and its light." I nodded dumbly, sleep pulling my head earthward, exhaustion creeping with her feline tail, sweat in arcane snail-tracks around my knees, my wrists.

"I am so tired, Ezekiel. You must let me sleep. She would have let me sleep. There is no "I" anymore, the scarlet letter to mark my position on the Map-which-is-not, the "I's" which cross within the hermetic "X", not unlike a Compass, under which must be buried something of value; I am only pulled along like a ship on a tether, pulled into port with a shattered hull. Please, let my poor "I" choose sleep without your prodding and gnashing teeth. I must, I must, I cannot . . . "

I was nearly asleep already, and as I laid my head down on the cool grass I heard him crooning his loving "hoos" like a lullaby.

29.

In the dark, the dream-self bleeds.

Dreams of the interior, standing on a rib, balanced on one foot, looking up into an esophagus-sky. Catching as it passes the brief light of a boy with hair like cut wheat-and then it is gone, and I am falling into poison sweat-lodge dreams rubbed with white sage, with buffalo blood, with rattlesnake bile.

And, oh, I am under him again, the Stone with the Inquisitor's cragandjag face, and he with the rack under me, bending (as though for a shield) my spine into a circle, diameter twice radius, 2, numbers marching like ants up and down my bleached bones, the queen and her thousand daughters perched upon black and white ladders and staircases that smell of opium, velvet slant of plush-lipped opiates, slant, slant, slant, slant of perpendicular bones, the geometry of bruises and burst lips. His marble mouth next to my ear, words like grave worms, like winged insects, like mocking plague rats. The Stone torments me: Go ahead, Darlinggold, precious. Scream in the sunlight and scream in the moonlight and scream in the starlight and lakelight and cloudlight and fishlight and gooselight and rowanlight and dawn's rosy fingers, Rosicrucian dawn, Templar aurora, Maltese cross blazing across the sky like the outline of a corpse: In this sign thou shalt conquer . . . To the gold dust of the desert, to the streets of the Maze, feel the cool stucco on your burning back, feel the lick and tickle of the flames while we burn you, burn you, burn you, witch in the Holy Land, cat-woman, you smell like the sage-garden and didn't we see you dancing naked with the devil in the orange groves last midnight Thursday? Can't deny, can't deny, but my did the oranges taste nice, my didn't their juice taste cold and sweet, my didn't he make music on that drum, didn't he make you a percussion/tympani, beat on the copper bellied skin of your back, songs to wake the stones, blow into your bones and out came symphonies?

(-They cannot finde that path, which firste was showne, But wander too and fro in wayes unknowne-) How can you deny your possession, your Assassination, with all those jabbering voices in your head, pretty young thing? Aren't you the devil's pan-flute, woman? Confess, confess, confess and we will merely strangle you, and the hooded executioner will hide his erection from the crowd, the excitement from seeing your lips burst open like sea amenones, eyes go wide as though in the throes of orgasm, his hands intimate on your lily throat, oh and he'll turn aside at the last minute so no one will see. Confess and be saved. Or we'll we'll hang you from the hawthorn tree, burn you at the stake like venison and eat your pretty limbs at a banquet attended by twelve Kings and no less, twelve Queens to drink your blood from teacups, for I say unto you that the body of a witch mortified and vanquished in the name of God is yea verily as sacred as the body of Christ, and it shall melt on our tongues like unto the very Communion wafer, and we shall feast upon it as on the tender breasts of doves, and suck the holy marrow from her bones. Our hounds will gnaw the severed feet and be blessed in the hunt. the children will suck your knuckles like cherry candy. A burning is always cause for celebration: the village eats for a week. Quick as a spring hare you won't escape, we know all the best hiding places.

(-Furthest from end then, when they nearest weene That makes them doubt, their wits be not their owne-) Oh, ho! Indeed, you are far from salvation, from rescue and release. I am the Path that pierces you, my body gores you like a matador, and how I burn inside you as though you were a censer with all your pretty gold finish. Never think there is anything else but you and I alone in the dark.

Oh you Salome-witch, with the blood of that glass-bellied Queen on your painted fingers, dance here in the Dungeon as you danced in your heathen grove, and we will merely crush your skull with a stone. We will take a sliver of flesh from your dancing heels and plant the wisteria with them, and oh! How purple they shall grow in the spring! Walked you on the desert Road like the shadow of a hawk, but you can never, never escape it, it trails you like squid ink, trails you like a credit report, chases you like wolves after caribou, clings to you like jellyfish. We knew you when you came, we knew the moment your black foot touched Holy Ground. Perhaps we will only drown you, drowning in the Sea will salt the meat, and your lungs will fill up with scrolls before you die, the parchment will choke your cilia, papyrus in your ivory nostrils, (and tell us, tell us how nice the oranges tasted!) Aramaic letters smearing on the Walls of your esophagus; oh, how pure you'll be! HOLY, CLEAN, PURE, white the color of divinity, and you all stained RED, RED, RED, blackberry juice on pricked fingers, pricked like that famous beauty's finger, only you weren't ever a beauty, were you? Oh no, not with that dress, not with those shoes, not with that ratty hair!

Oh, you though you could charm even with that dreadful time-release skin moldering into all sorts of decayed shades, your stupid mewling mouth gibbering with black vomit on your lips, the vomit of your sickness, your unclean brain, cramped and filthy, and yes, oh, yes, precious, aren't you the Monster after all, deformed and grotesque, commedia dell arte devil with bells for horns, weak but ugly, oh isn't that you in the proverbial nutshell! Isn't that JUST PEACHY? Your little piglet haunches all scrunched up in your dank corner picking at the lice eggs of true reality and how they GROW on you like fruit!

Oh don't cry, little bird, don't cry. Aren't you a NICE GIRL after all with your lolling eyes and your mouth full of smoke and your sloppy eye-make up, aren't you really a NICE GIRL at heart, oh yes, of course, precious, we know, we know.

And we'll crust you in salt like a diamond dress, how pretty and NICE you'll be for the feast! All dressed up. With three fingers (for the Trinity, of course) we will scoop the mound of salt from your contorted mouth and remove your teeth to play dice with, and scrape it from your cheeks as though from a fat side of salmon. In the afterglow of your ascension we will dance and dance.

(-That path they take, that beaten seemed most bare-) Oh, you foolish girl. I am beyond everything that you are. You should not have come, not have come, to the walls of the Labyrinth with its mosaics and cisterns like the vaults of heaven. So becoming with your clear eyes. Yet you could not see the Way. Come and dance for us, Jezebel-witch, Delilah-daemon, show us the calves famed in Gaul and Britannia Ultima, show us the white-armed dervish of the orange groves.

(-This is the wandring wood, this the Errours den-) This is the end. You know nothing. Do not pretend. You are mine, my very own.

And in my dream, in my sacred madness I see his face how like a stalactite lit by the light of bat's eyes. The callow face of the Stone, cutting me like an obsidian arrowhead, surgically slicing, glutting himself on me, glowering, gloating. Now that I have chosen sleep he can have me entire.

Oh, but know that I will wake as dreamers do and you will slip back into the white pebble in a macaque-stomach, and I will lurch onwards.

Will you now?

Oh yes. I accept. Here and there, my body is all sweet flesh and curve, ready for the witch's oven, ready for the gingerbread hut, ready for the peppermint banisters and butterscotch windowpanes, the cinnamon-gummy rugs and white chocolate stairs. Ready for the black licorice whip oven grill and cotton candy pillows, the pumpkin pie floors and caramel apple chandeliers, the lemon-ice wash basin and the cider bath water. But I'll wake. And in the end, won't I make a lovely pie, cinnamon crust with a honey glaze, twenty-four blackbirds baked inside, to lend sugar and mystique to my bones? Won't that be a dainty dish to set before the King? When I lie souffled at his bedside and he runs his tongue over my soft grape-flavored centre? Won't I then be the best dish the witch ever served to his Majesty under a silver dome?

Oh, we are just SALIVATING, darling, positively DRIPPING.

You will see. If I accept, if I do not fight, I will prevail.

(-'Yea but,' quoth she, 'the perill of this place I better know than you-')

30.

Hoo.

I am watching you sleep, Kore, Darlinggold, watching your eyes flutter like bees' nests, watching your breath whistle through the grass like a scythe. I am watching your coppery chest riseandfallriseandfall, tidal motion of your stomach concealing and cricket-breathing. I am watching your forehead crease like an envelope, lost in dreams I do not share, but can guess.

Oh, womanchild, I have walked beside you and I have chosen to, not because you were weak and needed my padding footsteps next to yours, but because I heard your voice echoed off the faces of every Wall, and came to you drawn as a furry-feelered moth. I dragged my Temple along the Road to you as though it were a plow, as though I were a black-shouldered ox, and I let you breakfast on its fruit. I let you kill my beautiful, simple-minded chess set because even in your delirium you dazzled above all their cut crystal. I let you go mad in my arms. I have pulled you quietly and surely along the Road, to give you what you desire, because you were bright and new against the mud-brick. Just as Maidens cannot help but eat anything they are offered, Beasts cannot resist the pull of Maidens, irrefutable and fierce. We lumber towards you out of our black corners and dripping dungeons, drawn and caught, even when we know it is so. Oh, especially when we know. And I came to you, you and no other, out of the grey of the Temple.

Soon it will be over, my Kore. Soon there will be a blue Door and a Key you do not think I know you have. We have played this scene so many times. Soon there will be a shaft of light through you like a lance and we will part, because that is also the way of Beasts and Maidens. I know. I accept. I have, after all, set this sequence in motion. But as you sleep I am filled like a pitcher with sorrow, because I love you and do not wish to see the last of your many-colored shapes against the sky. But it is the course of these things, and I will follow the tale I know to be ours.

You shift in your sleep and I know it is because of the Stone, the Stone I carry inside me and thus keep close by you, so that it can do its work and change you one last time. You did not want a sequence, but I have given it to you, you were content, and I have given you pain in a silver bowl, for as I love you it is also my nature to harm you, to torture you, to push you along the Road that passes through me and present you amid fanfare with new twists and snarls, with new bottomless wells and dead ends, with Angels and Hares and Lobsters with colored shells. Without pain, there is no progress. Though you cannot see it now, though I am only the little golden Monkey who nuzzles your face, I am also the Stone and the Inquisitor, the Camels and the Carried Women, the Man and the Bar. I am the Voice that Recites verses inside you, from a place you will never remember. I am even the Road itself. I adore you and I worship the presence of you within me, yet I have borne horrors to you on my back, given them like presents. It is the Way, and I have fulfilled it.

I have brought you this far, through the acetylene torch of Walls shrieking a beckoning call, drawing the orange streaks of your soul towards it, to absorb into itself all the cardinal colors, to bring together the reds and yellows and white-heats and oranges, to conflagrate in some Compass Rose which lies at the center of you though you cannot believe in a Center. Nothing grows in this place that cannot carry its own water, the cactus that blooms at night, the single lemon-yellow flower. And you carry seas inside you, the salt and the tide of blood and plasma.

So you walked and became purified, and ascended poles that dwindled skyward like fabled towers covered in thorns, the sky opening like a womb to enfold, envelope, encase, entwine, entreat. The burning blue furnace of heaven, where the world is battered on a white anvil, poured molten into a Labyrinth-shaped mold, spattered with red sparks that become stars and iron-oxide rich soil. You turned your salt-crusted face upwards, creased eyes and parched lips, hands blistered from making corn cakes on the searing rocks, toes calloused from walking through caves with the dark, seductive rustling of bats overhead and the maddening smell of water within, you raised your eyes to the vault of sky, and I saw you like a first revelation. You are so beautiful, Kore, Kore, my Darlinggold, painted with metallic dye, extended arms thinned to thread by hunger and ascension.

The balance of one foot on the pole, like a parchment-colored flamingo, will be as it ever is upset by your arms in second position, and you will falter as you must, feel the hot wind rush up from earth and down from heaven, and as you step off into space, into unknown and unknowable, flesh carved with hawk-claws and pictographs, shaded by the great image of the desert snake etched in sunburn on your back, and I will vanish gratefully in a puff of raven feathers. Their Plutonian violet-black will float in a sudden hush down to the red rock below, and I will leave you to do this all over again, for that is also the Way, the cry of events sounding again and again like the tide, full-throated. We have walked together before how many times and will again. So it is not really farewell, though each time my heart tells me that it is. You cannot teach the body to know the lay of the Maze, it will insist always on its own telling. You will not remember me in my golden fur, you never do, with your shivering eyes, and next time I will not be a Temple-Monkey. But you will be a humanchild, fevered, forever and ever, for it is your tale in which I am the villain and helpful guide and the scenery and even the shuffling prop master.

There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.

31.

She wakes, with sand in her eyes, for it is the last day.

It is a silver sun, full of diamond sunspots and a nacreous corona, beatific, filling the sky like a supernova. The Monkey, fur made into jewels by the brilliant light, makes her a last breakfast of robin's eggs and wild turnips. Terns wheel overhead, with their lonely cries, watching the gold woman and the gold animal go about their morning tasks. She washes her gleaming face in a fountain, water trickling off her features in sweet rivulets. Her blank eyes have become beautiful, have become hers, and they are polished like copper pots. She eats the steaming turnips and salty eggs slowly, not entirely knowing why she savors them so. The Monkey grooms her (savoring himself this last contact with her wild, coriander-scented mane) and she allows his touch on her bronzed hair, calmed of her night terrors by his deft fingers.

They are near a long Wall, stretching lazily beyond sight in either direction. It is made of living vines and long tendrils of ivy, tangled together like the woman's hair, over and under, over and under. Here and there a fat white blossom opens and shuts with a flutter, like a hand. It is well-kept, tended by some loyal hand. There is no stone beneath, the Wall is entirely leaf and stem, entirely alive, displaying its green like a lady her colored fan.

It is the last morning of all mornings until the next, with its cold light and misty breath, the last grooming and the last fountain-washing. Her limbs creak slightly as though she were truly made of gold, a molten statue-woman walking far from her pedestal. She is pure now, in her lionbody and named, and her flesh is liquid light where the sun strikes her, striding like a flame-deva down the Road which is sullen, ashen, carrying Direction inside her, so that she faces herself on all sides. The Monkey clambers up her smooth back and takes his place on her glittering shoulder.

Is it indulgent, perhaps, to take a moment to admire them, their pairing, their shapes against the tooth-white sky, the comfortable lie of his tail around her fleur-de-lis neck, the confident rhythm of her bare feet, the precise matching shades of her skin and his pelt? Is it a distraction to give them this last tableau, this last snapshot under a spring morning, under a willow tree with her eyes laughing?

Let it be. We must make allowances.

CANTO.