hagiography

The silky sun falls soft against my skin, painting warmth onto my body.  I am as slack as a baby here, smooth, clean, unformed.  The lawn and flowers around me are breathing, slow and easy, a chlorophyll symphony.  Here I am loose.

The branches of the trees hang heavy with blossom, their petalled sex sending out an age old invitation.  Waxy perfect, transitory, purposeful, yet cyclical, flower, fruit, shed, beginnings and ends contained but not restrained.

The old woman stands beside me, a walking stick in her hand that is alive, carved with creatures and faces that the wood has birthed.  Flowers grow up this staff, twined, wrapped, framed.  She is barefoot.  Her feet are as green as the grass underneath her.  Her skirt shimmers in the sunlight, the billions of scales seem almost like material, but they flash blues and greens and the occasional rapid pink.  She wears belts of snakes around her belly, which writhe in contentment and comfort on her fulsome hips.  Her naked torso is barely covered by silken fur, but not that which is stripped, the animals still live and drape themselves about her.  Her face is brown, leathered, weathered, deeply lined, framed by hair that is pure spun silver.

She smiles.  She takes my hand.  I hang my head.  I cannot look into this nature of equilibrium.  I feel my tears on my cheeks, full as oceans, coming in raining waves. 

‘Child, child, child.’  Her voice is broken glass splintered into mosaic of worship.  I am fleshy, bumble bee buzzing.  She keeps her hand on the top of my head until my brain has stopped boiling with the crying.

I feel I can’t look up, as if I am unable to meet the glare of the sun and the growing things in front of me.  I want to stare at the table, the blank white of treated iron, as endless as the horizon of the sea, stretching into an indistinct distance.

She takes my chin in her hand.  Her fingers feel firm against my jaw.  I have opened my mouth so often and so much has come out of it.  I have gritted my teeth constantly and ground them in my sleepy dreams of stress.  I am clenched, closed, tight.

‘Child, child, child.’

I look into her face and it has changed.  Her silver hair is now bright gold.  Her eyes shine aquamarine.  Her skin is milky and lined only with laughter.  The animals that adorned her are gone and her breasts are magnificently full.  Her hand is on the back of my neck and I can feel tendril roots curling from her fingertips and into my veins and muscles.  Her energy sap enters me, flowing like honey, spreading throughout my body, refreshing me with sweet nourishment.

I find my feet, at the end of my legs where they have always been.  She draws me upwards to her and into her.  Her body is against mine.  The snakes from around her waist slither onto me, their soft pressure pulsing.  Her face shines, verdant, fertile, full of the life around her and inside her.

She bends, slightly, her swan neck flexing so that her lips can meet mine.  Her mouth is fat with a whispered promise.  She breathes stars, whole constellations inhabit her and the moon is at her forehead.  She kisses me, sprinkling diamond dust onto my tongue, as tangy as sherbet and as intoxicating as a narcotic.

I swallow instinctively.

‘It is in you child.  I am in you.  Everything is in you.’