but since I’ve gotten confused in my way and can no longer be sure to which
That’s enough. That’s enough of that, you’ve become tedious, as you’ve always been tedious in your fashion. Let’s lower you from the ceiling and feminize you now, make a woman of you now. No I’m not going to cut it off: please. It’s so trite. I was many things in My life but not trite. It’s rather an unimpressive specimen anyway if I may say so, for supposedly being the Ultimate Specimen. No let’s lower you from the ceiling and slip the cuffs off the hook while I dig something out of the old tool chest here … get back down on your knees, you’ll get used to it. The rest of us have. The rest of us got very used to it a long time ago. Tell us, what’s it like from the other angle? How is it gazing up for a change? Don’t look at Me. Did I say you could look at Me? I asked what it was like, I didn’t tell you to do it … what a very stupid slave … I guess it’s all just a little unfamiliar for you though. I guess it takes some getting used to. Well tell Us about it. Yes tell Us all about it. Where’s My evidence? is what I want to know, that you ever kept your end of the bargain. Where’s the evidence except a vision or two. Was that supposed to satisfy Me, a vision or two? where’s the evidence. That he was ever OK. That he was ever safe. That he was even loved, maybe. That he wasn’t so painfully lonely in the night. That’s what I want to know, I who gave him up. I who haven’t gone a day without seeing his small face, hearing his small voice, every little thing he said, polite little dictator with all his whys and answers to the chaos of the world. Oh here’s what I was looking for. A little large but appropriate I would think for a god-toy, suitable I think for the ultimate slave, here it is … then bend over. Bend over now. Bend over and put your face in the ground. Arch your back and open yourself behind. A little large but you know, this is what it is to be a woman in your world. This is what it is. This is what it’s always been. There. What do you think of that. How do you feel about that. What
lake I’ve returned, then swimming up up and up to break the surface I can
ridiculous female could ever have suggested God is a woman. What ludicrous bitch could ever have thought the viciousness of God anything but male. Are you God for the way you give us children, or the way you take them from us? that’s what I still want to know. Here, a little deeper I think. Here, here, here, yes. What’s the matter. Yes. Here, you don’t like it so much? Here, yes. This is for, you know, all of them. Isaac and the carpenter kid and all the eldest sons of an Egyptian night, and, well, for the little wildman too. For him too. Here then. Here! and … I … here, and … oh. Oh I…. No. No I swore to myself I wouldn’t, no. I swore to myself I wouldn’t let you. Swore to myself you would never make me cry like this again … but You have. Swore You never would but You have … oh no. Oh no. Let me die now. What are You waiting for. Let me die now. Let this dream be over now. i’ve only been waiting for it since the moment i lost him. Since that moment i … since that moment i returned to the boat and he was gone; so let me go now, so i can hope on just the merest of chances there is somewhere else Over There where he’s waiting right now, waiting for me, and i’ll hold him to me again, pull him to me, smash his soft hair in my hands and press his small eyelids to my lips. Let me go. There’s nothing here for me anymore, no other delusion to make me believe in my own life anymore, if only for a minute: no Domination or submission to give me purpose: no method for going on. i don’t care about Your subservience or Domination, i don’t care about Your humiliation or Glory. This is the ritual no mother can win, when God gives a mother her child just so she might go mad with love for him. There’s nothing here anymore so i want to go now. You there in the doorway, come and take me then. What are You waiting for. Come on then. Come here. Come on. Please. Please i beg You. i’m begging You. Is that what You want, is that what You’ve been
therefore as well no longer be sure to which gondola I’ve returned either,
waiting for, to hear me beg? then i’m begging You. i’m begging You now. Please come take me … please i’m begging. The walls can sing now, it’s time for their song, i don’t know what more i can do than beg You. i’m begging then, i’m pleading. Come on then, please. Yes please. Come on. Please. Please. Please.
Someone in the doorway. Not yet fifty years old but ancient in her grief she rises up on her elbows to try and see in the dark, falls back, eyes wandering the ceiling looking for the way out of her life. In the dark she hears his footsteps, waits for some explosion of final pain or deliverance or both, not really bracing for it because she doesn’t have the strength to brace; and when a hand falls on her forehead to calm her, as if she were a child having a bad dream and talking in her sleep with her fingers, it takes her a moment to think to herself maybe it’s not God after all, maybe it’s someone else.
In her bed, she turns to the shadow beside her and, reaching out, puts her own hand in his hair, and remembers from long ago a smell of tall dry grass. At first it catches in her throat but she finds the will to ask it anyway: “But who is it,” she murmurs in the dark, “are you …?”
“I’m Nothing,” says a voice she knows, that she knows she knows, transformed by all the years though it is, “a Bright Light.”
or whether there truly is another gondola, or ever was, or whether there was
ever even Another Side at all except in my red hysteria, or whether I truly
2XXX
~ ~ ~
swim from personal chaos to collective god or from personal god to collective
chaos, or whether they’re the same chaos, the same god, the same lake, the
~ ~ ~
The night before it happened, she had a dream about her father. She was crossing a square in the dark, making her way past a huge fountain through concentric rings of symmetrically staggered stone benches. Hovering over the fountain was a bronze world patched up from the pieces of other shattered worlds. Particularly since it was dark she didn’t recognize him at first, as though he was only the ghost of someone she was supposed to have known; when he said, so quietly and invisibly in the dark it almost could have been the fountain speaking, “The Age of Chaos is here,” she woke thinking, What, it’s just arriving now?