Wake, Siren Read online

  And there were tears in my eyes and tears in yours, for all that had changed, for all that was lost, for all that was behind us, for every moment that led up to this one. We stood with our arms around each other and I do remember the noise you made when our house starting shifting shape. It was a noise I’d never heard you make before. And it was that, more than seeing our small house rise and turn into a gleaming temple, streaked marble, glittering gold, tall columns. Here was a noise I’d never heard you make. How lucky, for there always to be space for surprise. All those years. And this, now, new.

  Our small, humble home, the place where we’d shared our lives, it transformed before us. We understood the honor, but our holding of each other spoke our sadness, too. Our home had held us and held our love and kept us warm for so many years. We did not need to speak, and we did not want to seem ungrateful to the gods, but we held each other tight and let the tears come, and we understood what the other was feeling. The loss, the years, the small corner of our world.

  And then the larger god turned to us and thanked us again and asked us what we wanted most in this life. We held each other as we whispered to each other. Do you remember what we said? We barely had to say anything at all; we both knew the answer. I remember the warmth of your breath on my neck, and the feel of your arms against my hands, and knowing then, as I knew over so many years, that we were for each other.

  “We’d like to guard the shrine you made of our home,” you said. They nodded. You went on. “And also—” You paused and swallowed tears. “And also, we would like—” You couldn’t complete the sentence. I held your hand and squeezed and I continued for us. “Please, when one of us dies, let the other die in the same hour. Let him not have to bury me. Let me not have to see his grave. Let us continue on together and unparted, please.”

  They were kind to us. We lived out our many years tending to the shrine, and then that morning, you remember? We were talking about the meals we had when we were visiting the small village of your grandfather, the rabbit, the wild boar, the steak with the ribbons of parmesan on top. We were laughing. And I looked over and saw that you were growing branches, growing leaves, the lobed leaves of the oak, that your body was becoming trunk, and at the same time I saw from the look in your eyes that I was changing, too. I looked down to see that I was also becoming tree, a linden, with its large, heart-shaped leaves. “It’s time,” I said.

  And just as our mouths were covered by this new skin of bark, we said, “Farewell, farewell, my love, my true lifelong love, my friend, my love, farewell.” And our roots went deep into the earth and they entwined there, and we grew tall in the sun next to each other, close enough that when your leaves flutter in the soft breeze I can feel them against me, and you feel mine against you. And sometimes, sometimes, I imagine I can feel us embracing in the earth, our roots wrapped around each other and giving a little squeeze. We were so alive together. I like the windy days the best now, when we feel each other most.

  IVORY GIRL

  Pygmalion hated women. He thought they were disgusting. Their voices, their laughs, their hairs. The way they sweat, smelled, stepped. “You Cyprian women get so wet,” he said. “What’s with that?” No one told him. No one told him what the wetness was.

  So it don’t hurt

  Because we like it

  A way of saying getting there

  A way of saying ready

  A way of saying more

  A welcome

  A compliment

  An invitation

  Between the fingers it spreads like thread, a glow, a word: silm, the shimmer

  You know how lucky?

  To feel that?

  From a woman?

  On your knees

  The rivers, the ocean, the rain, tearfall

  The rivers that do not make it to the sea

  The ocean that’s absorbed again by the skin, wash of brine on the body

  The rain before it reaches the earth to evaporate

  Tearfall unfallen

  Detour the moisture

  But it’s not like water at all

  Moves better than blood

  It’s got its own light and the light is a mystery

  Have you ever even made out with a mango?

  You feel it on the inside of the thighs and not know what sort of prize that is?

  That’s another thing entire when it gets to the legs

  What’s with that? There’s so much that we want

  And otherwise we’d drown

  “You Cyprian women get so wet,” disgust dripping off his tongue. So he carved one dry as stone. “Ooooh, you’re perfect,” he cooed and splooged—she’s mute!—as he groped her ivory breast. He clasped necklaces around her neck, beads and jewels between her breasts. He placed her in his bed; stiff; under the covers he warmed the stone. “Cold toes,” he’d say. Women knew he hated women. Women know when a man hates women. It hides in their smiles. It hides in the smiles of surprise each time a woman shows she’s funny, strong, or wise. The men who hate women are surprised at this. Pygmalion hated women and all the women knew. A man who hates women builds one with a juicy ass and giant tits and no belly and a face that’s foreign and empty and dumb.

  And when Pygmalion begged Venus to make her real, and Venus granted his request and put moving blood in her body and gave her breasts that squished if you gripped them, we teased her, but only because we wanted to make her know.

  Where’s your stretch marks, sweetheart?

  Where’s your peeeeeer eeeee odddddd?

  Where’s your laugh? Don’t you laugh?

  Where’s the one hair at your nipple?

  Where’s the flesh crease on your back?

  Where’s your smells, sweetheart? Don’t you smell, sweetheart?

  Where’s the strength in your legs?

  Where’s the muscles in your shoulders?

  Where’s the wetness? Where’s the rivers, oceans, rain, tearfall?

  Where’s your sag?

  Where’s your power, sweetheart?

  We’ll tell you, sweetheart.

  It’s in you, sweetheart. All over you. It fills every curve and swell. Find it, sweetheart. Know it, sweetheart.

  He doesn’t make you who you are.

  Time separated her from her statue life. “Smell this,” she’d say and lift her arm. We laughed! You got it, Ivory Girl! You stink! She sweat and seeped like all of us, less perfect every day. “There’s nothing duller than perfection.” She’d learned! “Really, it’s a myth.” That’s right! We loved her more and more. “There is no love in loving the ideal. Pyggy doesn’t love me. He loves an idea in his brain.” Pyggy is a shit, she knew it. “We’re made of mess,” she said. Sweetheart, yes. That’s exactly what we’re made of.

  DRYOPE

  I figured it was my fault. I was young, he was the god of the sun, and I didn’t know what to do except scream, but that didn’t help anything. I didn’t tell a soul and I didn’t know till later that the sick I felt was shame. Not the flu. Not Lyme. Not some undiagnosable nonbelieved neurodegenerative disorder. All I wanted to eat: banana cream pie Blizzards from Dairy Queen. That’s all. Sometimes, fried egg sandwich. Sometimes, peanut butter. Mostly vanilla ice cream all swirled up with banana chunks and Nilla Wafers. Or maybe it was Vienna Fingers. I can’t remember now. I guess you could say the experience made me shame sick. I thought my life was over.

  I knew a girl who was taking oxy. I was crying to her over vodka and 7UP one afternoon at Paddy’s and she said, Here, try this, it’ll soften all your edges. That’s exactly what it did. When I see pictures from that time, I don’t even recognize myself. Just dead behind the eyes. Just greasy strings for hair. Gone, dulled, bad. I’d take a pill and it would feel like crawling into a basket lined with feathers, a splintery wicker basket big enough for me, with feathers on the inside. And inside this feather basket, absolutely nothing mattered and that’s why I liked to go there.

  I was sick. All the way. Then my friend Celine came
to my house one day and brought pasta with broccoli in it and lots of cheese and she said, You’re going to eat. And I said, You don’t tell me when I eat. And she said, You know how this ends, right? This ends one of two ways: you quit or you die. If you don’t do it for yourself, do it for the baby you got inside you.

  And I did quit. Not that day, but soon. Her words landed on me and lived in me. I quit and I started working again and lost a lot of the DQ weight, but then gained it back because sweet things were a good replacement for what I’d been taking, and the thing about giving something up is that you have to retrain your brain about what’s good. It took a little while to learn. And I started telling myself that everyone is broken parts, and I was no better or worse than anyone. I worked hard to fix what was broke. I did it for the baby, and I did it for my own self. I was walking taller and smiling more. And then me and Andraemon started spending more time together. We’d known each other since growing up and I always liked his hair, how he wore it a little longer than most of the guys, and he always smelled like he’d just come in from a snowstorm. And the thing was, he made me laugh. All the time I was laughing with him. When I told him about what had happened when I was young, and what it was like being a single mom to a little baby boy, he just put me in his arms and said, Jesus god, I’m sorry. He didn’t drop me. He didn’t hate me. We got married and my life was on track. I’d climbed out of the bad place, and I had a lot of love around me. I laughed every day. Every day!

  But if bad luck can find you once, it can find you again.

  I was down by the river with my baby one morning. I was showing him plants and bugs and flowers and frogs and all the weird little creatures that crawled and fluttered around the riverbank. And I spotted a lotus flower. Oh sweet pea, look, it’s a lotus. Purple lotus. And I picked it for him. I was trying to teach him colors. Purple, I said. But then things went bad.

  I looked at the flower and saw blood dripping out of the place where I’d plucked it and I thought, Oh hell no, did someone slip me something? Why is this fucking plant bleeding?

  I found out too late. It wasn’t a regular flower. To escape being attacked by Priapus, that creep with the arm-length dick, a nymph named Lotis had changed herself into this plant, to protect herself. I didn’t know. I was just trying to go about my life and show my little guy what purple was. How was I supposed to know? I wouldn’t’ve picked it if I’d known, man, doesn’t anyone understand that? Me of all people? Of all things, I understand about wanting to escape that shit. But I made a mistake. I thought I’d made a mistake before, that I’d asked for something I hadn’t asked for, but that wasn’t a mistake, that wasn’t my mistake. That wasn’t my fault. And I paid for it anyway, and then I pulled my life together out of a shitstorm that could’ve drowned me. Picking that flower, making it bleed, it was an accident. I didn’t know it was Lotis, I didn’t know it was another girl doing what she could to protect herself. It wasn’t my fault. Bad luck finds me and keeps finding me. I paid for that accident, too.

  So what’s next? For picking the wrong flower, the gods turned me into a tree, a black poplar, imprisoned inside a cage of branch and trunk, with deep-furrowed, rough, brown-gray bark. In those first few minutes, as I’m hardening up and down, my poor baby kept trying to feed, but there was no more nipple where he could latch, no soft, full breast for him, just thick, dry bark. Oh sweet pea, sweetie no, I said. Oh no. No milk. No more milk, just splinters for his small tongue. He wailed. And his cry, I didn’t feel it in my ears, it hit my actual heart.

  For a little bit of time, my face stayed in the tree. Just enough time to tell Andrae when he arrived to make sure my baby would know it was me here, that he’d make sure to tell him who I was, and I told him that they had to come visit, come sit and play beneath me. I said, You’ve got to tell him about the dangers, you’ve got to make sure he knows about all the shit that can go wrong. Don’t let him drink. Keep him away from the drugs. Keep him away from the bad kids who do the drugs. Don’t let him play near pools or ponds or springs or rivers. Don’t ever, ever let him pick a flower. Any bush or tree or rock or flower—he has to be careful, he has to be so, so careful!, because you don’t know whose body might be in there. In the rhododendron bush, or the laughy brook, or the honey locust, you don’t know who might be in there, every blade of grass, every cloud, there might be someone in there, keeping safe, or being punished, you don’t know. You don’t know.

  CANENS

  Thank you. Thank you so much. Let’s have one more round of applause for Delia Spritz on drums and Susannah Hubbard on bass guitar.

  Thank you. Thank you all for being here tonight, for spending your time with us here on this beautiful night on earth. But really they’re all beautiful, aren’t they? Even the lonely rainy ones. Tonight I’m feeling lucky to move through a bit of time with you, to have shared part of this night with you. You’ve been so lovely. It’s all been so lovely.

  For our last song we’re going to do an old folk tune. Told and retold, spun and respun, sung and resung, age after age. It’s “The Ballad of Canens and Picus.” Legend has it that Canens had a singing voice so beautiful she could enchant the rocks and trees, that rivers would stop moving to listen to her sing. She loved the handsome Picus and he loved her, too. But then one day in the woods, a goddess witch named Circe tried to seduce him. He spurned her love, and because goddesses can at times be wrathful, she punished him by turning him into a woodpecker. In her grief, Canens wandered the woods singing until she dissolved into air itself. And legend has it, this was the song she sang. It’s a sad song, on a beautiful night. Thank you all again for being here. It’s been an honor, to share our songs with you. And now, “The Ballad of Canens and Picus.”

  Ride well, ride well, my one true love

  Ride well, ride well, did he.

  In purple cloak and javelin armed

  He went to the woods to see.

  The morn’ was fair, the morn’ was bright,

  He went hunting boar,

  My Picus left on his stallion tall,

  He left for evermore.

  Circe she stalks, Circe she roams,

  She sees Picus on his horse.

  She’s struck at once, and wants him now,

  Unwav’ring in her course.

  He flees her fast, he flees her swift,

  Off down the path he goes.

  Her sights are set, it’s him she wants,

  Her choice has now been chose.

  The witch, she morphs, the witch she shifts,

  A boar’s shape she takes,

  And lures him on foot to the deepest woods,

  Where she’ll try to claim her stakes.

  She shows herself to be who she is.

  She’s driven by her lust.

  “Picus, I’m yours, Picus, be mine.

  Give me your love, you must.”

  Back on his horse he galloped away,

  Hooves thundering his reply,

  “Not me, not now, I have a love,”

  He shouted to the sky.

  A woman’s want is a dangerous thing

  If you are to spurn.

  Immortal hunger is bottomless

  As my poor Picus did learn.

  “Hurt me, you’ll pay, you’ll know my rage!

  Forget hearing Canens’s song.

  A bird you’ll be with a drummer’s soul

  For the choice you made was wrong.”

  She turned to the West and turned to the East,

  She touched him with her wand.

  Then Picus flew on wings so red,

  His new life it had dawned.

  I’m wrapped in grief, I’m wrapped in woe,

  Sorrow becomes a veil,

  As you who know who’ve lost a love,

  My song becomes a wail.

  Tap, tap, my heart, tap, tap, the clock,

  Tap, tap, bird’s beak on wood,

  They count the moments of my loss,

  Now I, too, am gone for good.

  Fly
well, fly well, my one true love,

  Fly well, fly well, did he.

  I join you now as air so soft,

  You can fly your way through me.

  Oh fly your way through me.

  ALCYONE

  Now: there’s a place called Folly Cove. Granite bulging at the shore. Tiny eyelid of beach. Shells and crab parts on the sand. Snarled heaps of seaweed. Coarse white barnacles suctioned in clusters to the rocks. Fog in trees. A crust of salt. Rock outcroppings a swimmable distance out to sea, depending on what sort of swimmer you are, and what state of push or retreat the tide is in. Islands at low tide. Swallowed at high. As though they never existed at all. So that each low tide brings the surprise of their existence. There’s no way to know what’s down there then, except we know what’s down there. Storms come and make the water white. But for seven days and seven nights on either side of the year’s shortest day, the seas are calm and the winds pause. Halcyon days. The solstice-close time under a cold bright moon when all is ease. Stars do their nightly sweep across the sky. Days bright and the clouds nothing but playful. Waves lick, don’t bash. Take five, Aelous says to his winds to allow for the kingfishers to lay their eggs in safety. So I lay my eggs in safety, living for that calm that comes. I wait until the nights are long and the days are bright and still. Egging in the quiet. This is the way it is now, how we stay together. I wasn’t always a bird. I was a woman once who loved a man and he loved me. Oh the calm. Oh the deep dark calm. Seagulls cry and beak the beach. Seagulls are what become of our confessions.