Selfsong rejoicing
over soulself's despairing,
behold, she is risen
only that she might fail again,
for it is in the ashes
that she keeps her strength.

Eater-of-ashes
grows strong on the memories,
leeching from the ghosts of dreams,
grows pale and cold and fierce.
The wind whistling in the barren pines
was not so lonely, so desolate,
nor so free.

I climbed the wind.
There was a ladder only I could see,
the rungs spaced exactly for my legs.
Little feet,
not my own,
strained to follow,
and the legs drew to threads,
stretched, dissolved.
There was no one following me,
so I tossed pebbles down
from the clouds,
wondering whom they would hit.

Leviathan rises
out of the deeps,
the darks,
out of the ocean,
his eyes blue like coals.
He bubbles.
He says to the child,
to the eater-of-ashes,
'My only,
when will you come home?'

There is a doll on the shelf.
'What shelf?'
'That shelf, the one you built for me.'
A sad doll, with eyes like glass.
It used to bother me
that she was so sad,
until I pecked her eyes out.

Let the sea grow wings.
Let the air take legs,
and the earth shall swim,
running over all the creatures
that crawl on the surface,
or that burrow under it,
and those who swim in the water,
or sail through the air.
Let them all come to me,
that we may celebrate life
that was not.

It was the birthday of the world,
Gaia's birthday.
The child,
in her pink frilled party dress,
she couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old,
took scissors to her long, blonde hair
and lay it on the fire
before she lit the candles.

Mother, you lay on the fire.
We watched you,
fire decaying you faster than decay,
devouring flesh
and all
we had meant to remember.
We called to you,
but you would not come.
You lay there blinking at us
through vanishing eyelids
and held out your arms.

I am gathering all the seeds
for a fairy recipe,
thistles and leaves and hemlock bark,
maple spinners and nightshade flowers.
Mix together in an acorn cup
and serve with dew.

Dawn crept, red-fingered,
over the horizon,
trailing blood in her wake.
Whoever said that she was murdered?

'Do you know?' she asked
She held out a seashell,
filled with seawater.
Her hands were brown with sand.
Wading barefoot out into the tide,
she knew she'd been told to watch out.
There were jellyfish here.

The stars drifted, gossamer,
trailing comets.
They, too, are dreaming,
humming songs of a new life.

The child grows up,
puts on black shoes,
and a brown velvet jacket with trousers.
She has a child of her own, now,
and she calls the infant 'Orphan',
but she never tells anyone its name.

The sea is raging
and the sky storms.
One steals the other's red.
The other dons black robes of mourning.

'You are sapping my strength,'
said the mother
to the child at her breast,
the one she was trying to nurse,
the one whose eyes glowed
with inhuman glee
and whose mouth dripped with dark fluid.
'More than that,' the shadowchild lisped,
'I am sapping your blood.'

Maple sugar,
I remember how syrup freezes on ice cream
in styrofoam cups with little wooden spoons,
canned childhood memories, too sweet.

'I remember your taste,' he said,
'I wake up in the middle of the night, remembering.'
She woke up at night thinking of him
for different reasons,
but when they put their arms around each other,
it was all right again.

Breathe into the fire. Gently now,
don't put out the flame.
There. That's your soul, that brief flash,
and those are its ashes.

I know you like to play with other people's lives, love,
but do us all a favor and don't play with their souls.
When you drop a soul, it shatters into a million pieces,
never to be found.
Minds are easier:
all it takes is a scalpel and a knife.