Sleepsong -- Apologue.

眠り歌



once upon a time, in the year of bated breath and lover's debt, there lived a man and his beautiful wife-- and though they toiled in circular disintricacies and stayed the coming of any age that time mustered, they loved each other dearly, to the threat of every deathbed and beyond.

she spent her days singing songs about the house as she did everything in her power to create the best home she could manage of the sagging willows and bastard reeds she gathered-- for the husband she loved so much.

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower;
There is nothing you can think that is not the moon!

見るところ花にあらずと云ふことなし、
思ふところ月にあらずと云ふことなし

--松尾芭蕉

and always, though he never knew the verses precisely, though he always knew the words to give her, though they sometimes meant the same with their smattered syllables and backtraced fingers on the parchment under the pillow, always there were sweets on the table.

he brought them in her sleep, in his wake, kneeling on the floor for the morning.

always, arms thin but full. eyes wide, view narrow, their blessings as few as one, with everything beautiful and dismembered as the enchantment he suffered.

a blissful zealot.

she smiled when he made his prayers between her legs, when he tasted the divine upon her mortal tongue, and when he loved her from the inside out, she always wished at the top of her pitches for his ultimate happiness-- always thought of how fortunate she was to love so readily and be loved so heavily in return.

"someday," she'd say, "i'll make you the perfect copy of yourSelf."
"someday," she'd say, "i'll make us something perfect."

when he'd fall asleep, dead of night and dark of day, she'd whisper her songs into his open ear until she too fell unconscious.

Sad nodes
we're all the bamboo's children
in the end.

憂き節や
竹の子となる
人の果て

--松尾芭蕉

not once did he ask which day, because

she always rattled in the spirals of his ears, a broken figurine in an unlined case. but it tickled, pleasantly-- the bells, the tottering footfalls, the sliding doors and water on granite, all sounds and all things bubbling at the base of his neck.

they kept the vermin at bay. they stood before the shrine, wet and desolate. his hands always played a part in the rhythms and the functions of what, to any man, was as clear as water under a full moon. the ripples beneath his outstretched fingertips put the finest of mirrors to shame.

clean and quiet, with the scent of sandalwood.

on the day of star rise and sun slept, the genkan was stained red with the same red that stained winter frozen lips.

her fingers limp and her body numb, that evening heralded no whispers for she could not breathe with so much wire twined like ivy about her whitewashed neck.

she wanted so badly to make him a perfect copy of himself.
she wanted so badly to make him something perfect.

she waited for him to return home, arms thin but full, eyes wide, view narrow.

she wanted to weep, but she could nary muster the sobs with so much wire twined like ivy about her whitewashed neck.

when he saw her, she was bound and brittle. his thin arms fell and the floor was filled with the taste of dried persimmons.

he tried and tried-- his eyes so wide and his view so narrow that in the end, he saw nothing.

in the end, he knelt as he always would, admiring her and waiting for her whispers.

and waiting.
and waiting.
head tilted, ear to lips,
waiting.

he smiled as he waited,
so happy to be home
with her,
waiting for her whispers.

when he grew impatient, he was a craftsman. his fingers laid across the lacquer of her throat and the ripples of the wires, and when he tasted them he tasted the silver of the moon and the gold of the carp swimming just beneath that reflection.

there.
just beneath that sleeping pulse.

with every touch, she lost a little more,
lids glued open, pupils attatched by fishing line to the ceiling beams above their collective forms,
surrounded by the sweetness of her husband's broken persimmons
and laden with the love of his unseeing eyes.

her fingers laid untwitching, her body still all his,
but without a throat to reach her lungs,
how could she
how could she
how could she
even begin
to sing him this evening's song?

his focus flew, a lifetime of dreams over withered fields, to this and that. surely, in that tiny room, there was something that could breathe her voice for her.

and that sleeping pulse would crawl from its shell if he said the right words and used the right parts.

"i'll have to rearrange. i'll have to make this room a womb, for you," he said, explaining to no one but himself and a collection of wire-strung sweets.

"i'll have to find everything for you, in you," he told the air,"and in your scent and fingerprint lingerings."

a knife caused the ripples. the water was her neck. the wire was unravelled.

and it was then that his work began.

her throat yawned open, her love soaking his legs and his bended knee.
unmoving fingers and eviscerated needs
loved his very purpose
as her spine

snapped
in
two

under his persimmon stained fingers
and his blinded need.

swiftly, swiftly, his knees scuttling and skimming across the floor, he reached for a broomstick in the closet-- oh, he fretted and frought with a tyrannical inkling, breaking it to the length of her spine, that he would need another.

his hands splintered, or the splinters sunk into his hands. he wasn't sure but nothingnothingnothing mattered so much as the two silk purses in the dresser.

the room was turning red as a plagued tree succumbs to autumn, spots and patches spreading and waiting for the white of winter. his footprints and bloody knees were an infection on the tatami, his finger blighting the paulownia wood and its brass handles.

but it was hers and she needed to be everywhere, just as her voice tinkled in his ears and richochetted off the walls.

ecstatically, his fingers trembled in time with his lips, inches away from his wife and her new spine. he didn't know how, exactly, the strings of the purses were to be tied when used for breathing, but he twined them around the remnants of her first spine and the body of her second.

and oh,
how he kissed her,
with all the bombast,
a child for a mother,
breathing life with his love and her blood
praying
her songs would spit out and stop choking her mute.

her tongue seemed to move-- oh the divinity to be tasted on her mortal, coppertoned tongue!-- in the breath of her husband's throat.

note
by
note
she
cried
and
wheezed
and
moaned
and
sang

the sound projected from the objects laying haphazard in the room, posessed by her blood and controlled by the memory of her fairytale happiness.

Though fragrant are the colors,
Yet shall the flowers scatter.
Who in our world
Could forever endure?
Over the mountain of transcendence
Let us today cross,
And there will be no more shallow dreams,
No more drunken illusions.

いろはにほへと
ちりぬるを
わかよたれそ
つねならむ
うゐのおくやま
けふこえて
あさきゆめみし
ゑひもせす

.
.
.
and
the
fre
quen
cies
of these things;
they pulled stressed fingers over bloody earshells.

only for a moment did he fail to consider the tiny set of bones in her head, still fertile and abraided by
a flock
a gaggle
a symphony
of locusts.

to veil her from herself, lest she ruin her own dreaming, he gave himself up
and started again,
just to speak,
to tell her that everything
everything was fine.

(therewasnoneedforthenoise)

"no no no no no no
don't listen, it's not here,
we won't find it here,
we can't look here,
not yet.

will you let me . .. ?
stillness is the sufferer,
the stammering, and you,
and i, and everything--
it's coming done.
it's coming done, i promise."

he placed herSelf on a half moon's platter,
served raw and serene to the stars that peeked in through the barely-opened shutters--

gentle visitors,
depraved divine!
have you come to
see the show that spends your time?

her eyelids drooped and her jaw asunder,
she hummed and she murmured,
murmured and lulled,
as the pro
cess
ion
al

o
v
e
r
t
o
o
k





the
ramparts.

the preparations went barebacked, halfcocked, raw.

kitchen where door set snobs
disk dials
handsets
cored upheeled
spinnerettes
comb conchs
ever sundries sundried
caveats unbarrelled
spine upon spun
twine, tempter,
deliquaincies,
after all and in the marrow
drips of draught tremored
travailed, torched
for fact for ambergris
wrought

wrought.

many things and many hands and many hours

matchstick humming
tin can stick stare
stairwell distomb
bitters ninefold
these
soft touches

and so many colors.

oh, while he worked, how she wanted
to kiss him
to love him
to sing him his songs

and send him off to

s
l
e
e
p







because she missed him so.

oh,
the feeling of his body in her emptied ribcage and the feeling of his love in her emptied heart
rotted the pediment of her instructured desperation
that left her feeling nothing in her
deadset skeleton shell
the no longer
held o n e
s i n g l e
thing.

between her dreams and his realities there was nothing to be said
because she no longer had the voice with which to say them
(oh, she lacked the voice with which to speak).

the instruction standstill, stoodfast. it gaped and swayed and he, beloved, understood his mouth would have to spill for two. pushing out post-abortive melodies
("oh, the newsprint needed for the fall, it must have been")
gossip in columns, fact for fact an uneducated anatomy.

sufficience. in drought, excess. he smiled as he sang and sung as he worked a steelsouled magnum opus in his dead wife's bed.

"Still in the water, I'll wait--
mispresented and r-rewretched,
three tons of gasped air in
one lifetime, four and two,
charted up and bartered out."

the fumes fixated him in an asphyxiated cough. fixative. here and there, there, there.

"there there. we're almost."




t
h

e


r



e




.


she resided and she waited, she waited so long like she always promised she would.
how she willed and wanted to touch those pomegranate stained hands, the juice-bloodied fingertips,
how happy she would be to feel him again, to make love to him again,

to provide for him again.

"someday," she'd say, "i'll make you the perfect copy of yourSelf."
"someday," she'd say, "i'll make us something perfect."

oh, such promises that she wished she could keep.

(.keep.kept.
.for hours.)

sunlight questioned, deliberated, ratted out the window. soliloqies, regrets, spat.

spit. sweat.
no tears,
never tears.

ever and always i'll
(but the stench)
love you, love you
(blades and wire)
my voice and my heart
(raw fingers, ringing ears)
yours, everything
(shipwrecked, dessicated)
overflowing, overflowing

andtherewasONLY one (1) one placetoputitall.

"a love song, before bed."

he said it twice, for her whole ears and her whole body. her whole self.

"a love song, before bed."

he said it once more, before undoing his.whole.self unto her.

"a love song, before bed."

.
.
.
.
.
.
.


red from beneath the doorway,
seeping onto the feet of a postman
who heard five last words
grind
and
splatter.






s

o


h



a




p





p






y







.

together, once more,
forever and always.