Covenant

So I wrote this profane feminine prayer in the throes of a no-good, godawful-bad day, let's just say that. Not much going on inside but seething exasperation. If this had been written longhand, it would have been a case of the pen tip never leaving the page, except where it tore it up. In hindsight, I felt like I'd been possessed by the wrath of an Old Testament god, except if that god had been a goddess. Entirely coincidentally, I was listening to some PJ Harvey afterward, and I can imagine this piece accompanied by one of a handful of songs from 1995's To Bring You My Love, even down to those opening lines that echo those of "The Dancer." Elemental and righteous. I might even add a bonus video at the end, because it's my blog and I can do what the hell I want. Yeah, still simmering. Black and empty heart indeed.

***

She came naked out of the eastern desert, eyes blazing with madness and the mirrored flames of sunset, her scorpion arms raised wide as if to grab that holy molten orb and arrest its plunge below the rim of a world too enfeebled to abide the dimming of its fires, as if her livid atrocities had built one upon the next until she'd run howling through sand and sage to escape their loathsome burden, her skin streaked with dark blood but neither tears nor sweat, since the sun had burned those human elixirs from her person, etching on her knowingness the finite nature of all things, despite her quest to preserve every last drop of quantum froth, to make the earth retch itself up in ungodly seizures of fault line and mantle and plate, the scalding orange vomit of its innards gouting down coastal ridges and hissing into a quailing, grimacing sea, as she implored the heavens to be merciful and let her have it all, goddamnit, for she had strained ligament, bone, and sinew to keep it all intact, to keep the infernal ledger balanced, to honour birth while enacting each grim sacrifice as fair payment, to snatch death from the jaws of birth, to goad the saddest clown to smile, to gorge on sin's offspring, to pay homage to the tail-devouring snake of life, to open her parched cunt to the lust of stones (those discarded bones of the world), to shed her scorched and jerk-leather skin beside a dry gulch … and for this—for all this—she was condemned?

Frontier

Clearing Over Sideroad 106 - © David SharpeWhat drove us east from our coastal home in the late fall near got us ensnared in the mountains that winter. But we stumbled on the last clear pass with days to spare, vindicated though much depleted. Descending the lee side of that great range, scanning an impossible horizon, we accepted our reprieve with some grace.

"What now?" you said.

"We find some place and hunker down till spring, if there is a spring. We might be in the rain shadow, so the snows could well spare us, but don't bet on no easy ride."

In time we came to a place of flat light and echoless sound—a place so dead it seemed haunted not by ghosts but by its lack of ghosts. Cold, absent, god-abandoned. Remote as a deviant comet and more pitiless.

Clapboard walls, roof of tar, thin aluminum windowframes, yardless and forlorn on a treeless plain, its eggshell walls its own piteous windbreak—stoic before the baying lupine gales of endless prairie nights, and patient for morning.

Which did arrive.

A dilute lemon sun struggled through a vaporous sky, the wolfpack howl dispersed by the voluted mists, the only sound now the iron clang of crows at a forge without shadows.

You smiled for the first time in weeks. I took your hand and held it, marveling at the avian bones.

"We have a little food. Dry stuff. And water," you said.

I tried to smile too, but my face was a mask. 

"And I have you," I managed.

We rested up a fair while, weeks even, and what our bodies regained we paid for with disquieted minds; what replenished our thirsty blood only drained our ruined spirits, helped untether those thoughts best left stowed and tied.

My heart is made of ore; it loves as well as it might but is shot through with something igneous, something ferrous. Only the blast furnace of your own heart will distil the purity of it, forge of our union a thing less friable, less ephemeral. O our savage steelbound hearts.

While the timid sun tried each morning to revive the world, we sensed the tireless chill of the future as it unearthed our trail at last and began slowly to track it. What manner of thing is this? What is its essence? It's the story's ending, doubling back, heedless of narrative arcs, avid and greedy in its zealous moment, wanting to finish, wanting it done, desiring to end this thing now.