12.

I am descended from Foxes on my father’s side. I only learnt this recently. We were out in the woods when we came across a great den — a giant beaver’s dam of a den — a mound of branches & bracken & moss with an opening at the top. Across this opening was laid the body of a vixen, now little more than her coat. We knew those responsible & were indignant. As we talked about their offense her pelt stirred & a little train of kits emerged & went running around us excitedly. They must’ve been down in the den hidden beneath their mother’s corpse & then pushed out passed it when we disturbed them but me I saw her death bubbling, her flesh rotting in an instant & her young expanding from the writhing maggots, bubbling up out of her & weaving all around us in a single furry thread. We went a small distance hoping to shake them off but they stuck with us. They seemed large & well fed. I had the absurd image of their bellies being filled with dragonflies (there was water near by). They were blond foxes rather than ginger & they assumed human form without any visible transition. There they were stood beside my father in front of the grey-pink bark of the pines. The only way I could tell them apart was that he was still wearing his clothes. These were his brothers, my kin, wild dogs the supposedly civilized ones have been taught to hate, to hound. No wonder I always feel hunted when I hear that sound, the baying of the crowd. One of nature’s great shames that noise is.

Then I am a white wolf born of blond foxes & I live in one of the last great rainforests of an age you are more than ready to say goodbye to. I eat berries & roots because I am flesh-sick with death. I pay the price of the false god’s feasting, having gorged myself too long on this meat of illusion, having drunk too deep of that delusive red wine.

I am the blind eye of the moon my people still howl at. I shut nothing out — not even nothing — all that I reject I have accepted. It is by love that I cast myself out & the wizard well knows it.

Slinking through the one woods we tell each other’s story.

You mounted your horse of night in the hopes of a new day to ride: it is only the greatest fools who do not take the sunrise for granted. It was an angel’s wing who covered the earth between aeons, a wing of water, which wherever it is in the universe is of her body, whole in however many parts such as only bodies can be. You stood at the nerve centre at the top of her spine & you sent out two ravens. One didn’t return & so you waited. You waited so well that in a way you ever shall. It is this wait that gives Eternity its gravity — a great gift but the price indeed is freedom.

The black bird returned on fire, a poet’s song: fresh every morning no matter the age. In this way the firebird whitened & the bright flame greened & the world found a way to speak Peace, a new word for what it might be — but they kept it like a promise & a promise is too often compromised so the real word became stranger, the truth made it twist until no tongue could hold it. When at last it slipped from our mouths — the word freedom free now even of its speaker — it found it had nowhere to go. This is how the bird became a cuckoo & why for you Spring will ever be the strangest of seasons, the very alien of your heart.

You mounted a horse of night to hope to get the beast to kneel but in the end your only friend will be whatever you cannot subdue. Such triumphs make us smaller, able to be folded up, pressed like a leaf between pages, shared between times, an oddly useless thing that gets brought out in an attempt to remind us how precious we are. The night is a black jewel in an infinite garden. The black jewel a single tree. Night is the bones of the universe’s skeleton. Space is a hard thing — sharp as a knife — & the fruit which balances on the edge of every twig is light. The flesh is light, the meat a rainbow, & you will have to eat it if you want to understand. As it was in the beginning so shall it be in the end.

& so shall we call what comes after the end the aftermath. The aftermath is where laughter comes from: a world of fairy dust even more dangerous, for now every non-existent atom is a bomb ready to go off. This is why you have to give things up, learn the many strengths of weakness. There is not one thing you’re not until you’re nothing: the detonation of the heart.