The Book of Dreams - The East Wind Melts the Ice
Put a truce to any thoughts of departure. I am she who glides through the sky when the snow is falling fast, the lady of snow and darkness. I am a ghost, which is not to say I ever lived. I am a memory, which is not to say I ever died. I begin at the moment the ice on the river begins to crack like bones of glass. I am a silence written on pulp-mash paper, in ink drawn from village-wells.
Inward is the only conceivable direction. All arrows point within. So too, this book, which faces down and in, along the sallow thread of my tongue, into darkness and out again.
If I were to tell you that I am an old woman-hermit, who lives on the side of a mountain I cannot name in the year of the ascension of Taira Kiyomori, this would be true. It would, of course, be as true to say I stood outside the Theban wall whose mud-bricks are the color of pages and asked riddles with lips of verdigris. It would be as true to say I drove six brown horses around the walls of a burning city, that I gathered my husband in fourteen pieces and knelt in delta-silted river reeds with my arms full of his flesh. It would be as true to say I invented the world last year, from coffee beans and plantain leaves mixed in my veins. We are a body of Contradiction, flesh-full and fleshless.
But perhaps I am just a mad old woman squatting in the wreckage of a pagoda halfway up the mountain, mending my sandals for the seventeenth time and scraping in my bean patch, waiting for the new green shoots to slide out of the earth like stars. Perhaps I am only she, Ayako of One-Name-Only, who each night brews a sour tea of dandelion roots and watches the stars slide out of the sky like bean-shoots. It is possible that I only dream her, her rags and thin hands, her snow-cold calves and breathing eyes. It is possible I have never been anything but her.
If I do not dream her, then these are my hands deep in the soil of the Mountain whose silence booms in her heart as though it were an empty hall. If I do not dream her, then the others are a mist on the wild goose’s wing , the dream of my lion-haunches and terrible teeth.