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A million stones, a million bones, a million holes within the chinking
I have not been sleeping well. I dreamed last night for the first time in weeks that I can remember. I had found used hardcovers of Gillian Bradshaw's The Dragon and the Thief and The Land of Gold, which in waking life I have never seen outside of a library; in a college town by the sea, I discovered a corpse in a bed of seaweed, slippery and unrotted, like a bog body. It was sewn within a second shroud of skin, pale and wet as sacking. A friend told me this was standard funerary practice in his denomination of Christianity, so I could stop carrying the head around in a fold of nori for the authorities to investigate. We reburied it in the black salt mud under the bridge where the tide had gone out. I guess my brain is basically all right.
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A woman with a bulldozer
built this house now carving away the mountain
whose name is your childhood home.
We were trying to buy it, buy it, buy it
someone was found killed there, all bones
bones, all bones
Earth, water, fire and air
met together in a garden fair
put in a basket, tied with a skin
if you answer this riddle, you'll never begin
--Incredible String Band: Koeeaddi There
Also: you were carrying around the head in a fold of nori--seaweed--but in Japanese, inori (a pretty similar-sounding word), means "prayer" -- so seaweed and prayer almost come together-- a nori inori--a prayer in seaweed: remember the dead in the dried remains of the sea.
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Poem!
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I was glad to know the same obsessions were there when the brainstem came back on line.
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Glad to hear it!
Yes, cool dream. Are the books worth reading?
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Knot me nori harai-kushi
bless me with lightning from the sea
pray me a seaweed prayer
Beneath the waves,
I slept with a young maid
Our limbs long and loose entangling
wrapping round and slipping free
Pulled from that soft embrace
I shriveled and stiffened
contorted like the konbu left to dry
Along the sand
So pray me a sea prayer
My own tears transformed
Into the salt of purification
More word play: the seaweed one finds in miso soup is wakame. The same word can also mean "young girl" or "maiden." So you can lie with the wakame and be with the seaweed.... or a young girl.
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That's the
Welcome back.
Nine
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I'm glad you're dreaming again, though I'm sorry for your not sleeping well.
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This is beautiful. Please send it somewhere. When I was in first or second grade, I saw Urashima Taro's story performed—it was one of the earliest Japanese folktales I remember learning.
So you can lie with the wakame and be with the seaweed.... or a young girl.
Nice . . .
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Feel free to steal, if you like . . .
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I wonder if some parts of a city I know look like that . . .
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I remember them so. I haven't read either one since eighth or ninth grade, which is presumably why they still surface in my dreams; I wonder periodically how they would hold up. What I remember is a luckless tomb robber who discovers the last dragon in Egypt, Hathor; when they venture into Kush where there are still said to be dragons, they encounter a princess of Meroë and some creatures that are certainly not dragons, but still pretty mythological. There is probably a romance and definitely some politics. Mostly I remember the names of the dragons.
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Hee. Yeah. There is an eight-year gap between them. But there is probably something in the underlying strata.
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Check out
Welcome back.
Same to you!
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Thanks. Today has been surprisingly awesome, so I think I'll survive it.
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I'm glad the day has been surprisingly awesome, and I hope that tommorrow and the following days are much the same.
And that you sleep better tonight.
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nori noir
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harai-gushi
So imagine the first line emended to reflect that!
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Emended! Now get it in print!