Strange Conditions *

Strange Conditions That Befell Didi Lilo When Searching for Her Missing Daughter, Zara Carline

by

Lizbeth Rymland

                                There is a spinner reptile that  my girl child calls "The She-Lizard" who lives with her boyfriends in the rocks way north of our red mesa.  She lives two days long walk from here across the plateau toward the river, then at the river up the steep-sided ruddy black-faced canyon to the place where the canyon breaks and the savanna appears, then cross the river walking toward the sandy places to the dense black grama where glittering big rocks sit and agave stands around.  Zara Carline, my daughter, has disappeared and returned before and the last time she was gone she became familiar with the infrared lights of the lizard people.  I gather Zara's things in my satchel and though there is bright panic through my head and heart I feel that I will someday find her. 

                As I walk I begin to whistle to the gods for help.  Then the little winds come crossing inside the newly made bodies and causing the hair to grow from the pores of the mammals who live here.  All the Wind People look exactly alike with their curly hair hanging down.  In the distance I see a whirlwind, twisted like a tendril and it is coming to me through the smooth hard sky.  The wind begins to blow mud balls as if a hailstorm is coming.  I will gather clay and the salt from the impregnated leaves of the shrubby saltbushes and put them in my mouth. I will take the first hailstones that hit the field and blow the mixture in the four directions.  In this way the hail will turn to rain.

                Sparse stand of snakeweed, large clumps of mesquite exposed on the crest of a low hill of blowing sand.  I am looking for a rocky hill where scruboak and little squawbush might grow so I can find food.

                The day my child was born the land was filled with deer and covered with beautiful flowers.  The air had the odor of pollen and fragrant blossoms.  Birds of the most beautiful feathers were flying in the air, or perching on the flowers and building nests in the deer's antlers. 

                The wind comes up again and reminds me of blowing.  If I blow on the tiny entrance it will be enlarged and I will be allowed to enter.  If the bins are empty and I blow on them they will fill up.  So the wind asks me to whistle and reminds me of blowing.

                                The She-Lizard's chilling smile came without a word of warning, came as if disembodied from the narrow rock ledge over my head.  And each word she cast had the spin of a ring of copper around a fixed point.  I cry out, "What on earth has happened to my daughter?"  She shakes her head.  There is nothing reassuring about her smile.  From the lipsides of the she-viper rustles the tiny skeleton of a digger wasp which moves as she speaks.  Her boyfriends are up there with her, sunning themselves, but she stands like a queen, taller than the rest, her head framed with a giant corona.  She hasn't seen Zara for a little long time, she says. Near the She-Lizard's resting place are bundles of thistle and fireweed.  On the walls are the withered orange daylilies drying in the sun.  She is chewing on a strand of purslane to quench the thirst.  Then she leaves me and sits exceedingly still with her friends.  This is the way Zara Carline learned to sit like an upright gecko,  motionless for hours.  She was a friend to the lizard people so I believe that they will find a way to help her mother.  They seem to be speaking silently, meditating, seeing things in the movement of wind and white horsenettle.  After three hours of waiting, I am offered fireweed.  I remove the splitting pods and hairy tufted seeds.  The core of the plant is sweet and tender and pleasant to the taste, but when I eat my heart feels sore for Zara Carline, my little spindle who also loved to chew on the core of the fireweed.

                Soon I find that I have been deceived.  That what I am eating is not fireweed at all.  I begin to feel the receptors as if buried in the pits in my head.  Nearby objects sweep across the retina faster than the distant ones.  There are balance receptors located at the base of the pectoral fins which stretch when I make yawing or pitching movements.  The photic control through the side of the head.  The photoreceptive lining of the third ventricle and the long waves penetrate deep enough to reach and stimulate the hypothalamus.  The nocturnal animals cannot see red lights but I can see the mammals, hiding burrowed and breathing softly below the ground during daylight.  The entire landscape is wombed and pocketed, remade in red shadows; the lobes, sacks and exclamation marks of both slow and sudden heating and cooling.  Something stirs in my sex with the coming of the red light and the photic control from my temples.  Red-lobed vision is lateral as well as vertical into the earth and it comes with radio sounds from far away.  The red heat of numbers: free living forms wriggling through layers of moisture.  Carrion beetles undermine corpses of small vertebrates and bury them for food supply.  Ravenous predatory nematodes consume nematode larvae.  I see the damage on the landscape, the trunk cankers in the wounds of fine leaf yucca.  Flames noxious gases and smoke escapes from jagged holes.  Underfoot, I feel minor explosions in the depth of the vessel.  A charge is repulsed and I am suddenly in a trench isolated from the main force.  I see the red tap root of the amaranth buried deep in disturbed ground, I see its egg-shaped leaves.  I rise up on my feet and call out again..."What on Earth has happened to my daughter?"  The chaos increases to respond to my question.  Infrared radio waves ending in spines on the rosy pulsing heatscape.  Radio photos...cast upon hairworm snake weed...overlaid onto fourwing saltbush and across the pale wolfberry sprung from red sinkholes, a spillage of photic shadows across clumps of milkvetch, in patches of creeping root stocks of vine mesquite, in clusters of spike dropseed and blue locoweed I see these things:  Fragments of the wagon; the carcass of the dead; the lethal current surging through Ruth Snyder's body, her helmeted head stiffened in death; I see paprika sowers in Slovakia; I see women with meat in Magnetaya; a three-year old slum dweller behind barbed wire; a swimming accident draws a curious crowd; Browne is seizing the bomb from the crumpling figure...I see a flood victim from Churchill Downs.  I hear bits of telephone conversations, technical conversations that I cannot comprehend; musical chimes, hotel and motel reservation sections, busy signals, the telephone circuit ringing, radio feeds, a Korean love song fed through short wave, air traffic control, police and fire radios, navigation, disaster broadcasts, personal paging systems... Then as if to stopper the chaos, machinery moves in... There are giant machines and sterile buildings.. There is massive deforestation on a mountainside.  Sprayed poisons.  Mass inoculations.  I see the world's largest blast furnace in Magnitogorsk, the world's largest dam, a nitrogen fixation plant, I see turbine blades, plow blades, Otis Steel, iron puddlers, ore loading docks, ore being poured into pigs... I see a scythe, a combine, a reaper, a harvester.  Suddenly I'd entered the lower bank of a quick rising fog and couldn't see a thing.  I tried to pull myself up the ten feet to the balloon lines, part way, cramps grabbed me and I stopped.  A sudden squall struck.  I was jerked backward and dropped to the end of my harness.  Then everything went black.

                When I open my eyes I see the sky above and the heads of lizard folk concerned about my safety.  I feel the still warmth of the rock beneath me and realize it has grown dark.  I turn on my belly and am still in their bandwidth...on top of the rock ledge overlooking the savanna below.  I can see damage to the landscape.  I can count the elk grazing at night...I can see their heated tumors...I can tell which of the cattle have fevers.

                The next morning the She-Lizard tells me I may find Zara Carline in a hollow in the Earth where there is no warmth and that the infrared will help me to get there.  With a little twig of Russian thistle she draws in the sand the outline of a giant spider woman with her head resting on Serpent Hill and her extremities stretched to the four horizons, making her heart the center place.  "Go there", she says, "Northwards. Cross two days of mountain grassland, three days of sand scrub, four days of woodland and savanna back to shrub steppe.  You'll find roads there to the canyon which is her birth canal."

                For days the only thing I see are signs of death slathered in red shadows.  It began in the savanna and continued after I entered the forest.  From a crack in the Earth I watched a pair of coyotes crisscross the sagebrush flat to locate a crouched antelope fawn which they killed and ate together on the spot.  Three hours later I found a jackrabbit and helped myself to the remains.  By the puncture wounds and contusions in the jackrabbit's throat I could tell an adult coyote got it.  The crushed larynx results in death by suffocation.  Shortly after nightfall I find a dead cougar covered by the remains of a bull elk whose neck it had broken.  They must have rolled more than 100 feet down a steep mountainside and crashed into a tree.  The uninjured cougar was fatally pinned down.  Both predator and prey had had empty stomachs and had been near starvation.  The cougar's strength had drained away.

                At first I didn't notice the evidence of death as omens.  The infrared makes everything strange and I was grateful to share with the other mammals the carrion hidden in the debris.  But after three days the meat ran out and the plants themselves became ominous.  Like everywhere I look I see the poison plants coming to life and color in the rain.  There is no sign of food anywhere only these plants from the nether world are coming.  Monkshood, baneberry, whorled milkweed, dogpane.  I know the death angel by the presence ofthe veil on the stem, the white colored gills and spores.  As I see them I hear the warnings of the grandmothers. "The crowfoot has an acrid juice that blisters the skin on contact."  "Beware of the monkshood.  Odd little blue flowers, everywhere irregular projecting curved hoods."  "Beware of the baneberry.  The lovely red or white ones that give the child dizziness and burning sensations."  "Beware the whorled milkweed, growing in patches from creeping root stocks...Beware the Nuttall.  Monolepsis.  Poverty Weed. Patata...Beware! Beware! The sickness cast in the berries of the carrion flower.  Beware the fruits and flowers from the land of the dead!"  I am hungry but from these deadly fruits only the seeds of the dogbane can be eaten, ground to paste to make little black pancakes.  Then I think of my lost daughter and the sight of these poison plantswhen my body is hungry makes me lose my appetite and my will. 

                In the forest meadow I feed on bark beetles that swarm the burned and rotting lodgepole trunk.  My lips are stained by the juice of chokecherries but I still go to sleep hungry.  Beneath my head I hear shrews feeding on the litter and undergrowth.  There is a wood rat foraging in the sagebrush below.  All the animals are feasting.  I have laid my bedding beneath the perch of a pygmie owl.  The earth is wet from a recent rain and the earthworms are gliding out of their burrows and glistening in  the light of the stars.  The female becomes swollen with eggs.  One's got its tail hooked in the end of its burrow.  I fall to sleep watching it probe about for dead plant fragments which it will coat with slime.  In the pitch dark the approach of a hermit thrush startles me bolt upright.  The hermit thrush have come to move the owl just as his eyes keen in on the presence of a lizard.  My thorax is struck by the clatter between fear and aggression the small birds bring to the mobbing.  So I have the speed to land on that slithering and claim it for my own.  I stomp on his tail and before it can break it off and escape me, I've got its head in my mouth and I like the taste of it.

                I carry Zara's objects in a dried paunch to bring her back to me.  I put it together the day I lost her.  I've saved her baby teeth, snake rattles and skins and some gambler's dice from the first boy gambler.  That is because Zara Carline is linked as kin to the first boy gambler.  There is a nest we made from her hair and spittle.  We used to collect the scales of snake's skin.  When she was six years old I found her looking under the bushes and hissing like a snake so I taught her a trick before it was too late.  The venomous ones will be your friends for life if you are quick enough to take them by the back of their heads and knock the pride from them.  If you knock the pride from a snake it will be your friend for life, they are so respectful of the hierarchy.  To show her what might happen if she wasn't quick enough, I took a rattler and made it angry, and when it struck me, I fell to the ground and after some writhing I played dead for a little long time.  My grandmothers taught me how to move the venom through the body for seeing visions, so on the ground feigning dead I was witnessing the procession of shining cities and ghostly machines.  This even so frightened my little girl that she was impressed by the danger of the snake people.  But danger only challenges Zara Carline.  If she was quick enough, I taught her, she could inspired the other children with living snake necklaces.  And she did so, as a child of six or seven covered head to toe in rattlers, she could scatter whole settlements that way. 

                We capture mountain sheep in dry season.  We butcher them and cut out and clean the paunch.  Then we slap it against a stone. In the summer this brings rain.  I bring the paunch for rain.  Here is a whistle strung to a fur collar.  "Blow sickness off, blow sickness off on all four sides of the sick man", that's what it's for.  Here are bone and hoof pendants which rattle with our every movement.  I brought the sparkling rock to make my face terrifying to enemy ghosts.

                Lately we got susceptible to the electromagnetic mischief of the scientists up the hill.  It was nine days ago that we went to town to scavenge for scrap metals and the castoffs you can find in the ditches and the drains.  We like the fairground in Sykesville.  We sell dried paunches there.  You can find a lot there.  Eggs of birds, fish and insects are sold along with coppers, buckets and barrels, living insects, little horse head nebulii, skulls of all species,  shining ball oscillators of great power, balloon transponders, invisible catchnets.  Zara was acting strange.  You'd be talking to her and her left eye would begin to wander as if she was about to dart off and do some mischief of her own.  There was a demonstration fairground, the acoustic levitation of a copper-wrapped toroid.  I am the one of our people that knows most about the solid state entities and their offspring so I am pleasured by the stir of new and old  machines of all sizes. I could feel the movement of the thing and then soon enough every moving thing that passed me sent an impulse until I began to feel I was lost in a thicket of human noise and sentiment.  So I got deep distracted before I noticed that Zara was gone. 

                I didn't see it happen but heard later that she had wandered off curious about a tall yellow-haired man with one eye.  The attraction was mutual I suppose.  She was spying at him from an alleyway and I guess he was looking back at her from his truck, looking striking tall with his black eye patch and she stunned enough by the sight of him had her fingers in her mouth and wasn't quick enough to notice the fall of metal debris from the rooftop above her head.  So in an instant she was down, her body splayed beneath a short heap of rubble, her head bloodied by the copper plate.  The tall man was witnessed by a red-headed child, named Moses.  Moses said that when the object struck her and she was on the ground, the one-eye looked about him in all directions as if he was guilty of something and then he approached her, slowly, knelt beside her and after some rumination, searched her purse for signs of her identity.  Finding nothing with her name on it, the one-eye picked her up easily and put her inside the cabin of his truck.  Moses said the stranger circled the truck three times looking everywhere for spies, and, not seeing Moses, who was standing in the hollowed out second storey window, the man gunned his engine and left quickly.

                I didn't know any of this, of course.  I was distracted  by the acoutistic levitation of a micromotor, and the odd sensations of passing strangers, some scarecrows, a few tempests in teacups, motorheads with their engines running hot, lumbering pacifiers with heads full of wind and seawater, tin women, electric eelgirls, three hawkboys and one hawkwoman, some full human and some other-than-human beings that wandered the amusements of the Sykesville fairground.

                As soon as I noticed she was missing, I began to look around.  I circled the fairground a few times.  Then I started asking strangers, fairground vendors and the street sweeper who had caught my eye earlier on for he had flippers for hands and yet made his wage sweeping.  No one had seen her.  She is a striking looking child.  Pale as flax, tall as a corn stalk in August, with flaming red hair.  The ravens liked to follow her, and the crows sometimes, so often she could be seen trailing black clouds of birds.

                I stayed till the fairground closed and the vendors shut down their booths.  I walked the neighborhoods outside the fairground gates.  The barber was washing his shears outside a towering shop.  He remembered seeing Zara outside the fairground gates but he couldn't tell me where she went.  Two little girls had seen Zara Carline looking at herself for a half hour in that plate glass window.  We don't have any mirrors in the woods where we live.  Then I started knocking on all the doors of Sykesville.  The cabinetmaker's wife invited me inside but I didn't have time.  The fur trappers whistled and hooted at me.  The innkeeper's big sons banged on pots and pans and chased me away.  I even walked the hull of the condemned warehouse singing and whining for Zara Carline.  The warehouse frightened me for the rotting floors were covered with grass and in these grasses little sea monkeys lived.  I was already upstairs when I discovered the soft spots in the floorboards.  I knocked on one door and was surprised by the glistening wet face of a little girl monster.  She spoke but it wasn't in a language I ever heard of.  The tin smith's wife suggested I go to see the gypsy woman who lived in a tree 3 miles south of town.  This was on my way home so I started back in the dark.  I took a stout cottonwood branch and wrapped it thick with fiber for a torch.  This is the way I walk in the dark, with a torch in my hand, shouting and moaning for my child.  Being her mother I already knew she was is some kind of danger.  I knew it when I first lost sight of her. 

                The gypsy didn't live in a tree but a yurt wrapped like a donut around the biggest Juniper I ever saw.  The yurt was made of skins and the light pokered through from where the stitching was worn.  I shouted a hooting holler that the grandmothers in these parts know as a beckon call.  The woman came to the opening with a torch in her hand and she looked all ways before she spotted my form in the moonless dark.  She invited me in, "Sit down on the floor." she said.  She herself sat higher, enthroned in a bone chair.  For oraculizing she used coppers and the little bones of rats and lambs.  There was a tattoo on her exposed chest, the proboscis of a butterfly, a sign of the people that I recognize as kin.  With five throws of the coppers and bones she saw one thing only and that was repeated.  She shook her head and told me the news.  "A pack of swine were chasing a raven, the corn patch opened and the swine fell in."  I was frantic by now and though I am likewise trained in the ciphering from the messengers, I could make nothing at all of this one.  This enraged me and before I knew it I was circling and huffing, challenging the gypsy to a fistfight.  A strapping boy came in and something about us struck him funny, he opened his head and hollered out laughter too great for his body to sustain.  This stopped us dead in our tracks and when we were all of a piece he stopped his laughter and offered me a drink of beer.  I drank it down fast, he said "good night", then he let me out the back door into the dark.

                No matter what happens don't stop.  I mean just keep going because your life depends on it.  I wake up and I am in a mud patch surrounded by a thicket of brambles.  Maybe I crawled to this spot and fell into a coma.  There is the rich smell of burning pine.  The peering black eyes of a pair of raccoons.  How much time?  I may have lost the trail of her.  In my dream she was covered in lichen, sunk comalike in a mossy embankment near the ruin where my grandmothers were born.  I saw her hands first, stretched starlike to either side and between each of her fingers, a spangle of tiny fossils broke free to the swarm of new life, even smaller iridescent insects and shining reptiles broke free of their egg casings, uncurled, unraveled and began to crawl home.  Like my mothers from the covens of Spencertown, I can cipher what the messengers send and this ghost messenger whispered that my girl was alive.

                Ten days walking and my mind begins to unravel. The river wetland seems infested and streamered by neon gases at night.  The mammals and the birds are drawn to me.  Like I become a site for the suckers of nectar and pollen.  I tell them there is a tin of treacle for them if they will pollinate the flowers five minutes fly to the southeast.

                So there is a whipping frenzy inside my brain and I think maybe I have lost the trail of her.  I've got my books.  The tattered maps are here and the hide-bound packet of her snapshots.  A little bit muddied the silk of her color, but her baby teeth and the lock of her hair is safe and clean.

                I don't know where I am.  When the soils became audible, and I could see the bats pollinating the shrubs and succulents through the particles of dark, my inner ear began to waggle, I started traveling closer to the ground.

                Somehow we have become prey to invisible creatures.  I crawl out of the bramble and there is a full moon up sky.  My bedding is shredded and torn by talons.  Where are my matches?  Here are my matches wrapped up tight.  The thicket is dry and will burn hot.  I'll have to search for firewood so I can spend the night figuring my whereabouts and calling the spirits for directions.

                So when the fire begins to quicken, I know the logs are filled with spirits so I peer inside to decipher their little dwellings.  I know how to talk with them so that they will talk back.  Like I tell the fire it is beautiful and it explodes a little, scattering salamanders.  I look deep into the logs and discover the hives for the salamanders.  When I call them out they come to straight to me and when I ask them questions about my girl child they answer with a riddle.  "Living in a cell, celliculous... Living in a nest, nidiculous...Living in a barn...ridiculous."  The slithering folk are lying to me or they don't tell me everything.  If I wrap the scraps of her dress and underclothes in banners on my arms and sing to her all night, I may have a dream that shows me where she is and how to get to her.  If I close my eyes I can hear the pocket gophers tunneling.  Neotoma are making giant burrows as breedings sites for other animals.  They are carrying rotting leaves to their dens... A warbler is wiping cobwebs from her bill onto the growing rim of a nest.

                There have been strange symptoms.  I spent two days with my eyes pinned closed and whenever I asked the gods howcome? a ghostly stranger whispered back that it was Bell's Palsy.  But now I know the blinding was a kind of training.  Like how the approaching prey is revealed to the blind and deaf highway woman by her sense of smell.  And the smellscape was amplified noxious as if I was a little tick sitting on the sunlit tip of a twig on a bush catching a whiff off the skin glands of the burrowing mammals.  I can smell female effluviums calling long distance, enhancing the frequency of wing fanning, of landing and walking to the chemical source on the part of the male.  This blind phase lasted two warm days and two cold nights.  Then a railroad man came to my assistance.  He who found me wandering by the night roadside.  In his car he took me to his family home and hypothesizing that my condition was caused by thickening smegma in my eyes, he poured warm salty water to charm them open.  The spirits complied and help me over.  The opening of the eyes was even more harrowing.  Because suddenly now I respond to the cue of looming by running away.  Like the expansion of a disc of light means the disc is moving towards me.  These poor folks have faces like giant masks. I kindly excused myself and ran away.

                So morning comes and I know not what havoc the tricksters have done in the night.  There was a dream of Zara Carline.  The first thing I saw was the Queen of the Butterflies.  She opens a hollow in the ground to show me the shadows in the waters below.  The shadows form the body of Zara Carline with the head and proboscis of a butterfly.  Then Zara Carline's head reappears and I see her form enclosed in the pupa hanging in a tree like a large seed.  She's in her last stages of transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, her body hunched, her legs pressed tightly against the thorax, her wings crumpled and uninflated.  Males from everywhere are clustered on the pupa and settled in the twigs all around.  As the moment for her emergence gets nearer she begins to shudder.  The end of the pupal case splits and she slowly starts to haul herself out.  The males are now fluttering their wings with excitement.  They are so eager to copulate that they use the claspers on the tips of their abdomen to tear a small hole in the wall of the pupa through which they insert several segments of their abdomen tips.  In this way they are able, as the end of her abdomen passes theirs, to mate before she emerges.  They copulate with her while her body is wet, still drying and her wings expanding.

                In this dream I am suddenly aware that this miracle of transformation is about to occur in a terrible place.  It is a sterilized barn and it is run by the one-eyed harvester who took my child away.  The barn is filled with trapped horses who have never seen the natural light of day.  In fact, the barn is hospital like.  I mean, it is not made of wood at all, and everywhere there are instruments for monitoring temperature and cleanliness.  There are fluorescent lights and show spichots in the ceiling for sterilizing the animals.  The horses are being prepared for something terrible by a team of nurses.  One by one the nurses shave the horses and then attach them to bloodletting machines.  On the shelves are cans that say, "Tetanus Serum", I realize that this is the way the serum is made.  The one-eyed harvester carries a canister of liquid fire which he uses to hose down Zara Carline because her eyes are still sticky and her body is slippery from new birth.  The bloodletting machine moves ominously toward her stall. 

                                When the Butterfly Queen reappears, I call out to her..."Why on Earth are they doing that to my daughter?"  "Because the living land is chaos when you see infrared as food chain", she says, and disappears.  I awaken to the sound of a frightened cry from my throat and I am bathed in sweat but I know somehow that I am better able to navigate in the landscapes stained in red.  The disorientation had become acute in previous days.  The infrared comes with radio noise and while I was desperate to find my child I would find myself lost in the sight of a shivering hawk moth covered with a pile of hairy scales.  The sounds cast by the heated muscles hid the voice of a manic disc jockey announcing a rap tune.  Just yesterday there were new symptoms.  I was flickering my tongue in and out when I was alarmed or excited.  I felt myself tuned up along with dozens of local gopher snakes and sidewinders at the approach of a careless kangaroo rat.  I could feel the proximity of the kangaroo rat's burrow.  So then I thought I was deceived by the lizard people, until I heard the She-Lizard's voice again..."Infrared is warmth, follow the warmth, not just the food chain."  So following her directions I moved my attention to warmth and the world resumed its order... The white-breasted wood swallows sitting close beside their partners before copulations, quivering rapidly with slightly raised and spread wings.  The fledglings are fed by a number of old birds, young birds feed their brothers and sisters, the male flies off and catches an insect and feeds it to the female who once again red quivers her wings.  In the evening they fly up to great heights and wheel around with loud calls.

                I walk with my packs strapped to my forehead with the supplies hanging behind.  The little lights turn on in the houses when I come toward the village, everyone hears me calling for Zara Carline.  I see the Foghat of Petral.  Fog arrives in a clearing and then goes back again so I know it will be good weather. 

                The lights turn on and a mother comes out in the dark deer yard and asks me what I am up for.  For a moment I think she is challenging me to a fight but then I remember that I have lost my child.  "There is a Leafman", she says, "who is good at finding things that are lost in the ground."  She says he lives where the chokecherry grows thick by the side of a cave and she points me there.  I begin to whistle and Dustdevil comes and takes me to the grounds of the Leafman.  These are old burial grounds.  I recognize them from the time I was newly born.  Leafman likes to rise from the ground and then disappear back again.  He likes to cover holes made by burrowing animals.  He also likes the holes blackened at the burial site.  Leafman is afraid of women and as we talk he is walking backwards, not forwards.  "Yes, she is underground", he says, "but she is very undead.  Please have a seat and tell me about her."

                "From the time that she could crawl, she dwelled in the misty worlds of spider and antpeople and she could stay still enough, the only motion was the slightest shifting of her eyes to watch their doings, their comings and goings.  I taught her everything I knew but then she had to find out for herself.  She was tied to me for nine months after she was born.  Every morning started off pretty much the same according to the weather.  The thank you fire would be lit outdoors and from that flame the need fires were lit. Then the fire where the goats were sheltered and then our own good morning fire in our yurt.  Then sometimes the boys would come if there was building or tooling to do.  I made Zara Carline a special chair so she could watch all our doings and exercise her legs which are quite sturdy today.   People would come to me for medicine and she was witness to all of that.  She saw me make medicines from poisonous plants and animal parts.  All of this she likewise learned how to do.  From the day she could run on her fat little legs, not much could keep her at home.  Till she was ten years old she was allowed to travel only as far as the distance where she could hear and repeat my raven calls.  Zara Carline was so wild and fearless as a child that just a raven's call would bring the other children ambling up the hillsides and across the ravines to find her.  When the kids got close to mating age, and the subject of their study was winged creatures, the mothers sat nightly by the fire and made them corsets each attached with a set of wings.  The corset cages and the wing racks were made of bird and mammal bones covered by the black feathers dropped by the raven and crow people.  The mating dance would start this way: With a series of whistles they would signal the whereabouts of a boy or girl, the beloved one, who was secretly desired by one of their numbers. 

                The plan was made early on, the clan kept the dance a secret from the precious one.  When the winds and the weathers gave them the signal of mating time, a series of whistles in sequence would bring each closer in turns, first hiding behind Juniper, then displaying themselves, until the flock of them had reached their innocent victim.  Then new cries came free and stamping and yelping they made a circle around the victim and began to slowly move with suggestive turns of their heads and bodies, giving distinct impression of the desire for love.  The lover who most desired the beloved would lead the others in her own display of gestures...then the boy would show interest by mirroring the dance and making gestures of his own.

                The year of the bat clan was hard on my nerves.  Those caves are poisonous to human beings.  I'll never forget her strutting about with the little oxygen suit I made from fiber plants, scrap metal and some stolen canisters of oxygen I got from a labman.  You can't have a child getting lost in caves full of ammonia so I riggered her up with a special suit like the scientists use.  But during this time there were no safety signals, no

raven calls when she was down in those caves.  That summer I couldn't go to the forest without finding at least three children hanging upside down from the branches."

                I told him abut the first meeting of Zara Carline and the Bat Queen.  "She was thirteen years old at the time and already tall for her age.  I watched the children from a nearby plateau as the flock of them crouch above a hole at the top of a cave.  Soon after dusk they witnessed the bats spiraling skyward, 8,000 feet soaring at forty miles an hour.  After the swarm thinned to an invisible trail, my child calmly reached into the air and plucked the slowest little girl bat from the sky.  The little mammal was much too young to know fear.  With her tiny ears pricked up and her eyes scanning the crowd, the little girl bat allowed my child to unfold her graceful wings and measure her wingspan.  Just then the Bat Queen emerged from behind a rock and approached Zara Carline who responded  by facing her bravely.  Three sweeping chirps came from the blind Queen's mouth in order to discern the details of my child's form and perhaps the substance of her intentions.  And, liking what she found, the Queen made Zara Carline an offer.  If Zara would help the Queen stop the mammologists, she would gladly introduce Zara to the mysteries well-known to her people.  Zara gladly agreed to help the Bat Queen and the Bat Queen assured her that they would meet again.  Days later, when Zara went searching, she found cave openings and forests littered with mist nets.  She went directly to the mammologist's laboratory and requested to help him. 

                She was a sexy child, so the scientist gladly agreed to have her accompany him through the night.  She wore a helmet with a headlamp, like the rest of them, and shortly after dusk went with the team to capture the bats caught in their nets.  She was astonished to find bats of many varieties...Long-eared blind bats with single rhino horns coming out from their noses, as well as wolf-faced, sighted bats who were angered by the bright lights and tried to cover their eyes with their membraneous wings.  The scientist taught Zara how to carefully untangle the furious animals and put them each into a cotton bag.  She soon discovered that the mammologist in charge was a troubled man and distracted, so distracted that he offered her the job of rounding up all the bats for ten days to bring to his laboratory.  The first night she carried the bats in cotton bags for three hours march through the dark, always singing to them to keep them calm, stopping here and there to forage for food for them to eat.  As she walked to the laboratory she had an idea.  She would find out the exact nature of the research and attain the answers from the Bat Queen herself.  Knowing the lecherous nature of the labman, she promised him sexual favors if he would allow her to meet him at a certain time with detailed reports.  On the appointed night she delivered her own reports to an uncle and had him visit the site where the mammologist was waiting.  The mammologist was angered by my daughter's trickery and pursued us for a while.  But when his reports were well received he left us and the Bat people alone for good.

                So I asked the Leafman where I might find the Bat Queen because she would help me.  This is what the Leafman said..."The red world is where the bats come from. You will find her in a high meadow stained with red...Where water springs up from the earth...Where water gathers in a shallow stoop... Where spiders and swallows live freely...Near the ledge where she rescued Monster Slayer...Bat Woman carried Monster Slayer down the side of that cliff..."  Then fear crossed his face, a dry crumpling of leaves, and as he backed away I heard him rustling words to himself, "That devils have visited this Earth: human-like beings with pointed beards, good singers, one shoe ill-fitting, but with sulfurous exhalations at any rate.  Yes, she is underground but she is very undead, very undead, very undead..."  He shook his head, worried, then fell back into a heap that scattered in the wind.

                I walked four days through mountain forest grassland, as the she-viper first instructed, but now I am looking for a red-stained meadow.  There are bracken ferns to eat and larkspur but I am not eating much at all and so I can't walk upright.  When I had my wits about me I made little sod knee patches so that I could crawl.  Now I take them from my paunch and wrap them to my knees and follow the little runways of the red backed vole.

                I fall unconscious in a boneyard, a meadow where bluebells arch over the half buried skulls and scattered vertebrae of cows long since dead.  In the boneyard I dream that I meet the Queen of the Bats hanging from a giant tree.  These tree arms have recoiled in pain from the scolding of lightning.  Bat Queen is attended by other females.  They hang long and graceful in their diaphanous black draped taut over silvery wing bones.  I am now upside down so I can clearly see the face of the Queen.  The sky is filled with her people, darting and twisting through the night sky emitting radar like pulses of ultrasound.  "What on earth has happened to my daughter?" I ask. She begins to scold me by showing me the superior maternal instincts of the bat mothers.  We find ourselves in a creche in the maternity cave filled with millions of pups.  My eye is drawn to a single bat mother who sorts through the creche's throng of hungry millions to find and feed her own offspring.  This bat mother recognizes her own pup by its cry.  She sniffs out the smell and calls out for the sound form of her own pup.  "Our mothers always remember where they last left their pups", she scolds me.  "She goes back to the same place in the creche each time, then sniffs her way over to confirm that the little one is her own."  I watch Bat mother sniff and exchange calls with a pup for a minute before nudging it toward one of her teats.  The Queen is angry with me for losing my own.

                "What on earth has happened to my daughter?" I ask her again. Then I add, "I have heard she is caught underground." The Bat Queen removes her crown and with infrared eyes I am allowed to look into her skull to witness a brain the size and sheen of a large pearl.  "To locate your target and discern details, a large number of frequencies is needed."  She shows me how it is done.  The other bats are already snaring insects.  The insects respond instantly to the sound.

                Moths fold their wings and drop groundward to shake their pursuers.  "Broaden frequency bandwidth by producing harmonics and by emitting frequency modulated bursts that sweep over a wide frequency range.  A long constant frequency pulse is good for detecting targets larger than the wavelength of the signal. The frequency-modulated pulses contain information about time."  As she produces a long constant tone, followed by a downward sweeping chirp, I see shadowgraphs echoed back into the pits of her ears to play their forms against her pearly brain.  Her brain becomes a shewstone, a projection screen for a procession of 3-D sound shadows.  She sound tests the young Preying Mantis who is contemplating in the hollow of a nearby tree.  Then flapping into a tall vertical posture Bat Woman flies toward the Mantis Boy.  The Insect's beating wings introduce oscillating frequency shifts superimposed on the doppler.  But the Praying Mantis has an ultrasonic ear buried in a groove on the underside of the abdomen.  Hearing the high frequency chirping of the Bat Queen, Praying Mantis extends his forelimbs, ordinarily folded in prayer, into a Superman stretch.  He stalls by flipping onto his abdomen, then he slides into a steep roll finished by a power dive at four meters per second.  "Target far?" she says, "Lower harmonics", "Target near? Higher harmonics." "The higher harmonics give the finer details of your target."  She swoops on a free-flying ant and captures it this time.  Then, the whole landscape fills with the ripples from beating insect's wings.  Everywhere there are sounds of living forms, precise in size, detail and density...Some birds are sleeping, some deep in tree hollows, others are rising high into the skies.  I hear running motion, round and slow creatures are foraging for food.  I can hear the skeletons of mammals huddling together.  I can hear the skeletons of insects in flight.  Then Queen Bat and her ladies hover around me and she offers me a gift balanced on her cupped black wingtips.  I look closely at it. It is an inner ear, a thin elongated sheet curled up like a snail. Before I can protest, the gift is implanted directly into my cranium.  The excitation is transmitted via the spiral ganglion cells along the auditory nerve fibers to the brain.

                She gives me three clues before she disappears.  She says, "Your daughter always liked the darkness, and the depths of darkness in living people... She is a good-hearted girl and attracted to suffering, lost souls.  She may be furious."  She tells me of a place where the grey birds live.  "They have no wings."  "They just hop about and should not be trusted.  The Grey Gods were destroyed long ago by hail and windstorm.  The grey birds live in a land below the pocked stony forms of their dead gods.  Do not eat the gray food of the syphilis people."

                I wake up blind in the boneyard, swarmed by sound shadows.  When I open my mouth to sing the good morning song, the chirping sounds produced from it are not my own.  Every sound is met with an echoed battery of objects I can barely recognize.  The shadowgraph of the jackrabbit cutting living twigs from the larrea.  Locusts are preparing to jump across a gap.  They move their heads from side to side before leaping.  I turn and chirp ground ward.  Pocket gophers are tunneling.  Neotoma are making elaborate nests as breeding sites.  It's because I know these animals and their habits that I can cipher who they are. Now I am blind and I can't cry out.  Like, for instance, staring me down is a spinning object with a dome-shaped head.  It made its way quickly across the path in the meadow and is utterly silent.  I don't know what it is.

                May be a dust devil so I follow it a while by chirping to it and a minor tornado works its way through my ear and onto my mind's new eye.  Here comes Bat Woman with her burden basket.  That bat has a vagina wing by means of which she clings to rocks and makes embarrassing noises.  I follow Bat Woman and Dust Devil both.  We come to a meadow rimmed by black volcanic rock and when I chirp free the returning shadowgraphs outline strange and silent human populations living in the hollows.  There are human shaped skulls and the speed of skeletal movement, though differing one from the other, remind me of my own.  A magnet in the pit of my nose gives me the four directions plus above and below.  Chirping eastward I discover the blue boat of destruction.  In the stern of the boat a man seems to be vomiting.  "Very well", I say and point my sensors southward.  We must be on a ledge.  Beyond the boat are winged beings flying and riding in the sky.  From clear little bells of air come mysterious acrobats and black rituals.  Southward there is a beckoning gesture, an invitation to nothing, floating detached against the blaze of a fire.  Shadowgraphs of trapezoidal sections, metallic sharpness, unending distortions of animals and plants.  Due south, south more directly, a hollow crack willow shelters an infernal tavern.  From its portals are coming full faces, blunt and swollen.  It's a little settlement of strange folk cooking on spits, all with different skull shapes, different speeds in motion.  In front of the hut women are gathering around a village spichot, near a thin stream of running water.  Someone is trying to cut the cord holding a roasted swan.  Or are they trying to bite a cake which is hanging on a string?  I become frantic thinking about my losses.  When my ears come more keen to human language, I hear a child's voice cry out to an old man..."You are nothing but a sickly old swan, white without and black within!"  With my hands feeling the ground cover I discover a patch of chicory.  I fall to my knees and begin to pull them up by their fleshy taproots to eat my fill.  There is a man with his head down in a beehive.  Another man plunging head first into a pool has between his parted legs a fruit which is opening like an egg.  I am suddenly overcome with grief and hopelessness and I fall to my knees again and begin to cry.

                I am sitting near a place where water springs up from the earth.  There are spiders and swallows everywhere.  I hear the embarrassing sound that Batwoman makes clinging to the rocks with her vagina wing.  A man named Kyle Rudolph is sitting beside me trying to console me the best way he knows how.  He tells me about a big machine he saw on a giant farm with one crop only.  He says there are 12 foot wheels and a big metal box that runs the length of the 12 feet.  Ground driven gears meter out the seed. They hitch the hook onto a tractor.  The gear on the bottom box starts to turn and meters out the seed.  The wheels have gear bolts with chains hooked onto metering, he says.  The minute you move that chain, it is turning.  There are openings every 12 inches, it drops the seeds into little tubes, into openers, into great big metal shanks on hydraulics, with four inches under and they make a four, the seed drops down into a tube into the shank as it is ripping the ground open...The guy is driving that tractor.  Now there is thick stubble from the previous crop the year before, one foot to eighteen inches. On the front end is a header.  It is 24 to 30 inches wide.  There is a sickle bar at the front.  There are metal teeth on the bar.  It moves back and forth on a frame and cuts the wheat.  The 300 horsepower diesel motor makes a big roar, he says.  The wheat falls into the header.  There is a big conveyer.  The head and half the length of the stock are conveyed to the center of a platform, up into the main body of a combine.  The job of the combine is to separate wheat kernels from straw and the rest of the plant blows out the rest onto the back.  The kernels fill a tank on the top.  Inside is machinery that does the separating.  The first stage is threshing.  The great big metal cylinder in stream of cut-off plants, knocks the kernels out of the heads into the wheat whirling cylinders, next to the bed where wheat is being moved along and smashes it.  There is a mix of kernels and ground up straw.  The rest of the combine is a mechanism of separating wheat kernels from the trash.  There are moving screens.  The wheat is conveyed up and dumped into a tank.  There is a cab and a steering wheel.  There are two combines, two trucks, a continuous stream of cut off plants, knocks the kernels out of the heads into the wheat whirling cylinders, next to the bed where wheat is being moved along and smashes it.  There is a mix of kernels and ground up straw.  The rest of the combine is a mechanism of separating wheat kernels from the trash.  There are moving screens.  The wheat is conveyed up and dumped into a tank.  There is a cab and a steering wheel.  There are two combines, two trucks, a continuous stream of trucks between combines empties the storage bins.  They start on the edge, the combines.  They go around and around at four miles an hour.  The augur sticks out the side.  They call on the CB, "Hey, I'm full up Kyle."  It takes two weeks at fourteen hours a day to clear 4,000 acres.  There are big banks of lights on the combine machines so they can work into the night.  There is a thick stubble from the previous crop.  Everyone has a CB radio."

                All of this sounds familiar to me but I don't know why.  I feel I have spent lifetimes watching these machines and counting kernels and recording the kernel counts on rain-yellowed papers.  There are no signs of life in the office of the farm.  Some dead plants on red plastic table cloths is all and a weathered calendar on the wall put out by the manufacturers of tetanus serum.

                Suddenly I feel desperate and parched but I am not thirsty for water.  "All I want to do", I say to Kyle, "is to listen to the sound of spiders mating."  I'm still blind, someone else takes me to the cave beside the meadow rimmed in red where sparrows are roosting and spiders are blowing silk balloons.  This one makes a feather bedding where I can lay down and let the shadowgraphs of copulating spiders play loosely on my pearly brain. It is a jumping wolf spider boy spinning a triangle of silk a few millimeters long.

                Then shock comes when I see my daughter again in that dream.  She's got her own body but the head and proboscis of a butterfly.  Then I see her face and body wet as if in an embryo with flattened new wings.  She is enclosed in the pupa hanging in the tree like a large seed.  She's in her last stages of transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, her body hunched, her legs pressed tightly against her thorax, her wings crumpled and uninflated.  Then I hear the words of the salamanders that I witnessed in the fire..."Living in a cell, celliculous.  Living in a nest, nidiculous, living in a barn, ridiculous."  I see that the barn is not an ordinary barn but a sterilized hospital where horses are stuck with wires and tubes.  There are monitors everywhere and shower spichots which release pesticides and antiseptic sprays.  Hairless nurses are moving from stall to stall to shave the horses and a tall one-eyed man is coming behind them with a large bloodletting device.  This is a serum producing plant.  My daughter, who is wet with afterbirth and just beginning to flap her lovely wings is in the last stall.  She is shocked and terrified as the nurses spray her with pesticides.

                This time it is not the Butterfly Queen but a Spider Woman who appears to me.  I ask again..."What on earth is happening to my daughter?" She answers, "They are cleaning her..."  "Why?" I ask.  "Because the living land is mystery and they are afraid of it..." she says, "It is confounding. disorderly, disturbing to them." Then she turns into the outline of a great spider woman with her head resting on Serpent Hill and her extremities stretched to the four horizons, making her heart the center place.  I hear the She-Lizard's voice now return to remind me..."Go there"  "Northwards."  Cross two days of mountain grassland, three days of sand scrub, four days of woodland and savanna back to shrub steppe.  You'll find roads there to the canyon which is her birth canal."

                It may have been friction itself that led me to the desert of the hermits in the valley below.  A kind of agitation in the red-stained meadow throwing sparks and leading me elsewhere.  The swallowpeople thought that a dogbitten stone was dropped into their wine. The spiderpeople thought the cooking fires were built upon stray cuttings of that tree that was struck by Oloafet, the cunning master of flames.  In any case, there was turmoil in the red-stained meadow.  People biting backs.  Dogs eating half-living carcasses of other dogs.

                In the valley below is the desert of the hermits.  The wind blown sandy terrain is caught by scattered clumps of honey mesquite and palmilla. There is a sparse stand of snake weed.  Large clumps of mesquite sit whispering to one another on the exposed crest of a low hill of actively blowing sand.  These are silicon loving plants.  The whole religion is one of shining.  I am standing on the ledge where the Bat Woman rescued Monster Slayer.  She carried Monster Slayer down the side of this cliff.  I can see from the crest of this rocky hill that the hermits bring the sun to themselves by hoarding an assortment of shining objects. I climb slowly down the black rocks, and on my way down I detect the brilliant green in the body of a centipede.  I reach for it and get a zipper wound.  My arm is opened, the blood springs free and the sun rays delight in the slick of ruptured tissue.  I look at the valley once again.  The unending distortion of plants and animals is righting itself. On level ground, the scat of a coyote has mesquite beans and chokecherries, the head and wings of locusts.  I follow the scat and footprints to the den.  New pups totter and scumble toward the mouth.  They blink uncertainly in the strange light and warmth of the May sunshine.  They are stalking grasshoppers around the den's entrance.  I dig a small hollow at the mouth of the den, just beneath the deadfall.  I push a long twig into the bottom of the hollow with the hooked end facing downward. I tie the other twig to the baited cordage and hook it to the first so that the little shaking will trigger the trap.

                Even by the light of day I can see that there are as many ghosts as there are stones in the desert of the hermits.  Some hermits stand before their huts with their legs in water, up to their knees.  They are eating bread made of spurred rye.  Not wanting to know, I watch from a sidewards eye as their nightmares are spiraled and spun into membraneous tissue. I am frightened by this and decide to hide in a hollow in the rocks until nightfall, wait for the coyotekill, then I'll make my way across in the cool nighttime, while the hermits are asleep.

                I make my bedding of grasses and fur on the floor of the cave and prepare to sleep through the day.  Lying still in the cave I feel that Bat Mentor is ever present yet invisible.  Dressed in flint, with zigzag lightning at the end of his wings, he stands near the opening and gives me a clue to the proper offering and the god to whom it should be presented.  He tells me to go to the antpeople and find objects to offer to the hermit named Tseya Tinidini.  There is a large antcrater near the stoop of my walk.  I lie flat on the ground to spy on the antpeople better.  My pineal gland is ignited as I watch how the antpeople parade the shivering shining bits to bury them and display them atop their heaps.  They are burying copper, manganese, silver and gold in their antcrater.  They have built a nest extremely deep, descending vertically to groundwater, to protect their queen in the inner chamber of this fortress.  I must not rob the antpeople of their glittering harvest.  If I made a pool of spittle before me on the sand, perhaps they will grow curious and come to keep my company.  Before a little long time of drooling, I grow quite thirsty and disappear.  I begin to dream of spinning things.  Although I am stammering slow and blurting curses, I can dodge in an out of spinning things with quick reflexes. I was told that we can raise frequency by spinning 33 times clockwise each day.  When I awaken, an assembly of antpeople are gathered around my head as if an ampitheatre.  I will give them my spittle and beads of my sweat if they will lend me some of their prize of shining things for the hermits.  They agree and we make our trade. I continue to drool for them and they bring me slivers of silica and green phosphorescent flakes of a dead centipede.  I feel the long wave rays penetrate my tissues and stir my hypothalamus.  From ground level I watch the grasses respond to sunlight.  How the chloroplasts stream in an orderly fashion around and around from one end of the cell to another.

                When night falls I wend my way around the glowing thickets where the hermits live in firelit thatch.  Close to the entrance of every doorway stands a fire altar which is layered earth, animal, gold, wood and food.  The skins of the men and women are slaked with ash and copper but as I approach I see their faces and bodies glowing and sparkling with fire threatening to burn if I come too close to them.  Just like the ants in the earlier day, the group of the hermits cluster around, they are silent in their movements and making a wyerd of me.  I can only hear the whispers of the one in the crowd named Serafina di Dio, she is murmuring without moving her mouth, "What is this which gleams through me and strikes my heart without hurting it and I shudder and kindle?"

                As the moon begins to rise the hermits take their nightly places affixed to racks, boulders and crucifix.  They bind each other in turns.  Those buried alive are also attended to.  Murmurings of "Tighter! Tighter! Tight enough!" come from the hermit's mouths as they are lassoed to their night posts.  These ordeals are conducted amidst the night fires as an experiment.  The ones most torturously pinned seem to come to their visions directly.  Dusty children from nowhere attend to one, bringing him water and crushed pulp of prickly pear to tie onto old wounds.  I am staring dumbly at the strange array of upthrusted human forms when a boy child takes me by the hand to collect water from a kettle in the rocks above us.  As we approach the kettle we hear the warble of a cactus wren. A group of cliff swallows takes off quickly with beakfuls of mud.   We soak up the water with a piece of cloth and wring it out into a hollow log filled with sand and a grass mesh bottom.  We rinse the sand for a while by torchlight, cleaning the water till it comes out clear, then we pour the liquid into a paunch and carry it back to the hermits.

                I'm staring up at the suspended hermits again.  I am drawn to touch the longest one who is showing his teeth and beginning to dream.  I begin to tell him about my daughter, Zara Carline. That on the day that she disappeared she was stricken by the beauty of the hummingbirdpeople.  She came in early from seeing one with red nectar.  Zara Carline whispered that the hummingbirdpeople were very fast and very still all at once.  That they always stayed upright, and that their wings made tiny figure eights while hovering.  The hermit barely opened one of his left eyes and peered down at me..."They take the nectar and split", he said, then he smiled to himself, almost laughing and went back into a trance.  I hear a female voice coming from the tallest crucifix nearby, she is responding to me...she is saying, "The more nectar, the more spirited, the more spirited, the more nectar."  I look up and see the women disappearing in sections.  So I ask her, "But why is it always red? Why do the hummingbirds like red sweet?"  "They like red sweet because its May Day and the King and Queen are making love in the fields."  Then I am guided away from this place by the hand as if I should not be here. Now it is not a child's hand but the warm hand of Tseya Tindini who tells me his own name. He leads me to the hut of Serafina di Dio.

                She is a giant of a woman, just short of my own height, with deep set eyes and high cheekbones.  From shoulder to foot she is draped in the night blue of the evening sky.  She's got the hair of a hornless ox among her own hair and the skin of a frog on her mantle because a frog is slippery, and the ox, having no horns is hard to catch and she would like to be as hard to hold as the ox and the frog.  Before she begins to weave on her loom she catches a large serpent and holds it in a cleft stick, she strokes the reptile with one hand down the whole length of its back; then she passes the same hand over her forehead and eyes, that she may be able to work as beautiful patterns in the web as the markings on the back of the serpent. 

                Now Tseya Tindini and Serafina di Dio sit me down by the fire and listen to my story.  They ask me questions about the disappearance of Zara Carline.  Some of the questions I can't recognize the reasons.  Was she taken by the dark of the night or by the light of day?  Was she wearing garlands or had she ceased wearing garlands?  What music did she dance to?  Who did she dance with?  The hawkboys or the she-vipers?  As Serafina talks she is tapping lightly with her fingers on my zipper wound.  Then Tseya Tindini excuses himself, he is lapsing into a trance and that state is accompanied by a powerful physical heat which makes us sweat. I do not want to stare at Serafina because little worlds burst free from the tiny beadlets on her skin.  Tseya Tindini was speaking about the magical heat radiating from certain coffins and corpses.  In the midst of the fire he saw Zara Carline seated beside the one-eyed harvester who is driving a hansom into a hole in the earth.  Tseya Tindini described a listless crowd of grey farmhands. "There is a barn, illumined by electricity", he says.  Yes, I agree with him and tell him of my dream.

                "The walls of the barn are painted white." I say, "They are smooth and shining.  In the immensity, there is a needle--fine, pointed, hard, glittering in the light.  The needle in the emptiness fills me with terror.  Then a haystack fills up the emptiness and engulfs the needle.  The haystack, small at first, swells and swells; and in the center, the needle, endowed with tremendous electrical force, communicates its charge to the hay.  The electrical current, the invasion by the hay, and the blinding light combine to bring the fear to a pitch of terror and I wake up screaming, "'The needle!  The needle!'"

                I am instructed to make a fire altar to attract the alliance of the hummingbirdpeople.  I will need them to locate Zara Carline.  Then Serafina di Dio and Tseya Tindini argue a while to determine if the fire ceremony should have three or five parts.  "Three heats come after the semen," he says, "The one that has to do with progeny, one with defense and the third with refreshment."  "Five fires", she says, "three is ascension, four is orientation, and five is orientation for ascension. In the valleys below you must remember orientation for ascension."  "The objective", Serafina says, "is that Didi Lilo Carline should be able to roll herself in fire, hold her hands and feet in fire, submerge herself in boiling water, enter fiery baking ovens, or even, remain immersed in the frosty river for six days without ill effects.  For this she will need five days."  Now I am in a panic.  They don't understand the danger that awaits Zara Carline.  "I will work for three days only," I tell them.  "I have seen my child in danger and I am late."  So it is determined that I will do a five part fire rite in three days.  The fire altar must be layered earth, animal, gold, wood and food.  Shining earth, shining animal, shining inner light, shining wood and fiery food.  As the fires burn fast I am to stay very still.  I am to bring all of my colors to the fire and in this way attract the birds of spirit, the hummingbird people.  They will be my aggressive allies into the nether region.  But there are no hummingbirdpeople for many day's walk from this desert basin.  Tseya Tindini advises me to call them in advance and in this way I may find tracings of them when I reach the nether regions. 

                I begin to plan my escape from this encampment before morning.  I have no time for this fire ritual.  I will call the hummingbirds in my own way as I walk.  So before the three of us take leave for the night, I ask Tseya Tindini about the roads to the birth canal of the spider grandmother. "In a white rock gap there are three separate summits alongside the North Road, these are three overlooks in succession.  The first overlook has ruins atop a low dune, a little bit higher than the sage flats below.  This place 100 meters from the rim of Kutz Canyon.  North and west of this overlook, at the top of a steep-walled badlands pinnacle standing several hundred feet above the floor of the Canyon.  The pinnacle stands near the canyon rim and flanks the North Road to the east where it drops into the canyon below.  Access to the top is dangerous.  The structure hovers 150 meters from where the North Road drops into the Canyon wash.  Below this overlook and further north is a lower one, on top of another isolated butte.  The remains of two rooms connected by a low wall are found here.  Circular rooms will take you down to Kutz Canyon.  Through those rooms you can enter the land where your daughter is buried."

                They warn me of dangers along the way.  They tell me of the Hanovers that stand round the last sheaf and beat it with sticks in order to drive the mother out of it.  The Hanovers call to each other, "There she is! Hit her! Take care she doesn't catch you!" And the dangerous little girls in the district of Bruck, who, each wearing a wreath, strip the puppet, pull it to pieces, and place it on the pyre, along with flowers with which it was adorned.

                In gratitude for their help, I give Tseya Tindini a packet of shining things that I gathered from the antpeople.  I kiss Serafina's hand and she absently taps my arm again.  When I look down at my arm where the zipper wound was left by the centipede, I find that by Serafina's powers the wound has disappeared. 

                I prepare my escape while the hermits are sleeping.  I gather all of the evidence I have left of my daughter and put them in the paunches.  I bind the viper skin, batwings, gravestone rubbings packed in leaves and remains of shining things to carry for good luck.  Then my seed supply for gruel and some fresh coyote pup meat from today that I will need to eat tomorrow.  Before napping I begin to plan my journey through the cool desert that will lead me to spidergrandmother's birth canal. On the way I will perform the fire ceremony in my heart to attract the attention of the hummingbirdpeople.

                When I awaken the moon is high enough and close to full so I can make my escape.  I gather rabbitbrush for fuel on my way, bind it together and tie it to my back.  As I walk I spy a stand of tumblemustard elongating and flowering four feet tall.  Its got a purple fruit and a long slender pod.  But in amongst the tall ones are young and tender leaves and shoots that I eat raw.  I gather the small seeds of the mustards and put them in my pouch for making gruel.  Later there are clusters of prickly pear so I set up an operation to rub off the spines and burn what is left of them.  The barbed bristle spines worth their way in the flesh, sharp-pointed little needles with barbs standing out like fishhooks, don't you work these, my friend, unless your grandmother taught you.  I rub and kindle about fifteen pads and then tie them together and pack them for later.  There won't be much to eat on this walk, the sagebrush stands on higher ground, the salt bush in the basin.  There may be saltgrass and sandhill muhly, there may be ricegrass and sacaton, but not much edible except for moving things and I should save my strength.

                I'm walking in the heat of the morning and I see a white sided jackrabbit explode from its cover like a burst of wild sunlight.  He flashes white then dark, appearing and disappearing into the distance.  The quickening of its light reminds me of the hummingbirdpeople and I begin to erect the fire ceremony in my heart and mind's eye.  "Give me fire O Son of Ahura Mazda" I imitate the mumblings of the desert hermits.  I begin withdrawing the navel to the spine to kindle and increase the inner blaze.  Moss agate on the desert floor tells me that I am walking the cemetery of a prehistoric woodland.  I see into the molybdenite as a hexagonal system, the short tubular prisms, scattered scales and masses.  But these are greasy metal rocks.  I am looking everywhere for glittering metamorphic mineral, like feldspar and mica from silicate melt or the cyclic twins of aragonite with 2 directions of cleavage and glassy luster.

                What I'm building in my mind's eye has a massive foundation, a square stone slab and the fire-container itself.  I take the flameman on a stick from a lighting fire, hold it high and call to all peoples everywhere who are attending fires now.  Royal fires are burning only here and there in Southeast Asian villages or in distant forests.  Cremation fires burn everywhere along the rivers of India.  Behind the river stations caves are glowing warmly with fires of the ascetics.  There are fires of craftsmen, the dyers, fires of the potters, the brick makers, the goldsmiths, the mint masters, the ironsmiths, the armorers, the bakers and the brewers.  The shepherd's fires brighten the valleys and hillsides of Kashmir.  Fires of travelers and soldiers burn east of the Volga River.  As I call to the fire makers I respond by tracing the interior heat that runs through my belly, in my bones, in my heart, head and arms.  My attention is drawn to the minutiae, enzymes wandering around on the surface of the cells.  From ten to the minus 9 and downwards there is an endlessly deep and tinier continuum of reflected motions.  Now I feel light flashing luciferin at the tip of the abdomen.  My entire body is a carapace of lacewinged, netveined creatures.  They are starting slowly with weak, fluttering flight, now speeding faster and lengthening into the form of dragonflies with bulging compound eyes, veined wings, and long, slender abdomens.  They are twisting their wings on the downstroke, making little whirlwinds that move the air much faster over the upper wing surface, reducing the air pressure there and increasing lift.  As fast as they are flying they are molting and leaving cast skin.  And they are copulating mid-air, throughout the hollows and cells of my own body, the male curls the end of his abdomen forward to place a packet of sperm in a cavity underneath, then grasps his mate by her neck with clasping cerci at the tip of his abdomen.  She curls the tip of her abdomen to retrieve the sperm capsule.  When I open my eyes, light plays upon and laughs over the surface of rocks and sagebrush, the heat penetrates.

                Then the call of my child comes through the small fires like the persistent sounding of bells.  It is not my time to succumb to wonder.  I remember how we played the game of the insect orders. I would quiz her about a creature she had encountered on her own.  I would ask..."Were the wings rooflike, sloping downward and outward from the middle of the back?  Were there a pair of pincerlike cerci at the tip of the abdomen?  Did the two pairs of wings differ greatly in structure, the first pair being thick and hard or leather?  Were the antennae long and composed of many segments?"  She delighted in this game and her answers always proved that she had observed well.  Now the landscape before me is covered by a grid.  To quicken her spirit in the nether regions, I send Zara Carline the first flutterings of my delight and blinding colors from my own body.  Along the gridlines, the colored gases flash and stream into a narrow point at the horizon and disappear into a cleft in space.

                Up ahead I see the white rock gap with three separate summits.  I light a fire from the rabbitbrush and chew on coyote meat and the pulp of the cactus for strength.  I climb the first overlook with ruins atop a low dune, a little bit higher than the sage flats below.  From there I see the rim of Kutz Canyon.  The rest of the walk took many hours and is hazy in my mind.  I know that as I walked I whispered to the fires continuously, "Oh living flame of love, I am burning...I am burning..." and as I offered a goat, I began to see mirages...First I saw the boy's wrath go down, the one engaged in slaughter during the cattle raid.  I saw Shiva's consort angrily throw a firepot at a seductive demon.  I was enraged by the red lips of an Ethiopian man blocking my passage and threw a left hook at him.  Then a voice from the sky inside my heart tells me I am not far from my destination and to remember that the living land is ecstasy.

                25

                All of this happened  after I tried to climb the eroded pinnacle that stands near the canyon rim and flanks the North Road to the East where it drops into the canyon below.  I may have fallen to my death near the top of the pinnacle.  For I saw other things that should not have been in the desert basin amongst the salt bush and sage.  There were two wheat fields on opposite sides of the road. One field was with waist high, large, full, firm heads.  The other field, ankle high, was badly infested with a virus.  I began to examine the sick field for the source of the virus and fell into a hollowed anthill.

                Then things began to happen very quickly and slowly at once.                                                                                    

                Nothing shines there.  Sounds in low range.  Slow frequency signals were monitored along the walls.  I found myself in a dingy motel corridor.  There were doors leading to corridors, leading to doors, leading to corridors for many miles.  Then suddenly the corridor opened into a hospital, a sterile and barren interior.  I remember the odors of outgassing carpets and furniture.  The clocks were loud and so were the buzzers.  Sanitizing sprays from the walls and ceiling spichots.  The nurses didn't recognize me.  I stared at them in the nurse's station but they didn't register or smile.  I looked down at my own lower parts to see if I was invisible.  It reminds me of the time when I was a farmhand drowned by a raccoon, and unwittingly dead, I found my way back to the farmhouse where no one recognized me at all.  So I spoke to them, "Is something wrong here?"  And they responded, "Not that I can tell." So I said, "There is no warmth here.  No one has their lights on." No response.  The people were dense like blondish grey oxen.  I began to grow angry.  Now male nurses were coming for me.  They wanted to gas me down in the back stall.  I could see it all before it occurred.  "Gas me down?" I asked.  "Where I come from that has bad connotations."  They assured me it was just a sanitary measure.  "No thank-you. I like dirt, even filth.  If you've got eyes in your heads you can see strange order that lives there.  And since I am nearly two feet taller than the biggest of you and five times stronger than three of you combined, I know you will honor my preferences."  "Is there any warmth?", I asked.  "Will you help me to another place? I am looking for a one-crop farm run by a one-eyed farmer."  I realize I am wandering the endless corridors of a psychiatric hospital.  The spirited kids wear strait jackets and read textbooks.  Their eyes bulge in their heads from unused life.  Some people I know from the Middle Ages, and several from Constantinople are sitting in a substandard motel lobby decorated by artificial flowers reciting the twelve steps.  "This place is horrible! Who is in charge here?"  The nurses responded that I could take my complaints and write them in a letter to Chairman Kyle Rudolph... The only alternative they could offer as temporary respite from this mental hospital was a shopping mall, where they sell everything I could ever want or need.  "Oh yeah? Do they have mock moons for sale?  How about sigillarian?  Fossil trees of the Paleozoic age?  Do they have Spikenard?  Paradise grackle?  How about the offspring of a white person and an octoroon?  Do they have paragaster and pixie stools for sale?  Do they have jambu in the mall?  Scatches?  Stilts for walking in dirty places?"  In an instant I was there, and I was pleased at what I found. After years of wandering through fluorescent corridors and cubicles for standing, sitting and lying down, my nervous system was livened by the colors and displays and I wanted many products for myself.  Connected to the mall was an old folk's home.  The wise ones are forced to sit in lawn chairs along the length of the motel corridor.  If they are lucky they can make flower arrangements from artificial flowers.  If they are good they can make baskets out of popsickle sticks.  They have fluorescent cubes where they can stand up or lie down.  The fiercest grandmother with eyes ablaze in her sockets from all she has seen had been forgotten in her bed for 11 days.  "Don't worry", they said, "She is watching TV."  So now I want to watch TV.  On the television I see my own daughter in a field of wheat, holding a single ear of corn. She seems to be holding on for dear life.  it is a red corn.  A sweet red corn.  it is a pomegranate.  Then something horrifies me.  The prospect of her eating from this anti-garden.  I lunge forward to stop her.  I am too late.  The juice stains her lips.  Then her lips are the only visible red for hundreds of miles.  Pressed forward to find her I find myself in an elementary school with pictures of the presidents hung on the walls. Every president from every time is exactly the same, Kyle Rudolph, wearing different suits. Passing the classrooms I hear a song; the children are having a singing lesson.  I stop to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling comes over me. I no longer recognize the school, it had become as large as a barracks; the singing children are prisoners, compelled to sing.  It is  as though the school and the children's song were set apart from the rest of the world.  At the same time my eye encounters a field of wheat whose limits I can not see.  The yellow vastness, dazzling in the sun, bound up with the song of the children imprisoned in the smooth stone school-barracks, fills me with such anxiety that I break into sobs.  In Principal Kyle Rudolph's office, the room becomes enormous, illuminated by a dreadful electric light that casts false shadows.  Everything is exact, smooth, artificial, extremely tense; the chairs and tables seem models placed there and there.  Pupils and teachers are puppets revolving without cause, without objective.  I recognize nothing, nobody.  It is as though reality has slipped away from all these things and these people.  I hear people talking but don't grasp the meaning of the words.  The voices are metallic, without warmth or color.  From time to time, a word detaches itself from the rest.  It repeats itself over and over in my head, absurd, as though cut off by a knife.  And when one of the schoolmates came toward me, I see her grow larger and larger, like the haystack, with the needle.

                I am told the only respite from this school is a highrise office building, forty-five storeys into the sky.  Before I can protest I am ascending its length in an elevator.  In the office building, the people wearing different colors and enclosed in glass reminds me of a giantbirdcage.  When I spot the hummingbird on an office worker's desk, I remember, after forty days and nights of wandering, to call to the hummingbirdpeople.  So at night, when just a few people are working, I begin to search for elements to make a fire altar.  I don't see much to burn except for tall stacks of papers which are on the desks and in the file drawers.  I slink around the corridors and into the empty offices looking for shining objects to steal for the altar.  I find a boiler room.  I like the machinery in the boiler room because it is shiny.  Little flames are hiding here and there amongst the shining there is warmth.  I make my altar in the boiler room with a large foundation, a secondary slab and the receptacle for burning.  The whole process takes me two or three human days.

                Now I don't look like the  rest of the office workers.  I am four feet taller than the largest of them.  I wear animal skins and my body is slaked in the white ash of cow dung and red powder.  (For the fire ceremony I've got forehead marks enclosing a red line between cooling, controlling red stripes.)  Also I am whispering to myself words the office workers seldom hear, the words of the desert hermits, "Oh, living flame of love, I am burning, I am burning."  So one the third day, when I am caught off guard by an executive wandering the halls, I fly into a panic but this panic is good because it sets the firestorm in motion.  As he seizes my arms I call out to the office workers to empty their file cabinets and their desks of papers and feed the sacred fires of love.  They know exactly what I

mean, and before we find our way to the boiler room, the lot of them are stirring into a frenzy of motion, sacrificing legal contracts and marketing reports for fuel.  Everyone becomes giddy with it.  There is great delight and laughter and the rapid movement of colors.  Now I am burning up.  Beads of sweat cover our faces and in this sacred sweat are hidden little worlds.  So I am yelling, somehow out of control, "Oh living flame of love, I am burning, I am burning..." And everyone is laughing and emptying their file cabinets into the fires in the boiler rooms.  The gestures of the office workers alone ignite subtle fires of great excitation and colors fly free from the worker's mouths when they express their joy. Then a messenger comes shouting with a great report.  The skyscrape is surrounded with bats and hummingbirds of all colors and varieties but there is no way for them to come inside, there are no windows that open to the air.

                I remember the methods of the Bat and Lizardpeople and begin to chirp batlike toward the walls for opening.  I use my infrared eyes to detect the superheated gashes in space.  My chirping calls on the batpeople and they come and surround the office building.  The hummingbirds are more cautious and seemingly endless hoard of bats enters first, covering the interior of the offices and the business suits of office working women and men in layers upon layers of bat guano. 

                Before long, the interior space of the building is demolished, no longer recognizable, Agni altars everywhere burning against small mountain ranges of bat guano thick with sweet insects, iridescent skeletons, scavenged by the hummingbirdpeople.  The skyscraper is filled with the lights of the agni fires.  I mean lively because the voices of the spirit world are spoken by the fiery salamander people. There is a street below, it's my first glimpse of the metallic canyons outdoors.  Bewildered crowds stare upward at the fire altars that are filling the windows, and swarms of bats and hummingbirds are hovering, pressing each other to get inside.  The other blaze lives in the eyes of the office workers manic almost demonic with ecstasy.  First they are sweating little worlds kindling then bursting free from the beadlets, then the executives and secretaries are covered head to foot in bat guano.  How bothersome at first, frightening even, till the swarming of ruby-throated, green-helmetted and black-chinned whirlybirds festoon them seeking insects stuffed with nectar.  This makes them giddy, the office workers, and in the heat of their divine inspiration, the younger ones offer snippets of their own hair and blood from their lips to the needfires seeking to kindle and rekindle... They are emptying file cabinets and desks full of papers to feed the fires...

                The brown bat needs the open air to hunt for food and the hummingbird likewise has to forage continuously to stay alive. I worry about finding our way out of here to assure the survival of my precious allies.

                Any time I worry at all the brain shifts.  The excitement and concern brings the frequency selectivity of the spiral ganglion cells to quivering extremely high within the key range of 61.0 to 61.5 kilohertz.  Again I'm blinded and cannot hear my own cries... the membrane is stimulated by the echoes but poorly stimulated by my own vocalizations.  My chirping brings back the shadowgraphs of torpid hummingbirds which appear dead and frozen to the perch.  They cannot fly, cry out or function normally.  My heart races and I am sweating so that the infrared lobes and pouches appear on human bodies and suspended in space.  The infrared is confounded with shortwave.  From a pirate ship off Magnitogorsk I hear men reporting the details of a naval rescue mission.  These gashes in space are the portals through which I will lead the bats, the hummingbirds and the festooned office people, our army, into the next world.  This is how the corridors from one nether world to another are opened, by the spinning and looping of infrared, shortwave, and echolocation.  But now the chaos doesn't confound me, I recognize it as a friend. I now know that as I wander through this strange threshold to the next, the sickening aversion to otherness, the vertigo turns to bemusement then pleasure, then new patterns are recognized.  The River Styx will begin to stream like the sunlit chloroplasts swarm around the cells of the desert grasses and I will find the entry to the land where my daughter reigns as Queen.

                First day outdoors in a little long time.  And the startling glimpses of what I see before me is as beautiful as anything I have ever seen before.  I meet "the-animated-one-suspended-repeatedly", also known as the "Hummingbirdman".  The Hummingbirdman introduced himself and said he would help us as our war leader.  He told us that in this underworld we must make sounds that make the body holy.  We rub our hands through the flints lying in the ceremonial basket to make the rattle.  Then the Hummingbirdman rubbed coyote and badger ear wax on my ears and under my eyes to enable me to hear acutely and to see into the future.  He ordered the other hummingbirds to bring beeweed sauce to feed us and give us beads that tinkle like little bells to wear around our necks.  Our work was to quicken the land of the dead with spirit fires, high frequency sound and fast moving colors.  There would be unbearable chaos in this battle as the shadow folk worked to swarm the living flames that worked to kindle the shadow folk.  The main thing was to feel love in our hearts amidst the chaos of the firestorms.

                Through the gashes we all enter to find a greyland where nothing shines.  The plains are covered with wheat that is likewise grey and not shiny.  For as far as the eyes can see, thousands of women and children are working the fields.  There are no sounds of birds, no winds, the air is stagnation and deathly quiet except for the occasional sound of a child or woman coughing. The only relation between the farmhands is inaudible brutality that erupts to the surface in an instant as insults or the flashing of teeth.  This tiny evidence of anger reassures me that there is fire here.  A child comes to us and offers food.  As we have been warned not to eat it, we take out a small quantity of our own food, which we mix in our own bowls.  The child has a large, strangely shaped head and small eyes, she is precocious. She is counting railings and how many steps to take before the mounds end and the trenches begin.  She shows us the ley of the land.  "This is the place in the sky where the cornfield opens and the swine fall in."  She shows us the monstrous haystacks and then the sinister barn.  She smiles, "These are the barns where cows give blood instead of milk.  It's for serum."  Recognizing the barn, I run inside before she can stop me to search for Zara Carline.  Then the Hummingbirdman intercepts me.  He tells me that no matter what happens I will spend the entire battle with him.  He instructs me to stop working for a while.  It seems the nature of my work here is to feel and radiate an increasing amplitude of pleasure.

                The battle starts suddenly with a war cry.  The office workers begin to run everywhere setting the fields and the haystacks on fire.  The hummingbirds alight on the grey people causing a frenzy of swatting that bloodies and reddens them.  This is good, I think. The fires of fury will set the entire nether world on fire.  The fire salamanders begin their song in unison, "Living in a cell, celliculous... Living in a nest, nidiculous...Living in

a barn, ridiculous."  This reminds the people to run toward the countryside and free the horses and cows from their stalls, the chickens from their coops, and the pigs from their metal box contraptions.  The animals become our war allies.  They trample and storm the man-made distortions. 

                The gray men look terrible with striped faces.  When subdued they become yellow jackets.  The hummingbirds try to stop their indefinite evils, harmful tracers buried in their words that come forth buried in the bodies of stinging bumblebees.  Unpersuadable.  Gray is the color of lack of control.  They look fearsome like yellowjackets, gray bees and spider ants.  From the midst of them comes the gray god with long, yellow hair.  He has one eye and his name is Kyle Rudolph.

                On seeing Kyle Rudolph for the first time I am seized with fury.  "What on earth has happened to my daughter?"  The Hummingbirdman stops me with a gesture, then he instructs all hummingbirds, bats and office people to continuously whisper the words I heard in the desert of the hermits... "What is this which gleams through me and strikes my heart without hurting it and I shudder and I kindle?"  The warriors sing this as they ignite the landscape with little fires.  They empty their pockets of shining things as offerings.  The fire altars are layers of shining earth, shining animal, shining gold, wood and food.  Like dust devils, our allies are uttering sounds that make the body holy.

                The battle lasted for seven days and seven nights.  I was not allowed to ask what happened to Kyle Rudolph.  I was not allowed to ask after my daughter.  Throughout the duration of the battle I was seduced and adored by the exquisite attentions of the Hummingbirdman.  It was our work to produce an increasing amplitude of pleasure and send it to the sores.  I dreamed of him when I was Zara Carline's age, and the dream was so vivid, I told it many times to the children.

                In my dream, the Hummingbirdman was a performer of poetry, who could become a dramatic transparent outline.  I mean he could disappear except for a human outline that he made to his liking.  He embodied the dramatic thing that combines the sinister one with the angel.  And his outline could appear high in the room.  He could also appear flatward on any given surface.  I saw him as a daring artist flier.  He had completely covered a cliff side with small, shining blue gemstones.  He was adorned like a circus acrobat and at the conclusion of his labors he would fly off the blue cliff side into the sea.  This man was, paradoxically, a shy man, so this performance was for an audience of two, his close companions.  He had decided on the act before we could stop him and so he flew downward into very shallow water and then reappeared on this back embedded in seashore mud.  We rushed to embrace him, he was shocked but o.k. 

                On the seventh day we were informed by the lieutenant girl that the cords were broken and the umbilicus stoppered that had been  funneling vital fluids into a vat for deadly gods.  The Hummingbirdman and I were cackling on our richly arrayed bedding and feeling the first stirrings of natural sunlight across our limbs and loins.  From the side of my eye I saw the silhouette of my giant daughter dressed in gemstones and wearing and crown.  She was smiling at me with so much warmth and sweetness.  And now she was more than a child but a Queen.  "What on earth are you doing, Mother?"  "Put on your red dress, sweetheart.  It's May Day and the King and Queen are making love in the fields."  Then she lay down beside me and we held hands for awhile, with our foreheads together, crown touching crown.