Body touches body. How sweet the spread of loosened bodies in the coil of sleep, but a gold-black thread is between them. An owl calls deep in the wood.
Can you see through the night, woman, that you stare so upon it? Man, what sparks do your eyes follow in the smouldering darkness?
She stirs. Again the owl calling. She rises. Foot after foot as a panther treads, through the door -- a minute more and the fringes of her goat-skin are brushing the bushes. She pushes past brambles, the briars catch little claws in her goat-skin. And he who watches? As the tent-lap flaps back, he leaps. The bearer of the white sword leaps, and follows her. Blur of moonshine before -- behind. He walks by the light of a green-oil oath, and the full moon floats above them both.
Seeded grass is a pool of grey. Ice-white, cloud-white, frosted with the spray of the sharp-edged moon. Croon -- croon -- the wind in the feathered tops of the grass. They pass -- the witch-white woman with the gold-black heart, the flower-white woman -- and his eyes startle, and answer the bow curve of her going up the hill.
The night is still, with the wind, and the moon, and an owl calling.
On the sea side of a hill where the grass lies tilted to a sheer drop down, with the sea splash under as the waves are thrown upon a tooth of rock. Shock and shatter of a golden track, and the black sucking back. The draw of his breath is hard and cold, the draw of the sea is a rustle of gold.
Behind a curl of granite stone the man lies prone. The woman stands like an obelisk, and her blue-black hair has a serpent whisk as the wind lifts it up and scatters it apart. Witch-heart, are you gold or black? The woman stands like a marble tower, and her loosened hair is a thunder-shower twisted across with lightnings of burnt gold.
Naked and white, the matron moon urges the woman. The undulating sea fingers the rocks and winds stealthily over them. She opens the goat-skin wide -- it falls.
The walls of the world are crashing down, she is naked before the naked moon, the Mother Moon, who sits in a courtyard of emerald with six black slaves before her feet. Six -- and a white seventh who dances, turning in the moonlight, flinging her arms about the soft air, despairingly lifting herself to her full height, straining tiptoe away from the slope of the hill.
Witch-breasts turn and turn, witch-thighs burn, and the feet strike always faster upon the grass. Her blue-black hair in the moon-haze blazes like a fire of salt and myrrh. Sweet as branches of cedar, her arms; fairer than heaped grain, her legs; as grape clusters, her knees and ankles; her back as white grapes with smooth skins.
She runs through him with the whipping of young fire. The desire of her is thongs and weeping. She is the green oil to his red flame. He peers from the curl of granite stone. He hears the moan of the crawling sea, and sees -- as the goat-skin falls so the flesh falls....
And the triple Heaven-wall falls down, and the Mother Moon on a ruby throne is near as a bow-shot above the hill.
Goat-skin here, flesh-skin there, a skeleton dancing in the moon-green air, with a white, white skull and no hair. Lovely as ribs on a smooth sand shore, bright as quartz-stones speckling a moor, long and narrow as Winter reeds, the bones of the skeleton. The wind in the rusty grass hums a funeral-chant set to a jig. Dance, silver bones, dance a whirligig in a crepitation of lust. The waves are drums beating with slacked guts. Inside the skeleton is a gold heart striped with black, it glitters through the clacking bones, throwing an inverted halo round the stamping feet.
Scarlet is the ladder dropping from the moon. Liquid is the ladder -- like water moving yet keeping its shape.
The skeleton mounts like a great grey ape, and its bones rattle; the rattle of the bones is the crack of dead trees bitten by frost. The wind is desolate, and the sea moans.
But the ruby chair of Mother Moon shudders, and quickens with a hard fire. The skeleton has reached the last rung. It melts and is absorbed in the burning moon. The moon? No moon, but a crimson rose afloat in the sky. A rose? No rose, but a black-tongued lily. A lily? No lily, but a purple orchid with dark, writhing bars.
Trumpets mingle with the sea-drums, scalding trumpets of brass, the wind-hum changes to a wail of many voices, the owl has ceased calling.
- "White sword are you thirsty?
- I give you the green blood of my heart.
- I give you her white flesh cast from her black soul.
- Thunderer,
- Vengeful and cruel Father,
- God of Hate,
- The skins of my eyes have dropped,
- With fire you have consumed the oil of my heart.
- Take my drunken sword,
- Some other man may need it.
- She was sweeter than red figs.
- O cursed God!"
More Amy Lowell Short Stories
