Beautiful Soon Enough

Imprint

Imprint There is a story that is told in the Pacific nights, about the goddess of fire, when she was pursued by an overeager king. He was a conqueror, and she didn’t want to be conquered. She hid inside a cave in the depths of her earth, red with tarnish, its walls of sculpted flame points, silver-long and giant; at the end of a sixty-three mile lava tube that skewed from the moon-scaped mounts of her island to the cooler sea. And there, the one who was fire, made fire, made the 160 berdeshevsky lava, was its river—left her imprint on the floor of her hardened flow. She crouched in her inner world, and she stooped there to plant love like a graffito: an imprint, ancient, raw, the flying vulva of the deity of all fires. She left her sign of womanhood, and nothing else there. She didn’t want his chase, there. But she liked visitors. • The creature stretches and shows her breasts, nipples the shade of eggplants. She shakes a mantle of persimmon curls, her digits are fire-singed; one of her legs is also a hand, she uses it to stroke her own shape—as if to say, I like me. Don’t you? The visitor sees it almost immediately. Sprawled and iridescent on a jagged rock by the tide. And it winks at her, tongue licking at the sun, like a lizard. The visitor settles, mimic-sprawls on an adjacent flat stone, at home in the presence of divinity. She doesn’t stare. But she feels the fire, how its skin ripples like a single muscle. The visitor is being observed, acknowledged by a nod, a trill in the water and in the wind around their two rocks. She lets her own thin fingers trail the ocean-sheen, gathers it like moving mercury, in her cupping hand. The she-creature mimics her. Quick-shifts. Is the fire now, is more like a lizard, and still woman, too. White ash, for hair. Dazzling. There’s a short branch in her lizard-hand, fashioned to help her to rise gracefully. She lifts it. —So so so. Tell me who you are. The visitor has come to an island to become honest. —I don’t know. —So that’s good. That’s good. So so so. What do you have to eat? She’s looking at the meager picnic dregs, an emptied water bottle. The visitor knows she has nothing left to offer. And the lizard has vanished. imprint 161 • And it appears and disappears, everywhere, unannounced. There are no more questions, and it’s early for replies. Sometimes, the “she” only stands there, stroking. A temptress. Sometimes, she is old. Sometimes, as though she might actually touch the observer with a dark and slow hand, singed fingers—she doesn’t. With a camouflaged hand that has trailed through the vines, and matches them— sometimes, she is a promise, and a possible friend. The island lives in its own passionate spectacle. Volcanic. It thrives and cracks, and preens, and shimmies, spills, and rains in flame. Destroys , and goes back to sleep. The visitor is never unaware of it. How it is watching her. Waiting for her. She stays longer and longer on an island she’s beginning to worship. She loves its black stones, those tiny, godly faces she finds in them. Loves the rain that tastes of fungus and salt and smoke. Loves the unseen, and its whispers. She stands like a lone heron on promontories of cooled lava, winds at her scalp. She begins to leave invented offerings: a meal, gathered; a garland of weeds; a dead redfish , cleaned. She loves the nights, their frightening number of stars. On nights with no moon, she finds beaches where she wants to bathe alone and naked in the late hours just before total darkness; only a small distance from shark beds in the deeper water. In daylight, she finds rainforests where water drums the leaves, where she likes to rest beside rolled ferns, their uncoiling center stems, like slender penises . They make her smile. She’s sleepwalking; and sometimes she’s awake. She settles in to a place where she can smell the new earth forming . She likes to sleep on the ground, she thinks that it breathes. At night there are a thousand crickets, and the mallet-headed small brown owls...