Bull: Poppy: Star

a prose poem

BULL : POPPY: STAR

by Sylvia V. Linsteadt © 2018, Hedgespoken Press

At the heart of her darkness is a bull with eyes of star. 

O earth, why is he trapped, why is he caged there at the dark’s deepest point, why is he full of such unholy hunger, why does his hunger threaten to shake the city to the ground?

Before he was caged, before she was the daughter of a king, they danced. Only later did such desire knot them. At the beginning it freed them, for there is a sacrifice older than kings, and there is a love affair older than all the bright-haired heroes, and there is a darkness in the folds of a woman and a red thread to take you there. 

You think his hunger could destroy a city. But you have not seen hers. All the cities in the world are not safe from it.

Ariadne awoke on the island of Dia, only a woman, alone. What she thought she wanted had turned to sand and shell in her hands.  The sea made the sound of weeping. Her hair moved as seaweed, as moon. Where are you my love, she cried. Where are you my husband, my father, my mother? But it was she who had gone, not they, she who had carried her thread into the darkness, so that the structures of her life might be undone. I am not your daughter, she had cried into that darkness before him, as if to summon this undoing. I am the moon’s daughter. I am my own. I am unworthy, I am dirty, I am afraid. 

Bull of primordial labyrinths, belt of honey, how desire dashes through my lower bones with your broad hand. 

They danced garlanded in poppy, clematis, the spired asphodel. They danced the dark path, the spiraled way to the black center. At the bucranium they came home to loss and to desire. In poppy smoke, a dervish, she spoke the moon’s far side, and all the hollows being born. He danced in the darkness too. His mask was the bull’s mask, and only a cloth around his heavy sex. His dark arms were ochre-painted: of labrys, V, meander. His horns grazed the ceiling. His eyes through the mask burned on her. Even the Mistress of the Labyrinth could not resist that look. 

 Especially she, for it was she whose desire he was made for, and she for his. When she cried out, lifted her aconite skirts, and surrendered to the chase, the wildness they knew could have split the stones—stroking, seizing, running in blood and lust through the dark pathways, always just ahead, just beyond his hands, until they had run their fire through every turning. Then at the axis she fell like a flower, opening, and he filled her to the dark side of the moon, pressed to earth, so that what rocked through them was given there, to ground. A ripple into ether, into ghost, into seed.
 
There is a girl becoming a woman at the labyrinth’s dark center. There is a woman becoming a girl, and a man falling in love with what he is forbidden, with what he has so long feared there in the cleft where it was once worshipped: the way light slips from a woman’s darkness: scent of root, scent of salt, lost star. 

Red poppy seeds are scattered across the bedside of the warrior who lost her; red poppy seeds are hot in the hands of the bull-king who loved her but feared his body would never be good enough to hold her until morning, into daylight. The world came to call him monster and no longer lord of horn and green. He believed the world, though she would have him believe only in the dance, in her seagreen eyes, in the beauty of his rough face, telling him across all of time I would have you, my bull-king, my gentle warrior.

O earth, she cried into the night when she lost him, into the dark, into her body’s deepest place— give me his heavy hands, give me his fear, give me his sorrow, give me the place where he is lost, and I will keep them, I will carry them across ten thousand years and every life I will try to give back to him his oldest name, as he will give me mine. I will show him the place his fear carries his courage, I will touch his sorrow into the longing he forgot, for the dance on the stones in the garden under the acacia trees and the rockrose blooms, that dance of falling in love, which is not the same as the labyrinth dance in the dark, in the underworld, but hitched to it—not the dance of gods but the dance of mortals. 

Remember: how your body went into my body in the dance under the trees. Your arms circled my waist like I was no more than a sheaf of poppies, and I opened red and slender to you just like such a stem, and that dance was better still than any other time or dance, for the green, for the seed, for the light, for the wind, how your fullness remembered me to seabeds, to dream, and you saw the oldest name of the moon in the ardent shine of my nipples, in the sweat at the root of my throat, in the wild plump of my haunch under the sun, under your plunging hands. You were big and golden in me, curved to the right like a crescent; I was small and sweet and furred as the poppy pod around you, and as hot inside as the vestal fires of my foremothers.

But he thought he was not good enough. He thought he would do her harm. He was bad, bitter as beer and she like the peach, so sweet, a juice he could not bear to put his mouth on again, not that way, that final time, because it would undo him, though he touched and recognized the pendant at her throat, the triangle and crescent, ancient seal of the wild she had always been, her hair everywhere and no, he couldn’t breathe but neither could he weep, not knowing why but remembering beneath remembering beneath the world. Across ten thousand years do not forget me.    

[.….]

© Sylvia V. Linsteadt 2018, published by Hedgespoken Press

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To read the full poem (just a few paragraphs longer but with the story's concluding twist), published in a beautiful little red book by Hedgespoken Press, please email me at sylvia.linsteadt@gmail.com to be put on the waitlist for one of the last remaining copies!