On Kubla Khan
By Deirdre Maultsaid
I dream about a barefoot woman with braided hair in a long sleeveless green nightgown standing in the dale in the sunshine, near willow trees, beckoning me to climb ancient marble stairs away from the lake, leave it, leave them, for, nearby, floating in the lily pads are dead bodies, faces caved in, skin mottled and in the ceaseless seething sloshing sunless water, at the marshy grass shore, they rise and sink again, while horror churns in my chest—beware!— and I jerk away but the woman near the willow doesn’t know about the terrible seething, so I follow her and when we arrive at a wide sunny verandah, I smell mint and lemon and pause at the set table where waits an avocado, halved and sacred, on an ornate white plate and I
Time shivers and judders
Wounded shapes lunge from chasms
I have no weapon
The woman sits, gently pulls up her green nightgown— now teal, now silvery, now cream, a floating marquee—and smiles and says in her throaty voice that it is a delightful afternoon and with the thick braid glossy over her shoulder and small rare freckles on her open thighs and her consent enduring, the woman ensouls me and I am a bell pealing and I am a rill trilling and I understand my own secret: I need to kiss those freckles as my heart unwraps and greener dreams unfurl and yet, where am I? what?— I was a lonely child, a clock ticking in a dim room, the horror of empty days— wait, now something is shadowed and lurking, something rumbles and sizzles just out of sight and it is wrong and oh, I feel such holy dread, and also pity for her but she is fey and in the garden I write to her, my new lover, letters on thick, creamy paper, edged in vines, which I have pulled like a vision from an unfamiliar bag at my feet, devoted letters that croon, letters that pant yes, oh yes, stately letters that say, Dearest, I wish to sire a moss child with you and I
Time riots and flares
Oh, beware, her flaming braid
I write on old ash.
The end
Maultsaid, D. (2024). She is devoted/but then time riots/and. Impossible Archetype (15), March, 2024. p. 46. https://impossiblearchetype.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/impossible-archetype-issue-15-1.pdf