64.

The Family

What does it mean to have come home, but to have entered the place where a man lives, to have pierced skin and found red desire that lingers, to know that love is salve and salvation. Family is all that the house may hold. Blessings on he who enters.

In that house laid out in a circle of rooms, gods and goddesses wove their magic, lighting tapers of beeswax and reading books. The glow of candles had bronzed their skin. I flow in as if in dream. A yellow leaf falls in the reflecting pool and shatters. The sounds of the gods' names are music.

“Enter me,” cried Isis. “I shall make you god.” Enchantress and wife, she stamps and spins. She raises her arms to dance. From her armpits rises a hot perfume that fills the sails of boats along the Nile. She stirs breezes that make the sailors swoon and opens the eyes of statues. Under her spell, I come to myself; under her body I come to life. Dawn breaks through the diaphanous weave of her dress. She dances and draws down heaven. Sparks scatter from her heels and on earth tumbles forth an expanse of stars. I take her arms. I taste her lips. I lose myself in beauty and chaos. To love is to believe in goddesses.

“Follow me,” said Anubis. “We'll go a road few men have walked.” In dark corridors we pass, a pair of jackals black as the black around us. We are beastly forms made beautiful in moonlight, beheld by gods, healed by gods' eyes, held up by the air streaming from their nostrils. Together we are twilight and dawn. I am the left eye and he is the right. Beneath the old man's eyebrows we make a fine sight, beholding things gods have made. The world is a body of light and its forehead a peaceful kingdom. Here we live in states of grace.

With three fingers I raise myself unto clouds. I ride the back of a mountain, and looking down see cities of stone, cities of clay, cities of clouds, cities unimaginable. I heard the words that shatter crystal. My language is shot through with the speech of gods. My tongue curls over words not my own. I am filled by the great god who walks fair paths, filling the roadside with song. Vultures pick at the flesh of a man fallen. Flowers grow. The mule follows the furrow straight along beneath his feet, crushing bones and flowers.

“Look,” cried Nephthys, leaning out the window. Outside night falls in soundless clumps. “Do you hear the falcons that cry above golden fields? Do you see rats jumping over rocks? Do you feel the silver cord hung about your neck? I am the sibyl, the sayer of secrets, voice of hidden things. I am blind until the moment I see through another soul's eyes. I am the cup of the lotus opening.” She shines before me, sister of the dark, speaking dreams clothed in flesh. Nephthys, I turn round and round behind you. You are siren and friend and sorrower. We see what was never seen before. “I am light,” she said. “I am the white, the infinite, the veil of brilliance. Give me your hand, brother, and we'll walk in spectral gardens. I shall lighten the valley.”

Two candles dance upon the wick, filling the walls with shadow. I spin and dive through smoke. I repel the scorpion, the rat, the snake. I embrace the hair of your head. I come to raise order from chaos, to bind darkness with light. The shadows of history I smash to pieces. I change and change and change. I am the things left undone, words unsaid, hearts untouched, seeds unplanted. Look, at the shadow against the wall. It moves as you do. Its hands are yours. Clap them. Stamp your feet. Make your shadow dance. Is the dark all you have to fear?

Dreams. Dreams. All are dreams.

The east window fills with light. A thrush flies in and rests on the sill. Dew on his throat, songs on his throat, scarlet blood on his throat, he knows who he is. The sky has shaped his vision. He finds some nut or bug to eat, something to love, something to sing about.

The west window holds a dying flame. A swallow darts through shadows, catching moths, circling the orange glow of candles. Night rides in on her back. In her mouth lies the berry of god-thought, desire folded into her wings. She swoops, she dives in dark dreams, but perfect in darkness. The eye of a goddess opens and closes.

I stand before myself, a man of thoughts and bones and shadows. Before I was, I was the air I breathed today, the dirt I stood on; I was yesterday's sunset. Before I was born of woman, I lay curled in the egg of the world. I was dust, a fine powder of thought settling over the brown feet of women, the hooves of donkeys. I was the thought of myself sunning amid rocks and grasses. I greet myself on the right—that gentleman with a few hairs on his chest, the thought of his mother clinging in some far corner of his mind. To my left stands he who was his grandfather's song, who will be the aroma of his great granddaughter's bread. I am the world, a porous layer of skin, a drop of water, a reality. Out of the marshes I rose, the first flower of the papyrus. I am where I begin and end. When a fish leaps from water to water, in that moment of arc, he is a creature of air. So am I leaping from thought to thought, this life to that. So am I what I love.

I am a great, yellow, stalking cat—mesmerizer, healer, companion—tender and fierce, a beast of fur that blinks. I know what I know in my body. I hold the rat in my golden gaze. I lick the dust from my kittens. I am everywhere alert and at ease. I wait in the moment, no longer flesh and fur, but the fact of a thing that waits, patient and anonymous as stone. The air is my skin and can not divide heaven from you, you from me, me from myself. We are two eyes aligned in a single vision. I am cat: pounce, paws and all. I am Mau, what I call myself. I am sun and dust, whiskers, milk and fur.

Bright, white Osiris stands, the perfume of lotus in a reflecting pool. He hovers about me, a question in search of answer. He bends his back to the plough, bends his head to the book, peers through the veil. I am his other one, the mover about of his bones, his fire. “Rise up,” I shout. “There is work to do, fields to plow, mules to beat, goddesses to kiss. There are channels to fill with quick water, life to pour through the desert to make gardens bloom. There is air to breathe and I am the glad hairs of your nose. There are manure and sand to haul and long roads to walk where herbs sprout along the riverbank and lovers kiss unseen in the wind-carved cradle of rock. I'll take you where gazelles leap and lions follow in your shadow. I can show you the world in a kernel of wheat.”

In the damp room waits a boy, dark-eyed, skin golden as sand, lips as red as pomegranate, eyebrows fine as a courtesan's. “I am Mestha, son of Horus, child of greening things,” he said. “I am Mestha come to shake this house forever. I am the child becoming the man who will fill these rooms with grandchildren. I will raise com and tell the young boys stories. I'll build houses and orchards and grape arbors. And when, as a bee, you come into my fields, I'll not chase you away, but smile and say: ‘Look, children! Here flies your grandfather. Bless him, he always did love the vine.’ I am Mestha, that which is the self, the personality, the soul of the man within the beast.”

I enter the room where the ape child sits. Out of a sack he holds tumble blood and bones, viscera, arms and legs, backbones, hair and eyes—all the parts of a man, all my broken self. Out of chaos comes a life lived once, or perhaps only its possibility. The head rolls about the floor. Its eyes open, blink twice. Seeing himself in disarray, he pulls himself together by will or the mind, perhaps by love. He becomes himself, forms himself from the bits scattered around him. “I am Hapi, the thousand raindrops becoming river, the thousand days that make the memory. I recall a day when the sun shown full upon you—you were at the height of your powers—and you lifted me up, swinging, and carried me home to mother. You drove scorpions and snakes from the house at night. You built a house where every room opened onto sunrise. I am that child of your memory, and after you were gone, these thoughts lay with your bones. I recalled and reshaped you daily. You lived in me and I spoke your name in the memory of others and so we lived together day after day: a memory, a man, a name.”

I come to the room where the sun rose. A hawk flies in and settles upon my wrist. In his mouth hangs the skin of a snake. “I am Horus,” he cries. “From the land of kings I come, riding through the hot winds on the back of a jackal. Where priests murmured in crumbling temples, I flew through their sacred fires dropping feathers. In my beak I hold the poison. I bring nightmares to unbelievers. I come to shout the wisdom of air. I've come with a sycamore seed in my mouth. By the river we'll sow it and watch it grow through the years. You will die there, Osiris; and I will sit nine thousand years in the tree's white branches, one eye on each horizon, waiting for the return. ”

Through the last door of the house came a goose, waddling, a blue globe between his feet, pushing the blue egg of the world. “I am Gebhassenef, your gosling son. Enter the egg and live in peace. On the day you were born, the world cracked open. When you die, the fissure heals itself. The egg rocks always back and forth. I've seen the flesh and bones of men, the sun coming and going in fire. In a moment the world changes as if by magic. I give you the anger and lust of the crocodile, and in the heat of love you shall transform them into will and desire. Your heart is a globe hanging in the east where the sun shines through. Your heart is an orb filling Egypt with amber light.”

In the last room, in the center of the house grew the rod of heaven, a tree, a bone, a cock rising straight, quick as life. I come and go out the same door. I am the passage of time, the footfall of a hidden god, the prints of one already passed this way. I am what is left when the rest disappears. I stand a million years. I am the face in flowers, the mast of ships, the sails filling with gods' breath. From one land to another I carry you in myself. I am Osiris rising. No day passes that we are not part of each other. At dawn we hurry to the hills and wait for resurrection. To live and love and miss life when it's done, that is no disaster. We shall come home again.