XIII

SUDDENLY I was in touch with something, in the air. Something called, something hovered, hard and real and whole as a soaring bird. O Christy, our great lover! Reach down your birdbloodied hand to me, you who decorated me with your garland of news, crowned me with your birdbays of love, blessed me with the flowers and the songs of our woods, hung me with the trappings of our woods to send me, wrought like a frieze with all this beauty, all this knowledge, alone away through my inevitable journey away from you, like a new bird, fledged by your birdridden hands, towards home (O let me go!) to get there as I could and find my own and, for the first time, earned welcome, to learn the bitter parting that gives freedom and slavery; bless me now, unclaim me, haunt me, bless me now who led me away, broke my seal of secrets, then left me—violated and ready again: pattern of all the journeys I would ever make, bird-enchanted, bird-shadowed, bird-tormented…

For I am in those woods again where the dialogue of our shared secrets once flew like birds from the trees of your mind to the trees of mine (but there is a clearing ahead where the river turns and flows, cuts through the trees, shall I follow it?) where there seems and seemed to be no time, nor past nor future, where once I was lost for the first time away from the house and kin-homing! How homing? O home me! Where…?—and thought of all of them, back there, Granny and Aunty and Malley and all the rest…. Who am I, separated from all of them and from home, yet with the idea of them and the idea of home in my mind, claimed and cursed by these, blessed and marked, sent somewhere? Those who will ever see me naked will find upon my thigh the blue sign, the stigma but no blemish, really lovely, like a vein in an agate or the grain in wood—and they will know the touch of the birds upon me.

There is the river, over I must—across I’ll go. For the vision burns away like cold blown breath; and when I look again it will have vanished away.

Christy make us real, make us hard and real in our lives: we who walk up and down in this autumn, trying to make ourselves real. We are involved, we are involved; and we cannot break away. All the history that we saw on the map in the kitchen pours into us and we contain it, we display it like a map for others to look at and be history; and the song of the girl on the world sings through us to be sung into others: Go into the world, go build cities, go discover countries; go spread love, go give, go make magnificence, get and give light, save and join and piece together (as you did the bits of string and cloth and whittled wood to make your ship) and show a whole and put it, combined and formed and shaped, into the world like a bottle with a ship in it. Gather the broken pieces, connect them: these are the only things we have to work with. For we have been given a broken world to live in—make like a map a world where all things are linked together and murmur through each other like a line of whispering people, like a chain of whispers a full clear statement, a singing, a round, strong, clear song of total meaning, a language within language, responding each to each forever in the memory of each man.

And then I said, “I will get up now and go now, where I belong, and be what I must be.”

I went to the bus station and really waited for a bus this time, and took it, and the next morning I knew it was no spell when I heard them calling all the names of the little forgotten towns, Normangee, Sweetwater, Cheetah, and I saw the live oak trees like old kinfolks in the fields.

Then, after a while, I was in the road going to the house and looked up and there it was, on the little rising piece of land, waiting for me. Through the mist that lay between us it seemed that the house was built of the most fragile web of breath and I had blown-it-and that with my breath I could blow it all away.