The Witch

She comes from the earth. In her hair grass and leaves have been tangled. Is it a blessing or nightmare? Her gown is white and silver. The moon glows bright and full. In its light we process through a thicket of black yew and birch and the birch bark catches the moonlight: it sparks.

I follow as she steps away. She slips between a copse of quince and willow. We have not spoken but she looks me through the blackened limbs, and onward.

If she speaks I will answer, but we move wordless on. Her face glows white under the moon and the branches spread thick before her.

Because she dies her body has been taken. I go with some men to find her. This takes a long time and one, a stranger, smiles knowingly. Touch her hand, he says, and the chill will sink to your core. Another in the moonlight turns, his coat patched and threadbare. The Witch has coiled up in your viscera, boy. She is a tired and cranky old man: just ignore her.

I wonder about these words, and how the dream translates them. The men are common woodsmen. They know all I know, but it’s easier for them: they are not possessed by her spell. One man acts as though he were put out; another whistles as he cuts new lumber; still another plays with a lasso woven of feathers and hair. Someone says—or perhaps I imagine it: Leave The Witch in the ground.

We arrive in a field, our breath slow in the chill, and dig. I see her pale hand and the veins of her wrist grow with the roots of the birch.

In four seasons’ time she has died and rebirthed. She compels devotion by charms: she leaves nothing untouched by her appetite. Once in a meadow we passed an evening. She spoke of the farthest reaches of space. The galaxy, she said, is shaped like a bowl with long, thorny vines. It twists along a horizon where darkness meets the light. Her secrets were powerful, sure. Do you see how your hand maps mine, she said. I spread my palm and she pressed it.

Once I paused with some men under ash. We leaned on branches prating about those many nights with The Witch. O how she charmed our bright feelings, tarring our hopes with black pitch.

Rowan, alder, willow, ash. White-thorn, oak, and holly. She was known as Gwydion, enchantress of an army.

Gétal! We stood in gooseberry and broom, bright moonlight on holly and heath. Gétal! An owl spread its wings in the coll; below it brooded The Witch. Gétal! She lit on it fast. Feathers and a sudden noise shook the dark; below her blood drops stained a fern. Gétal! She chewed the sinewy thing; gnawed its soot-colored bone to ash. Shadows increased with a fluttering movement. Gétal! A scuffle continued as branches and hair and the silver in her gown whirled in a frenzy of vines.

When the still husk of night returned I found her inertly strung. Her eyes were gouged, her neck scratched: she hung in scarecrow tatters. Somehow I took her off the tree. She’s not herself, I said.

As we went toward her grave I talked about this and that. I said what if this time I do not come for you. And she paused to think. “What if,” she wondered, and we walked. She said: “If you don’t come back for me I will lay in the earth. And that will be okay.”

I split the elder and in the fire it went. Some praise blackthorn, some white: the Ogham’s ancient course in leaves sometimes is hard to straighten. The men are gone, the woodland empty. A better world awaits my axe: away I swagger wanly—and tread my boots on the muck and mud that keeps The Witch.

When I go to bed my mother leaves the door to my bedroom open. A hall light shines and the light comes into my room, over the smooth, orange wood of the door that faces the bed. To my right are windows with white curtains and red trim. My parents’ voices—perhaps the television—come to me muffled through the walls that separate us. Sometimes I go into see them, after bedtime, to complain that I cannot sleep. “Close your eyes,” my mother says. In my room I look at things and invent stories about people I would like to become. I close my eyes and follow threads of some narrative that interweave again and again.

Once I endured a period of what I considered to be nightmares. This was perhaps near the time in my life when I discovered the word “midnight,” a sublunary and mysterious word that gave me an impression of dark blue laced with black. When I would close my eyes in the darkness of bedtime I practiced elaborate narrative rituals designed to delay sleep and to keep far away whatever nightmares I certainly felt I would have.

A Sunday school teacher gently pointed out to me at this time that I possessed a certain power to confront the monsters and bad things that populated my dreams. She said to step right up to the things I feared in my dreams and to say that they had no power over me. She spoke, I could tell, in earnest, and I believed her.

In the spring a shrub of spirea would rustle next to my window as the wind blew gently at night and I lay trying to wind myself down for the inevitable coming of sleep. I listened to the wind scratch the window with the little branches and white flowers and finally drifted into my dreams. Perhaps my Sunday school teacher’s yoga had some power indeed, for I do not recall another episode of nightmares. Only, on occasion, did the contents of my dreams match the intensity of waking life. The dream world instead became a kind of resting place. Images came, whatever they were, and I was just another occupant of the dream until morning.

Only recently have I noticed again how the intensity of dream makes claims at times on other precious psychic resources. Remembering my Sunday school teacher’s words—or perhaps those words have been refreshed by a more recent magazine article—I have somehow begun to step out of my dreams into another place, as though the images arrive as a wedge between me and some other alien substance. It’s hard to describe. I observe the pace of the day and perform its quiet rituals: make the bed; play chess with my sons; sweep the floor. And yet it seems as though simultaneous to these dreams other stories are being formed beyond my conscious narratives. But when I dream it isn’t me but that boy—or perhaps all the people I have been and no longer can be—sharing still in the images we have gathered over to watch with great scrutiny. What do we tell each other I wonder? And how do we train ourselves to be still in the dark and observant, instead of fearful, of things that go “bump”?

These dreams have no portent: I don’t seek their omens or believe such things presage future events. Some other transport—some intimate communion—takes place. Even now the memory of myself in bed, the hall light flooding one side of my room, arrives in dreamlike waves that can only be partially grasped. And yet, those years of going to bed composed an eternity, too.

To walk around inside a dream is to discover ways of telling a story. It’s not your story, though it is, quite certainly, you who are called on as its witness.

There is a photograph of Carl Jung, taken by Aniela Jaffé during the final year of his life. In it he holds in his left hand a candle while behind him Lake Zürich disappears against the horizon. This great dreamer focuses his gaze upon the camera, and I have thought often of this—how he was so compelled by images. And here he is absorbed by his own imaginary, the picture contributing to the circulation of narrative about him. The candle motivates a story in miniature of a life nearing completion. The brevity of that spark shining into the camera lens freezes it. The lake absorbs this light, and the rush of things continues.

The body hangs like a scarecrow on sticks, invisible axes supporting a thin figure in the sensorium of the world’s bountiful evidence: grey hairs on an arm; small brown spots that smudge the otherwise pleasant features by which, as a boy, I idly watched as mulberry leaves came undone, little yellow and brown, crisply curled forms, themselves changed, crinkling to particles in a blunt fist: I scried a future in the deposits of brittle fall stems--the smell of burning debris in the Yemeni capital, the pressure of bodies in transit on buses there, a frank burst of mucous over a man’s pants, the wet particles spraying my clothes. I possess a sense of witness for others whose lives somehow make palimpsests with my own. Dai, for instance, stopped in Aden many days, perhaps weeks, on his way toward India, and then over the Himalayas into China, flying gasoline to the army of Chiang Kai-shek. His words or what I remember him saying, accompany me toward a question: what looks through these eyes, dislodging memory, to shift outward over the surface of villages, distant from me now, a small moment of life retrieved by a photo, though even the memory resists my belief in it? Dai stands in pilot gear, strung over twin sticks that turn through little trails toward a future that will emerge, fragment, and scatter into the objects around him: the projective field into which the boy goes, observing that face, some short time later, looking back, closes, and the man in the photo vanishes into the earth: the trails are covered up like the memory of honeysuckle nectar in the alley after school is absorbed also into some alien substance claiming the child. Now in November, cool air shifts the impressions of how all around there are small objects that endure, remarkably little things—a Schrade pocket knife from the twenties by which I preserve a sense of duration: there, in the far corner of a closet, my father’s father’s Masonic insignia, the letter G centered between an open compass: God and Geometry; Goodness and Gawdawfulness; the Gliding spirit and Gelded soul; Gondwana and the Gape of Okeanos. Suddenly, now, my son interrupts with these words: “that’s no mystery”—HA! Of course it is and is not. A G—gee whiz—a G!

Extracts

Near my birthday as a child time slowed its pace inexplicably. I once argued with my mother, insisting I was born November fourth—not the third. Despite her witness, I persisted in this odd misplacement. Often now, when people ask, I will claim The Day of the Dead as the date of my rightful birth (I forget if November one or two is correct). My mother, of course, was right about the third.

*

Once on my birthday Glynn Ramsey pushed me from behind. We were coming from the soccer field: a new western shirt tucked into Sears Toughskins; blue and white sneakers with laces carefully tied. The air that day had turned brisk: a bright blue sky ran against the horizon. A broken wall—grey bricks in brown grass—stood gapped and gateless across the street from the school. Recess bell. Grass stains on my knee.

*

One year Dai gave me a train set. My mother made a clay tunnel for the electric-powered engine and its cars to move through. I do not recall the cake that year, but in a picture I wear a red and white shirt. A blue engine turns into view as I manipulate the power source, speeding up or slowing down the train’s velocity. It is strange to see myself thus in an image that retains more of the boy than I recall. The body regulates memory to protect us. And yet I can’t help but fret over all that must be so lost.

*

In the early blue of a still-dark room I’d open my eyes. I could hear my mother and father in the kitchen and the burbling sounds of the heater coming on as I pushed back a sheet and blanket to burst into the morning cold. I ran in my pajamas to the kitchen, pleased and expectant. In those years my mother would hide certain gifts in the dark house. I would luxuriate in the movement toward them, first looking under sofas and chairs, then peering behind curtains or opening the doors to an ancient record player cabinet. Eventually I slid a hand behind an equally antique pie safe. Here I found it, wrapped in red and green, images of a small boy and his gifts illustrating joy on the paper. Inside: a grey and blue jersey with the number twelve. This is significant to me because it belonged to the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys—Roger Staubach. On the back my name had been pressed above the one and the two.

*

We gather over a chocolate cake decorated with a merry-go-round pressed into the frosting. Red, blue, green, and yellow pointy party hats paint the room with color. Eight candles light the table. As the song ends I make a wish: blow. The flames lean away as breath traces waves of chocolate. Later I lick plastic horses with cake stuck to their hooves.

*

My mother’s knees and a yellow dress. The same light—perhaps the first light and experience of weather I’ll ever recall—fades into the evening of the house. My parents make the number three with their fingers. I mimic their gestures with less success. Thumb holds back the little finger. Fire truck; cake; a little dog named Pepper. Mulberry branches are bare in the window. My brothers are born that November.

*

In the kitchen my relatives gather. My grandfather—Duskin, the Mason—and the woman I call Mammy sit with my family. The same mulberry branches have shed their leaves: another year.

*

Once my mother bought a cake with thick blue and white frosting. My grandparents came and in a picture I no longer possess, but remember only, Dai pushes a fire truck with me over gold-colored carpet. The details vanish with time, only certain textures remaining vivid: the creases in his dark slacks; the rough and uneven nature of the carpet, my cheek flat upon it watching the wheels roll; circular swirls of white in the ceiling; thin, see-through curtains behind a sofa. Somehow I noticed the day’s dim light and the brightness of candles; the camera’s extraordinary flash.

*

Mi poses with me beside a cake: white frosting and a strawberry center. I have a funny look, and show something between bemusement and impatience. I am looking toward the dinner table. The kitchen behind us once seemed so big. I went through its door many times; dreamed into the numerals on the clock. Look at the orange and white hat next to orange stripes in her dress: the red shirt and warm reds in the wooden cabinets. Her brooch is pinned elegantly at the dress’s collar. I could not know how young we were, or what that even meant. A single candle at the center of the cake—a flame to unify the progression of years. Time is gathered there to signify the event of an unwinding singularity. Perhaps I have blown it out: the birthday song has been sung. Or instead we pose, briefly, as my grandmother prepares the cake for this ritual of the flame and my breath given to it.