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36 Petit My face turns like the Hourglass Nebula. The underwood-breathing, eagle-shrieking, minnowed whirlpool of my mind brims like the stream at full spate. I love everything that tumbled from the plateau into crayfish pools – their claws are the dead waving, beckoning me up to the cascade, to shower under its silver shoals. The drops shocking my skin seem to sprout feather-shafts as I fly through the mossy past. And back into the sunglare, to dragonflies magnified by noon, the museums of their abdomens, wings opening like skylights of art galleries. I have spent my life trying to see these living palettes give birth to colour. I love the sun-bronze kingfisher and mud-velvet water rat equally in their earth burrows. I love the bear-bumblebee and tiger-hornet, the day frog and night toad, everything that teems where my giant shadow roams, while under Maman’s gaze my child-shadow shrivels. I used to haul water up from the stream for washing, and down from the source for drinking. I was always climbing up and down the steep terraces, my childhood suspended between the rungs, over the adder-surprising, grass-snake-flashing paths, as I paused with my load. I was always scrubbing the spider-infested walls of our stone cottage with hard brooms, filling the cracks with stones. Yet each night, star insects crawled in from their sky nests.
page 43
Petit 37 Peeping through the hole next to my pillow, I could see a wasps’ nest galaxy, its queen laying double suns. A constellation of white ants raided our larders, ate everything we didn’t lock in the cupboard. Black rats ran along time’s warped rafters, dropped onto my face as I slept. I saw the universe was a vineyard choking with brambles, patrolled by light year long praying mantises. I saw their straw-green helmets and Milky Way eyes. What do you want from me? I asked them, and their telescope eyes peered into mine and spoke. I scratch at Maman’s dripstone encrusted cave-coffin, and weave a web of roots around it as if I could store her in my keepnet until I am strong enough to face her. The south breeze caresses me as I walk from ridge to ridge. The Mediterranean gleams like a radiant corpse, waves of its skin rising into the air to become cirrus. I am always at home, listening to the bone-voiced dead. I am always at my mother’s grave, telling her everything. Did she know that she carried a dragon, that when she breastfed me I drank her bile and stored it in my body to turn to fire later? That when she made me speak, before my trembling voice obeyed her command, a firecloud escaped from my mouth to burn her face?

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Petit

37

Peeping through the hole next to my pillow, I could see a wasps’ nest galaxy, its queen laying double suns.

A constellation of white ants raided our larders, ate everything we didn’t lock in the cupboard.

Black rats ran along time’s warped rafters, dropped onto my face as I slept.

I saw the universe was a vineyard choking with brambles, patrolled by light year long praying mantises. I saw their straw-green helmets and Milky Way eyes.

What do you want from me? I asked them, and their telescope eyes peered into mine and spoke.

I scratch at Maman’s dripstone encrusted cave-coffin, and weave a web of roots around it as if I could store her in my keepnet until I am strong enough to face her.

The south breeze caresses me as I walk from ridge to ridge. The Mediterranean gleams like a radiant corpse, waves of its skin rising into the air to become cirrus.

I am always at home, listening to the bone-voiced dead. I am always at my mother’s grave, telling her everything.

Did she know that she carried a dragon, that when she breastfed me I drank her bile and stored it in my body to turn to fire later?

That when she made me speak, before my trembling voice obeyed her command, a firecloud escaped from my mouth to burn her face?

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