by Ocean

When I was young I used to scoop water from the sea and pour it in the clouds. It was just a thing I did. Mother and father gave me an ewer in the shape of a wing. I imagined I was a swan when I poured, rainwater streaming from my wing. A swan of every color. I can change the plainest sunlight into a fan of colors, colors you can’t even see. I can do lots of things. I fill the clouds.

My father is Thaumas the Wondrous. Not to be confused with Thomas the Obscure, though I expect he’s read it. Father trundles endlessly among the rocks, nose down in a book. He clothespins sogged pages alongside the seaweed harvest. He reads while he’s sleeping, he reads while he’s walking, he knocks into pillars and reorients and keeps going. He treads water in the tidepools spouting Kafkaesque sophomoric passages, recitations regarding eponymous protagonists who struggle drastically to accomplish very little, or who lose themselves in cubes of one-way mirrors, or that otherwise sound of complete gobbledygook. He clothes himself in ink-smeared folios when he clothes himself at all. They droop and words wash over the world. I picked one up once, a book. I’m not illiterate. A book about reading. Confounding. Father never did much that was wondrous that I knew of, except he did once climb a ladder made of maelstrom to abscond with mother, scooping her up in his arms just the way she likes. That was about a zillion years ago. Father hasn’t set foot in the house for years. But they’re still fond of each other. Father and mother. They croon familiars over the pools. Mother’s as wispy as mist, her skin amber with bugs honeyed in. She used to be a cloud-nymph, but now she mostly crochets.

Our place is pretty hard to get to. There’s no land-route through the rocks. We don’t much get visitors. Khronos in his nostalgia iteration comes by once or twice a season to visit father in his man-shack; we never see him, but we know he’s been there because father is a wreck for days after. Sometimes Rhonda comes by in her little dinghy lashed to seals, and mother perks up and fixes juleps, but mostly I’m left to play with my sisters, if you could call it play. Or the snake. We have a snake. It’s as big as the world. Bigger. That old lady moves so slow you can pick her up and put her in a tree in winter and she’s still in the same place come summertime. None of my sisters will touch her.

My closest sister, you can barely see her. She can barely see herself, she’s so faded now. I track her shape with my finger. It is said that one day a hero will tear her wings from her and by them make his sandals swift. I’ve drawn pictures of him with his legs slashed through or his torso in flames. I despise him in advance.

My other sisters, the punishers: I love them but they are monsters. Aellope whirlwind, Ocypete swift wing, Celaeno the prophetess. They are hideous, each in her own way, and rather off-putting with all that hissing. I once had to do things with the Boread brothers so they’d quit haranguing my sisters. Father was out under some ship—the Argos—making it creak like a cask of wine set a’sea; mother couldn’t be bothered to look up from her work, yarning another shawl to spread over the sky. My sisters—I love them but they are bad. They only got that way because of what men did to them; I did those things too but I didn’t so much mind. You barely notice them, men. They move through like weather. On my way home, I spilled my ewer. The world slept. But Noah took care of things.

My name is Iris. I’m the rainbow.

This is a story about me.

Which kind of makes it like one of father’s books, where the words suspect their scribe. Kind of.

My body has always made rain. I gush. I make the leaves sticky with dew, I spread my love over the land of man. After the flood mishap I gave up my ewer and now by my body do I replenish the clouds. Through the sea I go and below, through the sky from world-end to world-end. Through me the gods link to humanity: Hermes grumble all he likes against his caduceus, but until he can dispatch a simple message without garbling it is I who am post and courier; once I reached ‘reliable age’ Hera entrusted me alone with her scroll-purse and put me in charge of deliveries. For her I have executed many deeds. I once plucked a lock from Queen Dido’s head and sent Heracles that woeful ox into a killing rage that proved its own punishment. I sought for my patron the origin-place of thunder (the only field assignment I’ve yet failed), and stirred the Trojan women to set flame to Aeneas’ ships. And during it all I make rain. Drizzles, showers, torrents. My specialty though is mist when the sun is out. There I shine. Now has Hera set me a new task.

Demeter had got herself all in a tizzy and was iceboxing the world. Everyone was in furs, the trees were falling down. It was all about her daughter’s absconding with the dark lord. I think she was a smidge jealous, but I wasn’t gonna say anything. Hera sent me down to lighten her load. Hera said, Love: it symptomizes like a disease. I went. My skirts billowed the wind.

I came in the window. Demeter was by the fire. She held her head in her hands. I placed logs in the hearth but the flames emanated only cold. I plunked down next to her. I spoke but it was as though she did not speak my language. I pried her hands. Her eyes looked as though time had been using them as his sand sifter. I positioned myself directly before her; her eyes gazed on and through. She wrung her hands. Look at what love does to a person. Note to self: avoid.

Figured I’d consult my folks.

Mother was no help, she was eyeing a new design for a blanket, something floral. Maybe Nimbus. Father was high on sodium pentothal and dog-paddling around his kiddie pool. He suggested I head on down to Hell and dig the young maiden out. You keep an eye. Don’t take nothing they offer. They catch a scrap of you they’ll hold on. He was vibrating like there were worms in his veins. Don’t let it freak you out, he said, he has no face, you know. Hades. Because death is never seen, as Blanchot has shown us. He ruffled my hair and scooped his sogged books around him.

I went to see them. It took a while to get there, through a lake still as a mirror, climbing down the reflections of the clouds. The dark got so thick it nearly extinguished the middle of me. But I kept hidden a lamp. Found my way to the bottom, though the bottom of what exactly I could not say. One could hear the purring of the Styx. I knelt by the black water; it flowed veined in water blacker still. The surfaces of the stones were carved in signs. I kicked them in the river, it rippled like the back of some sleeping leviathan. I penetrated through to the throne room. The place smelled of ozone. There was a fountain and it spilled in four directions. I found them as one expects to find a king and a queen: sitting. I guess that’s the job description. Sit royally the day through in your highbacked chairs. Kore was resplendent in white. Her gown spilled nigh to the rivers. Hades held her hand. I could not make out his face. I told them why I was there; Kore cackled in my face. Her laughter echoed through countless skulls. She spoke:

Let it ice over. Here I stay. Storm-wind, you will see. I gazed into the narcissi and the narcissi gazed back. When the ground opened I didn’t even shiver. Love had never invaded me so absolutely. The backs of Hades’ steeds formed for us a bed; I gripped their manes with my toes. May every woman-child be enveloped by a rapture as despotic. True love is totalizing; anything less is not worth parting your thighs for. I gave my will not so much to my king as to that which renovates us beyond the recognition of our former selves; even for you, young Iris of the north: love will come to tyrannize you, and you shall no longer be your mother’s daughter, as I am no longer mine. I took the form of Kore Adamah, after Adam: the Girl of Earth. The Fall of Man was a leap, a leap from the stiffly-kept garden with its wooden groundskeeper. Death took the world in his mighty arms. I gave my virginity to that which unmakes; I continue to give, and death receives. It is here I remain, child. Here I beget death with life. Here death comes to life like a bouquet of flowers. She presented her hand like a dealer over this deadland her gambling board. Her cardplayer’s hands held stems of Narcissi. Black.

I recalled Father. My hands threatened to burst the seams of their pockets. I never once saw Hades gesture. The place now smelled of nothing; my fingertips tingled numb. I knew that if I lingered my senses would flood from me and go the way of all things down the chute of time, but I could not conceive of motion. Kore’s face was a distant continent. Then she blinked and the blink shuttered syrup slow and my body trembled and I managed movement. I went to make my merry way, but I could now nowhere find my merriment, nor my way. I scrabbled over stones, I lost my sandals in sand. My nipples ached, my mucous membranes felt like they had been rubbed in camphor. The dead were stalling and looking at me. You’re getting older, one of them spoke in a voice brambled with thorns. It looks good on you. I ran. I ran until I came to the Styx. My tears tumbled in. The pythonian waters poured and re-poured through my hands. In the streams I saw the outlines of children playing, the shapes of family knelt at deathbed; I saw grandmothers with their hands splayed before them and young hopefuls with poems for their beloveds; I saw animals at spit and the whole coarse rumbling of the earth with its churn of maggots trundling the wheel. My hands groped at the shapes; they slipped through. Throbbing in the fingermarrows, the anxieties of earthkind, and it a horrible thing, doubly so to behold in myself my own burgeoning recognition. See in these coal-dark waters the failed strivings which define this whirling pebble of turquoise. See the memories of man vortex and become gone. My body filled with undescribed shapes. Who stands behind all of this appalling loss? Who is it? I want my hands around his throat. And I sensed then with an inexorable foreboding who it must be, though I had never seen him. You have your fingers in everything: even faceless Hades and his deliriously lucid bride, even Hera at her vanity, even father, even me. Khronos. Khronos it is none other than thee.

How I hate you, I spat aloud. For all of this. For placing love into arms and then stealing it away, and for the off timing which disallows love. For misfortune and illness and sorrow I hate you. For the disconnection of the people. For Kore’s aliveness and Hades’ deathness—both of them your subjects. For birth and aging and decay, for cruelty and then kindness followed on by cruelty again—

I loathed my voice. It sounded much too like the voice of mother or Hera or any other number of adults ensconced in their miserous dramas. I splashed at the water and where it touched the shore it was dust. The river began to speak then, and its words came in the split ophidian tongue of Time, crushing with the might of a sky of ice. All things are carried in me, it spoke. Beneath that sonic iceberg my body shrank. All things eddy and are shorn from their births. It is I who am the beginning. It is I who tear forth tears and bring forth birth and take it away. Of me are the beginnings and of me are the ends. You too are of me. You too must pay the dues of existence by the aging of your flesh.

This is shit! I screamed and the scream echoed off the walls of the cavern like the horrible laughter of skeletons. I shivered and the water purled itself again. I needed to have a face-to-face with he who inserted into my undemanding and blameless life the conviction I now felt. He who made my sisters go and placed mother out of reach and hewed the wrinkles in father’s face. A new feeling roiled under my skin. I had seen it in Heracles and not known its name then, but I knew it now. Rage.

I went through the water.

Time you sadists come to me I will drown you in my waters I will blind you in my light.

I sought him long and long, past Galicia and Vesuvio, past Sicily over which the smoke was still pouring, past Mt. Analogue and the marker on the waves for the sunken city, and out over the wasted sea to lands beyond all of ice and all of stone, until I arrived at the edge of the world where the sea drops off into nothingness. There the seaspray blew in every direction at once and it was difficult to hold my eyes open. I hung myself over the cliff-edge like a lure. I knew if anywhere he must be here. I shone in my rainbow form. The sun flashed like an eye. And there in that incredible air at the end of the world something fell from me, that thing which is ever and unbeknownst to us until we lose it, that which is most absolutely irreplaceable, and after which we have no hope of chasing. In the shape of a girl-child it went slipping into the waters of the void. And then I saw what I could not see before: I saw the world as a mandorla around the void, and I saw out beyond it over the sea of infinity a sight which stirred in me thrill and nausea and a thumping in the root of me. A sear across the sky cut in the shape of a man, a vast and auroric man with a musculature of cloud and entropy and surety, a vast, an incredible god: Khronos, it can be only you. His skin olive and bronze, his hair rippling with power. And he was not alone. He braced, twinned, locked in combat with another, another so beautiful that beholding him my heart whipped like a galeborne flag. And I knew him by his incorrupt smile to be Khronos’ elder brother, Aion, he who does not Become but Is. Aion, time unmeasured, effeminate and free and unselfconscious as a child. They spun, two continents in a ring whose walls were the horizon, and I gazed on them long and long and long. And in this longing I sensed that the elder brother could necessarily defeat his younger, but that he did not, and I sensed that this was by no bond but by choice. I knew then by the sun glistening off their godly bodies and by the stark pheromones carried over on the wind many things about them. I knew that Aion had budded from the dark before there was even a dark, that in the infinity before recording, before Khronos and Inevitability made the world from a glowing egg and begat history, Aion was there. I knew that Aion was the exemplar after whom Khronos imperfectly modeled himself, Khronos with his measuring tape and chronometer, stunned at the deathmask glaring at him from the depths of the accursed mirror of self-reflexive consciousness. I knew that Aion, time unbounded, had always been and would for always be spontaneous and chaotic and the hidden form against which Khronos pushed. I could see them moving through space, the king of measure and the king of eternity, and I knew inside my nascent womanhood that these two were to be ever taken with each other.

Trespass not my precious heart.

The sun shone like a coin reflecting some other, incredible light. The sun shone through me. I closed my eyes.

Behind my eyelids I saw Gaia swaddling in her arms a bundle. Its face was Aion. I saw by the black holes in its eyes that Aion had taken birth through virgins ever since his little brother started keeping a stopwatch. Aion came to me and spoke in an infantile language which housed in its vowel-heavy syllables all incomprehensible sagacity. He stood bediapered atop a sleeping serpent. The serpent had a name and it was Kosmos. Around him circled the zodiac. As it spun it made the sound of keys jangling. I recalled from Father’s books Nonnos: “Aion transmutes the burden of old age like a snake who sloughs off the coils of the old scales, rejuvenescing while washing in the swells of the Law.” Aion the infant gazed on me and his gaze was vacuum.

I knew then what Aion did. He was the life force. He was the jubilation and the rejoicing. He was the shine in his brother’s eyes. He was the allowance infinity made on time.

I opened my eyes. I could see the two twisting and sweating. Aion was grinning like a child. Khronos had his fingers up under Aion’s ribs, tickling the living shit out of him. Now Aion had Khronos headlocked, and the two were panting and stomping like stock animals. Khronos was growling and grinning, reaching back over his head for Aion’s hair. From his fingers sand spilled and was lost. It seemed a prestidigitation for the enjoyment of the world. And it was, for every mortal who had ever had the good chance to be granted a stay on this dim earth with purpose unknown. I saw Khronos tickling his brother and his brother’s eyes wet with tears. I saw therein replica tears of delight and sobbing spilling over the cheeks of men. I saw the rage and the duty and the adoration in Khronos, and the freedom and the exuberance too, from the reflection of his brother’s gaze. I saw the pleasure in Aion’s eyes, and that pleasure matched in Khronos’, and I knew, then, why they wrestled, and why Aion did not let himself win. For joy. For the joy of time. Eternity loved his brother, and this was eternity’s gift.

Joy.

I rose into the sky. Braids of water fell from me. I felt at my child’s breasts and they were no longer a child’s. The sky had gone tremendously silent. I felt for my scroll-pouch, it was gone. The air was stained with something bitter, and succulent—the crisp burn of things yet coming. I shot through the aether trailing my jet-stream of spectra. Home was lit by the dead light of a trillion stars. I felt old and young at the same time. I needed a cocoa with Father. I hunted around a while, I couldn’t find him. At night he stacks his books into a pyramidic cave and crawls inside. He was out back hula-hooping with the ouroboros. He gave me his Do-Not-Disturb look.

Mother was in the house, subsumed in an incredible mass of blanketry. I could barely see her, clacking her needle back and forth in the midst of it like an oar. I crawled to her, squinting. Mother? She didn’t look at me. I could find no edge to the yarnwork, I took up a bunch in my hand. It looked webbed by tentacles, hundreds of them, branching and branching, diminishing in size and interleaving until they seemed to reach down into the very fibers of the weft themselves and I could not make them out any more. Mother, what is this pattern—?

Mother looked up. Her eyes the places of thunder, her voice the creaking of a thousand ships beneath the swells of the Law. Khronos’ fingers.

Ocean (he/him) is a disabled poet, novelist, and visual artist living in the Pacific Northwest. His poetry, essays and fiction are known for their resuscitation of the mythic and their contribution to literary animism. His visual arts, informed by proto-language and asemia, have shown internationally. For selections of his work, navigate to: www.mirrorflower.org.