The blade in service to the wound
what it's like to wonder if you're the villain in the story (fire and metal interlude)
“Hedge straddler: zaunreiter
Boundary walker: mearcstapa”~Martin Shaw, The Night Wages
I carry a sword, my mentor tells me. Sheathed along the spine. What’s funny is I don’t use it for combat, she says. It is a grounding force, for stability; for strength. I rarely have to use it.
She had to use it. ancient metal; counterbalanced, current-carried; we pulled at a root system embedded in my back and spine and pelvis, in the shape of an ancient symbol along the plot points of my joints, my muscles, my dearest desires. the sword held us steady as we pulled.
deep roots. we pulled them out together and she cried.
you’re a warrior, she told me.
no, not quite right — the associations aren’t quite right.
defender.
Then I was given a dagger and a name. Two daggers, actually, crossed over the heart, which is precisely comical for combat —
so they must be for another purpose.
To find the purpose I have to make the shape of my body into the wielder of daggers. One up close to the chest; wrist out, the other, eye level, blade out. Defender position. Get close but no closer. not to kill, to discourage.
(I’ve always gone in close.)
when its not safe to be close, when i let my childish, (yes reckless), (yes wild) heart do what she does — when she didn’t know it was a battle…triage mode bleeding, she's done it again run in run in—
From someone who knows how to arraign such things.
Defender she said.
this was after I’d already asked what the wound needed. the one that traced along my abdomen like a c-section scar of a baby I never had.
open it, i was told, when I went to the dreamworld to ask.
it was healing wrong. it was festering. sealed lopsided, seared.
open it.
(maybe this is what the dagger is for. A true friend stabs you in the front, said Oscar Wilde.) So I open it. my own hand and my own blade, i open it and clean it and clean the blade and put it away.
“I made my best blades when i had an apprentice,” Eiji the swordmaker says.
”I thought i annoyed you,” replies Mizu.
"both are true.”
I look up who wields daggers, in the stories—and the answer is
renegades.
What part of you is a renegade? I ask myself.
there are parts of you you create on purpose and there are parts of you that exist when you let yourself be true.
“I did not train you to be a demon. or a human.
I trained you to be an artist.” ~Eiji the Swordmaker
truth is accuracy. truth
is sharp.
let yourself be true. It’s what a blade is for.
I walk the edges to tease them. Redraw them.
Move them –
I steal boulders from your fence line
In the dead of night.
I scare the sheep.
I am a shadow against your council fire.
(I want the fire.
And I am the fire.)
We have maps of grief – we know the blank spaces
The pitfalls.
The maps tell us the truth,
And so does the darkness.
(We have no shovels, so
We dig with our hands.)