LONGBOW
by
Suzanne d’Corsey
This is the threshold time. Short-lived. Passing away even as we speak. Earth’s barrenness is lanced through with green shoots rearing from the soil, a brief thrusting to life before relaxing into full flower. Armored buds tip the stark branches, and the branches spread themselves against the clouded glow of the Quickening Moon, a complicated skein, like your hair over the sofa cushion, where you recently reclined.
You spoke to me yesterday, and echoed my sentiments on the surprises in our respective mirrors. Jowly things, you lamented. A double chin, I cried. Wrinkly lines on the upper lip. Blotches. I don’t mind aging, I mind the fact that you still won’t come to my bed, and our lives, arrows, are speeding to their targets.
What can I give you, beyond inexorable passion, the planting ground of every harvest? I am possessed by lust and longing, but I’m not stupid. The blade of my seduction is ground to an edge that could split a hair. This reckless body reaching for you, vessel for my cracked heart, might be torn asunder. Better that, though, than the static pull of slow death.
I would much rather demonstrate in corpore, but, elusive creature that you are, I’ll woo you with prose in the meantime. In a story that penetrates the matter of the heart. As St. Teresa of Avila wrote, when the angel withdrew the arrow of ecstasy from her body, ‘the sweetness this greatest pain caused me was so superabundant that there is no desire capable of taking it away.’
No desire capable of taking it away. The trick, of course, is obtaining it in the first place.
When you left my doorstep, you walked a little away, then stopped and looked back, and stood for a long time. You did not know I watched you watching my lair, and I saw you begin to balance the scales of your desire and caution.
I tried to distract you then, with the story of another love affair, this one with my longbow. Yes, my longbow. As tall, as slender and supple as you. Do you remember?
Insinuate your fingers into my cupped hands, pages of my heart’s book. Be bold. Pry them apart. If you open my hands, behold my heart. More than that, my hands open in supplication and are filled quite readily with divine energy. Touch me, and we both come away with something new. The power is in our imagination, to create new worlds before the final reality ravishes us.
Our beginning is in our end, so let’s start at the tail of the previous story. At the butts. The last time, much too long ago, fired by passion, I had the puissance to draw the longbow. Imagine the archery green, the smooth Scottish lawn, the medieval walled garden of the run-rig. The whisper of shaft against bow, the sudden entry. See how the flinching target pursed its wounds like prim mouths at the arrows’ slow extraction. I left the butt to mildew in the cold rain, and stored the bow and quiver of arrows inside the garden shed. Last I looked, the quiver had tipped over- a mouse perhaps? Whiskers all a-twitch. Or the cat following close behind, puzzled by spliced turkey feathers. Paws in pursuit. Even the creatures circle in their desire, and they’ve left my cedar arrows to lie scattered aimlessly on the workbench.
Then I met you. Then I returned from the long Winter and picked up one of the arrows, to admire its smooth body. I twirled the feathers and thought of your soft breath feathering across my forearm when I reached to pluck a stray hair off your breast. Through the course of those days, I did not coerce you. There’s a skill here, a game played between hunters, warily circling the spirals of the heart. Too revealing a glance from my steely eyes, and you’ll be off faster than a gazelle. When you do reward my patience by telephoning, joy leaps in me at the sound of your voice, until your small talk makes me wary, and then, you say it. You are scared. Scared of me, scared of yourself when you are with me, scared for your life as is was. Then we must pause in our pursuit. The receiver is heavy when I replace it. I don’t know if I will ever pick it up again to hear your voice.
So, my sleek longbow dozes, belly up on the rack above the window, gathering a patina of dust. If beauty could illuminate, it would outshine the glass, even with the silver northern sun, then the stalking moon spotlighting through.
They say it’s bad luck to watch the moon through glass, but it’s hard to avoid it happening, especially to those of us who yearn constantly for the lunar face of allegory. I say it’s hard to avoid bad luck. But hard to avoid good luck as well, so I’ll take the good with the bad, and never let it be said at the end of my life, that I refused a gesture of love in whatever form it took. The inappropriate or tasteless gifts. The inedible meal cooked with affection and high hopes. Grit in the unwashed asparagus, the sour oyster, the plonkish wine. The sting of the lash on the offering that is my body, to a woman who cannot love otherwise. How sweet the kiss that lingers on that burning flesh. No, there’s no bad or good, only life uncovered in its occult parts. And that’s where I plunge my arrows.
And that’s why two weeks later you miss the excitement you felt, the burning in your belly, the flattery of my piercing attention, and ask to meet in a neutral place. Coffee? Surrounded by the woes of the world. Not much of an aphrodisiac, but you can turn me over and around and inspect me from all sides at the truce of the watering hole. Careful what you stir up.
Memories quickly pass away, but they are distilled in the grain of our being. As in the wood of my beloved longbow, whose memories far surpass mine. Under its dusty blanket, it dreams of the English graveyard it was born in, of its mother yew competing with church spire and iron spear-heads on the gate for the most eloquent indicator of heaven’s direction. They point up, but I say look down. Immanence is imminent.
They say yew leaves are poisonous, and cattle and sheep avoid them, and so don’t enter the old graveyards to graze and knock over the stones. The deciduous unveiled in the evergreen beauty of the English churchyard, Norman perhaps, medieval in any event. Probably built over a pagan sanctuary, a grove of magic and connection.
Only connect. Can my longbow recall in its dense grain a distant tie to elder cousins, those that flexed their limbs in medieval times to hurl the rude shaft into a human’s soft trunk, death taking her down to the slow embrace, the complicated skein of mother yew’s twining roots? But yew takes so long, by the time the roots have caught her fast, there’s nothing left but bones.
If you go to an ancient graveyard, look carefully in the earth, between the erupting shafts of flowers, and you will see rich brown fragment of bone, bits of skull edged with connective structure, like a satellite picture of a river. You will find teeth resembling children’s milk teeth, which they may well be.
I don’t mind dying if love takes me there. Ancient Crone of Death, percolate up my bone chips, my teeth, bits of my skull. Lover, see our destiny, the cleansed and divided spoils of war from the indiscriminate dust. Our coupling forestalls and foreshadows the final embrace. But it’s not fearsome. Purified bones that never loved beyond their assumed capacity is what’s fearsome. Give me a reason to take up the bow again, to collect the scattered arrows back to the tight quiver. Give me a token of your love, I know it’s there, secretly pushing through the fertile ground of your hidden desire. Give me strands of your hair, and I will plait a bowstring that will sing like a harp for centuries.
You’re getting that look on your face again. The tips of your fingers touch your lips, and you do not speak. Your eyes are guarded. You are counting the cost, and finding it’s all downhill from here. What is lost, what is gained in a life as well-planned and executed as my herb garden. You see at the cliff’s edge my muddy hand grasping your delicate ankle, but it’s your fear creating nightmares. My hands are clean and washed and open in praise before the Eucharist of your body, the Thank You of our feast.
But back to the story. Shooting the butts. Shooting the butts is the best. Instrument of skill and death. I enjoy bending the longbow to my desires, melding my vitality to its quivering expectations.
The three-fingered glove is soft deerskin, double layered under the pads of the fingers, because the yew bow is too powerful to be pulled with bare skin. It demands I be in excellent physical condition, or I cannot draw it, nor hold it steady long enough to aim, and when the control is gone, only a fool will play.
I work the arm guard up along my inner forearm and tie the leather thong. One stunning slap of the bowstring against that soft flesh is the last careless mistake one makes. Then I insinuate the fingers of my right hand in the tight leather sheaths of the glove, and snap it at the wrist. Am I conveying to you the excitement of this process? The anticipation? I hook the black quiver to my belt. The arrows offer their feathered ends to my fingers. My wicked handmaidens, ready.
The bow is never left strung, or like a horse always on a tight rein, it will lose its elasticity, its springy responsiveness. The joy in its haunches. To create the right amount of tension, I twirl the bowstring, then hook it over the notch in a difficult maneuver. Have you ever bridled a mischievous stallion? That’s how it is, a dangerous moment. But the horse wants to leave the stall, and the bow wants to perform, and I want to escort them to the fulfillment of their own joy, and they know this, and eventually they bend their sinewy necks to my will.
The yew wood stretches and awakens, and the plucked string sings its deep note. It’s a production, getting the bow to submit and cooperate, part of the ritual riveting the attention, calling into trance. A gesture of respect, the willingness to do things properly despite the difficulty. Yes, the same courtesy I extend to you.
And so to the act itself. In the beauty of my garden is concealed my shooting range. Down the central path through the fragrant, perennial herbs, to the far wall, against it the willing target. It bares its breast to me, it shudders when the arrow enters. Halloween pumpkins end up there, lashed to the butt, to make a succulent feast for my arrows. Sometimes an effigy, if I’m working magic. Wax or clay. Shall I put your essence there, take the single long hair you left behind in the witch’s lair, weave it into my wax, and try you with the love-tipped arrow? How do you know I haven’t?
Stand behind me, press against my body, left side open to the target. Make my arms your arms, my body yours. Feel how I move.
Fletching adorns the cleft nock I take between my fingers. As I lift the bow, the smooth shaft slides along the arrowshelf with the sound of a gloved hand moving down a woman’s back. Do you know this enticing sound, and what it heralds? This is where the skill begins, in the mix and marriage of variety. The intricate discipline of not grasping the nock, lest the arrow be pulled off the bow’s shelf. Trusting to the bowstring to coax the arrow into position. The stance, the focus, the intention always in mind. That distant target, not so distant. All for naught without the strength to bend the bow.
This must come from the muscles of the back, not the arms. Feel my shoulders go hard. Put your mouth to the flexing wave moving under my skin.
In the desire-filled pause at full draw, bowstring pressed to my lips, feathers tickling my chin, the craft of instinctive shooting is given. No sterile sights for me, I prefer the deeper knowledge. It’s a gift, one that requires trust. This is the place all the elements come together to fire the result. I can’t hold it back any longer, the trembling is starting in my hand.
The release is like a sigh, my part is almost done, and I surrender to the gathering power. The bow comes to its own life, casting from its haunches the emissary dart. I’ve already wished it to its destination, and if I’ve been skillful in my execution, it will follow my sight.
A flash of arcless trajectory, the thrumming bow falls away. The arrow penetrates. Never in the same way twice. The novelty is an important aspect. I would turn and kiss you now, but you may still be playing the timid nymph, lightly touching my shoulder still, breathing in the scent off my neck, hoping I won’t notice. At least you have no delusions that I am your feminine Puck, your breasted, cloven insatiable satyr. And you won’t be offended or surprised when I do turn and slip an arm around your slender waist. You untangle yourself, your breath whispers over my flushed cheek, then you run away.
But not too far.
This is a change. Have you been coaxed to some invisible doorway? Was it a matter of time, of seasons coming into their own? Now, I’ll make a confession. My wooing with prose is almost done. Like the bow, my skill has brought you this far, and I lay at your feet the choice of beds. The cold earth. Or sheets woven by the angels.
Come to me, the threshold guardian. The gleaming-eyed expectant stillness before the dawn. Countless times this season has wheeled around, the earth inexorably readying itself for new life, gathering its wide haunches for the Spring. This spiraling ascent happening irregardless of our lives or deaths, with the same uncaring propulsion towards perfection. Shed the armor from your leafing boughs before it sets into a deadening encasement. Nature’s flowering urge is the same energy I offer and ask of you. My desire, death’s perpetual nemeses, flies true as the swift arrow. Come to me, while I can still raise the bow. Sing under my fingers, bend to my desire. Begin the ancient story now. Beloved, rise to meet me where I enter in.
END
by
Suzanne d’Corsey
This is the threshold time. Short-lived. Passing away even as we speak. Earth’s barrenness is lanced through with green shoots rearing from the soil, a brief thrusting to life before relaxing into full flower. Armored buds tip the stark branches, and the branches spread themselves against the clouded glow of the Quickening Moon, a complicated skein, like your hair over the sofa cushion, where you recently reclined.
You spoke to me yesterday, and echoed my sentiments on the surprises in our respective mirrors. Jowly things, you lamented. A double chin, I cried. Wrinkly lines on the upper lip. Blotches. I don’t mind aging, I mind the fact that you still won’t come to my bed, and our lives, arrows, are speeding to their targets.
What can I give you, beyond inexorable passion, the planting ground of every harvest? I am possessed by lust and longing, but I’m not stupid. The blade of my seduction is ground to an edge that could split a hair. This reckless body reaching for you, vessel for my cracked heart, might be torn asunder. Better that, though, than the static pull of slow death.
I would much rather demonstrate in corpore, but, elusive creature that you are, I’ll woo you with prose in the meantime. In a story that penetrates the matter of the heart. As St. Teresa of Avila wrote, when the angel withdrew the arrow of ecstasy from her body, ‘the sweetness this greatest pain caused me was so superabundant that there is no desire capable of taking it away.’
No desire capable of taking it away. The trick, of course, is obtaining it in the first place.
When you left my doorstep, you walked a little away, then stopped and looked back, and stood for a long time. You did not know I watched you watching my lair, and I saw you begin to balance the scales of your desire and caution.
I tried to distract you then, with the story of another love affair, this one with my longbow. Yes, my longbow. As tall, as slender and supple as you. Do you remember?
Insinuate your fingers into my cupped hands, pages of my heart’s book. Be bold. Pry them apart. If you open my hands, behold my heart. More than that, my hands open in supplication and are filled quite readily with divine energy. Touch me, and we both come away with something new. The power is in our imagination, to create new worlds before the final reality ravishes us.
Our beginning is in our end, so let’s start at the tail of the previous story. At the butts. The last time, much too long ago, fired by passion, I had the puissance to draw the longbow. Imagine the archery green, the smooth Scottish lawn, the medieval walled garden of the run-rig. The whisper of shaft against bow, the sudden entry. See how the flinching target pursed its wounds like prim mouths at the arrows’ slow extraction. I left the butt to mildew in the cold rain, and stored the bow and quiver of arrows inside the garden shed. Last I looked, the quiver had tipped over- a mouse perhaps? Whiskers all a-twitch. Or the cat following close behind, puzzled by spliced turkey feathers. Paws in pursuit. Even the creatures circle in their desire, and they’ve left my cedar arrows to lie scattered aimlessly on the workbench.
Then I met you. Then I returned from the long Winter and picked up one of the arrows, to admire its smooth body. I twirled the feathers and thought of your soft breath feathering across my forearm when I reached to pluck a stray hair off your breast. Through the course of those days, I did not coerce you. There’s a skill here, a game played between hunters, warily circling the spirals of the heart. Too revealing a glance from my steely eyes, and you’ll be off faster than a gazelle. When you do reward my patience by telephoning, joy leaps in me at the sound of your voice, until your small talk makes me wary, and then, you say it. You are scared. Scared of me, scared of yourself when you are with me, scared for your life as is was. Then we must pause in our pursuit. The receiver is heavy when I replace it. I don’t know if I will ever pick it up again to hear your voice.
So, my sleek longbow dozes, belly up on the rack above the window, gathering a patina of dust. If beauty could illuminate, it would outshine the glass, even with the silver northern sun, then the stalking moon spotlighting through.
They say it’s bad luck to watch the moon through glass, but it’s hard to avoid it happening, especially to those of us who yearn constantly for the lunar face of allegory. I say it’s hard to avoid bad luck. But hard to avoid good luck as well, so I’ll take the good with the bad, and never let it be said at the end of my life, that I refused a gesture of love in whatever form it took. The inappropriate or tasteless gifts. The inedible meal cooked with affection and high hopes. Grit in the unwashed asparagus, the sour oyster, the plonkish wine. The sting of the lash on the offering that is my body, to a woman who cannot love otherwise. How sweet the kiss that lingers on that burning flesh. No, there’s no bad or good, only life uncovered in its occult parts. And that’s where I plunge my arrows.
And that’s why two weeks later you miss the excitement you felt, the burning in your belly, the flattery of my piercing attention, and ask to meet in a neutral place. Coffee? Surrounded by the woes of the world. Not much of an aphrodisiac, but you can turn me over and around and inspect me from all sides at the truce of the watering hole. Careful what you stir up.
Memories quickly pass away, but they are distilled in the grain of our being. As in the wood of my beloved longbow, whose memories far surpass mine. Under its dusty blanket, it dreams of the English graveyard it was born in, of its mother yew competing with church spire and iron spear-heads on the gate for the most eloquent indicator of heaven’s direction. They point up, but I say look down. Immanence is imminent.
They say yew leaves are poisonous, and cattle and sheep avoid them, and so don’t enter the old graveyards to graze and knock over the stones. The deciduous unveiled in the evergreen beauty of the English churchyard, Norman perhaps, medieval in any event. Probably built over a pagan sanctuary, a grove of magic and connection.
Only connect. Can my longbow recall in its dense grain a distant tie to elder cousins, those that flexed their limbs in medieval times to hurl the rude shaft into a human’s soft trunk, death taking her down to the slow embrace, the complicated skein of mother yew’s twining roots? But yew takes so long, by the time the roots have caught her fast, there’s nothing left but bones.
If you go to an ancient graveyard, look carefully in the earth, between the erupting shafts of flowers, and you will see rich brown fragment of bone, bits of skull edged with connective structure, like a satellite picture of a river. You will find teeth resembling children’s milk teeth, which they may well be.
I don’t mind dying if love takes me there. Ancient Crone of Death, percolate up my bone chips, my teeth, bits of my skull. Lover, see our destiny, the cleansed and divided spoils of war from the indiscriminate dust. Our coupling forestalls and foreshadows the final embrace. But it’s not fearsome. Purified bones that never loved beyond their assumed capacity is what’s fearsome. Give me a reason to take up the bow again, to collect the scattered arrows back to the tight quiver. Give me a token of your love, I know it’s there, secretly pushing through the fertile ground of your hidden desire. Give me strands of your hair, and I will plait a bowstring that will sing like a harp for centuries.
You’re getting that look on your face again. The tips of your fingers touch your lips, and you do not speak. Your eyes are guarded. You are counting the cost, and finding it’s all downhill from here. What is lost, what is gained in a life as well-planned and executed as my herb garden. You see at the cliff’s edge my muddy hand grasping your delicate ankle, but it’s your fear creating nightmares. My hands are clean and washed and open in praise before the Eucharist of your body, the Thank You of our feast.
But back to the story. Shooting the butts. Shooting the butts is the best. Instrument of skill and death. I enjoy bending the longbow to my desires, melding my vitality to its quivering expectations.
The three-fingered glove is soft deerskin, double layered under the pads of the fingers, because the yew bow is too powerful to be pulled with bare skin. It demands I be in excellent physical condition, or I cannot draw it, nor hold it steady long enough to aim, and when the control is gone, only a fool will play.
I work the arm guard up along my inner forearm and tie the leather thong. One stunning slap of the bowstring against that soft flesh is the last careless mistake one makes. Then I insinuate the fingers of my right hand in the tight leather sheaths of the glove, and snap it at the wrist. Am I conveying to you the excitement of this process? The anticipation? I hook the black quiver to my belt. The arrows offer their feathered ends to my fingers. My wicked handmaidens, ready.
The bow is never left strung, or like a horse always on a tight rein, it will lose its elasticity, its springy responsiveness. The joy in its haunches. To create the right amount of tension, I twirl the bowstring, then hook it over the notch in a difficult maneuver. Have you ever bridled a mischievous stallion? That’s how it is, a dangerous moment. But the horse wants to leave the stall, and the bow wants to perform, and I want to escort them to the fulfillment of their own joy, and they know this, and eventually they bend their sinewy necks to my will.
The yew wood stretches and awakens, and the plucked string sings its deep note. It’s a production, getting the bow to submit and cooperate, part of the ritual riveting the attention, calling into trance. A gesture of respect, the willingness to do things properly despite the difficulty. Yes, the same courtesy I extend to you.
And so to the act itself. In the beauty of my garden is concealed my shooting range. Down the central path through the fragrant, perennial herbs, to the far wall, against it the willing target. It bares its breast to me, it shudders when the arrow enters. Halloween pumpkins end up there, lashed to the butt, to make a succulent feast for my arrows. Sometimes an effigy, if I’m working magic. Wax or clay. Shall I put your essence there, take the single long hair you left behind in the witch’s lair, weave it into my wax, and try you with the love-tipped arrow? How do you know I haven’t?
Stand behind me, press against my body, left side open to the target. Make my arms your arms, my body yours. Feel how I move.
Fletching adorns the cleft nock I take between my fingers. As I lift the bow, the smooth shaft slides along the arrowshelf with the sound of a gloved hand moving down a woman’s back. Do you know this enticing sound, and what it heralds? This is where the skill begins, in the mix and marriage of variety. The intricate discipline of not grasping the nock, lest the arrow be pulled off the bow’s shelf. Trusting to the bowstring to coax the arrow into position. The stance, the focus, the intention always in mind. That distant target, not so distant. All for naught without the strength to bend the bow.
This must come from the muscles of the back, not the arms. Feel my shoulders go hard. Put your mouth to the flexing wave moving under my skin.
In the desire-filled pause at full draw, bowstring pressed to my lips, feathers tickling my chin, the craft of instinctive shooting is given. No sterile sights for me, I prefer the deeper knowledge. It’s a gift, one that requires trust. This is the place all the elements come together to fire the result. I can’t hold it back any longer, the trembling is starting in my hand.
The release is like a sigh, my part is almost done, and I surrender to the gathering power. The bow comes to its own life, casting from its haunches the emissary dart. I’ve already wished it to its destination, and if I’ve been skillful in my execution, it will follow my sight.
A flash of arcless trajectory, the thrumming bow falls away. The arrow penetrates. Never in the same way twice. The novelty is an important aspect. I would turn and kiss you now, but you may still be playing the timid nymph, lightly touching my shoulder still, breathing in the scent off my neck, hoping I won’t notice. At least you have no delusions that I am your feminine Puck, your breasted, cloven insatiable satyr. And you won’t be offended or surprised when I do turn and slip an arm around your slender waist. You untangle yourself, your breath whispers over my flushed cheek, then you run away.
But not too far.
This is a change. Have you been coaxed to some invisible doorway? Was it a matter of time, of seasons coming into their own? Now, I’ll make a confession. My wooing with prose is almost done. Like the bow, my skill has brought you this far, and I lay at your feet the choice of beds. The cold earth. Or sheets woven by the angels.
Come to me, the threshold guardian. The gleaming-eyed expectant stillness before the dawn. Countless times this season has wheeled around, the earth inexorably readying itself for new life, gathering its wide haunches for the Spring. This spiraling ascent happening irregardless of our lives or deaths, with the same uncaring propulsion towards perfection. Shed the armor from your leafing boughs before it sets into a deadening encasement. Nature’s flowering urge is the same energy I offer and ask of you. My desire, death’s perpetual nemeses, flies true as the swift arrow. Come to me, while I can still raise the bow. Sing under my fingers, bend to my desire. Begin the ancient story now. Beloved, rise to meet me where I enter in.
END
First published in the Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Vol. 3, #3, 2006