I pulled my hair from the earth,
where it had grown into a white
mycelium web, and spread itself wide
across the mountain. I could still feel
the faint heartbeat of fungi and wood rot.
I rose up from the wild grass,
brushed the leaves from my hair
and walked. The sky groaned,
limestone hissed and cracked,
thousands of saplings arched
their spines shut behind me.
In the valley, my body became fruit.
I spread my fingers across the trailing moss
and grew and grew for a lifetime
until the sunlight became too much to bear.
In the beginning,
I built myself a house with no windows.
I tore the great palm heart from my chest
and fed it to the young that had sprung up
in my footprints, mewling and wet.
The more I licked them, the colder they became,
so I built them rooms made of feathers and moss.
My body grew softer, larger,
rough and luminous like a boa.
The children were afraid, so I became fearless.
Because they were afraid,
I ate the world, spat out the antlers.
The children cried out for fire
so I learned to make it from stone.
They wept for water, so I dug deep
till it pulsed up from clay.
They grew into beautiful, fearsome creatures,
onyx eyed, sure-hooved and silver scaled.
One day I left the door open, and they fled
into darkness, leaving no tracks.
Alone in the valley, I longed to be a moon.
At night I became so weightless
that I could not bear my own skin.
In the windowless house, moths crept
from floorboards, burrowed
in my hair and against my throat
beat their paper wings against the wind
until we rushed through the walls and flew.
In the beginning, I had no name.
Before that, only darkness and longing.
Even now, it wells up in the undergrowth
through layers of mud, leaf and bone,
the chemical need of small creatures
iridescent and always in motion
small cogs clicking away among arterial roots.
Even now, it overgrows my house,
trailing each surface, climbing brick by brick
lining cupboards, gathering in corners,
the panicked red dust of unnameable remains.
When you have already been a mountain,
what is left to long for?
In the beginning, I was breath humming
through rough bark and tender shoot.
I was only mud and memory.
I lay myself down in the tall grass.
I long for nothing but home.
