On Montsalvat, the castle where the chambers sway, a fair young wench once stole into the quarters of her king and gave herself to him as a girl of pleasure. He possessed her with an unquenchable thirst for her body, and paid her for her services a handful of glittering rubies.
Sheltered by the deep folds of her garments, the girl guarded Hades’ greeting to her like a treasure of high worth — one that need only be possessed for it to unfold its power — and bore it gathered up in a cloth into a pouch, always close to her breast.
Something had changed since she had given herself to the Grail King. Whenever knights who found their way into the grotto of Montsalvat now slaked their thirst upon her, she gave them, to carry away, an unspeakable secret. The brave Grail-seekers whom fate had cast into the depths of the castle grew drunk on her as on heavy wine, and when they went their way again, they were changed. Hardier, bearing a secret unspeakable as that of the sphinxes, which strengthened them — yet they could not say why.
How this knowledge, the thing men call the erotic, propagates itself lies hidden in the allegory of the blazing candle. It reveals itself once one has gazed long into the dancing flame. How long? Long enough to see within it the woman with surging hips, or that other whom one once glimpsed, fleeting and reeling, from the corner of the eye at some feast — for at feasts one sees her always. Is she real, this time? Hunger, thirst and weariness have worn reason down.
There have been those already who thought that behind the slender flame Isis tarried — as behind a bleeding veil, the glittering breast — and almost she turns her gaze upon you and begins, with her voice, to anoint your ear, for it sounds like melting amber in a ransacked crypt: My absolute sister.
Ah, who has stolen from me the god out of the harts?
I am one of the girls of the Grail. My name is Salome, and I stand before you, young knight. You have ridden far, and it has made you weary. But your weariness is not of the kind that takes a night slept through for curare, to cool your brow. YOU have grown weary as one grows old, and now you stand before me. The hand of time runs on in black velvet. Melancholy is abroad, and through you too it passes, like a surge of sepia through Atlantean ruins. Slow, dense and …true.
I wear my hair braided into a knot with the purple ribbon, as the Greek woman wore it when she knelt before Aphrodite. You fancy me the silhouette of an antique courtesan, risen as from a shard of clay. Do you grieve for the broken pitcher in which the thirst of Dionysus was once kindled? The beauty of my body is a gift to the Muses.
I draw near you in silks, all but flowed toward you: Angel, I called to you, let us stand like a wick and its daughter, a spiral staircase of wax.
I hover about your body, touched your hand with my slender fingers, and there I sang my girlish laughter.
You are a Christian, yet my eyes call back to you a time when concubinage stood in free consent between the gods and women. I am slender and serene, like an Attic spring with a white nape. Turn freely into my lap. Its rose is yours, to deck your member; say thou to me, name me freely as you will: Isis, Grail or Magdalene. I am your girl of pleasure.
Drunkenness, the first torch is aflame.
On bare feet, as the nymphs walk, I dance around you. You let it please you, and so I loosed a veil from my dress. At its hem garnets clatter, like lusts to be snatched at/ they hang like wine-tears or wound-pearls at my leg, decking my hip in rhythm.
Then the veil glides over your naked face, over the lids and over the lips/
our desire has fallen from the same wound. You ask yourself where it lies? Is it the gaping behind the eye? Or the one behind the first word?
Numbness, the second torch too was burning. Follow me, I adjured you, and you followed me to the watercolour threshold, where one thing flows into its own likeness.
Catch the red pearls with the tip of your tongue, drink as Magdalene at the body of Christ, for he was her grave and he was her garden. That is the cannibal truth of bodies: come into the grotto — passion is the Corybant of suffering.
A god holds sway in us whenever we desire; and each time we consume ourselves in longing for another, we begin, in that thirst, to feel our powerlessness before his infinitude.
I am only one of the girls we are, here to trace your path with flourishes of swaying hips. I do not ask how many jewels you paid the cherub to be let into the grotto. Poor knight! Did you think the Grail was like the accolade — a thing honestly won, a thing to be found for you like a treasure, in mute and shimmering devotion, like a chest full of goblets, jewels and coins? Like shell-grease in the moonlight, in the cabin of a wreck on the sea floor?
Or did you believe it were like beauty in the veil of my scent — that it lay like pollen on my lips, that it hid in the flowing of the garments, in the rose of my lap?
Beg freely for the coup de grâce; your Grail is always already spilled, poured out into the air of Montsalvat, into the air, the drunken, drunken air/ where the torches crackle and the girls float/ My God looks on! / An angel has given herself up.
Yet the feeling dies out, the flame passes away.
My absolute sister,
who has stolen from you the angel out of the harnesses?
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