Isis & Ra: Acts 7-10 (End)

VII. Snake

Wari now Isis played with anyone who would come, and charged them when she won.
Even the children had to pay.
But all she would take were their pebbles and their seeds.
She kept enough for the next day's play;
The rest she lobbed at Ra's ankles
Day after day after day.
She drank wine from jugs people brought, and smashed them--
Just missing his feet, day after day.

She's just wrong, the people said.
But we like her.
We like her incense--we like her talk.

Food they gave her, day after day.
And always some brought heavy crockery
Just to watch how she'd smash them,
And do what they would never do, aim for Ra's foot, Ra's shin.
Thus her hours piled like the potsherds
Day after day after day.

Which of us knows what stung him?
Her jangling, her shrapnel, her rants?
The most available tale: she finally landed terracotta in his flesh.
That one jug she got just the right lift on--
Just the right arc--
They say its pieces sheathed themselves so hard he nearly tripped.
Of course, he kicked the splinters out,
And now they comet blind paths somewhere in dark.

But when he had righted himself, knowing himself lovesome as blood--
Lovesome as flowers, as beer, as gold--he spat beside her.
Perhaps he meant it a game.

Down did the bright slime spatter,
Arrowing rainbows as it splayed, adhering at last onto dirt.

Isis sprang, scooping the mud to her heart
(smacking off the several children who wanted to wade in and play).
Ra was already long gone past.
She gathered it up in her skirt, and hurried home.

In the shadow of her lodging, she laid the wet earth in a skein.
It lay, as mud will do.
The dirt of it leached, swirled restless into its coat of salivary slime.
She watched it, as the daylight angled, withdrew, and mimed death.
Ra was far off--probably right over her old back yard.

Over the mud she leaned,
Over it she leaned with all her breath.
Over it she told it--
Be what I'll have you be.
Deny me not, she said.

The serpent that stirred was pissed.
It was dirt, but now she had compounded it of something that one might imagine gold.
Its comfort could never be.

It raised its head, and leveled, and gazed around.
Bitch, go to hell, to Isis it hissed.

Good boy, was Isis' retort.

It slept between her breasts, or wherever:
Honor this messenger she should, she felt,
So it nosed itself wherever.
It was so cold, though, and a prick.
One interminable night,
She warmed its complaining coils in the crook of her leg.
Don't you have any fowl? It grouched.
Just you, she told it.
At that, it planted its cold snout in the crease of her hip.
Piece of shit!! She yelled. She had to arrest herself from hurling it at the wall.
Wait, she told it, cooling.
Sugar, you'll have your sugar soon.

Damn handmaids, it spat,
And wound itself round to sleep.

Isis woke with it perched on the cheek of her ass.
as if she were a convenient rock.

It was irritated that she had it no breakfast that day.
You're wrong, she replied.
Let's find you meat.
And she threw it in the road in Ra's way.

Bitch! the snake squawked.
First of all you wake me from perfect quiet mud
And then you have me have to be gold--
And now you throw me back in the thrice-accursed
Shit-filled,
Child-stomped,
Dog-pissed road--
Bitch, why don't you--

Ra's foot crushed its head.
His heel drowned it in mud.
And being itself,
And being magic,
Before dying
Like a whip did it rebound.

Its fangs, intact, it threw into Ra's foot.
Unknowing, its spent head clung.
And--
(Let us sing a little song)
Unknowing--
(Let us sing a song, for a hopeless little one)
All that it was, was poison and went in.

The children played with its gold empty skin.

VIII. The Wreck

Ra strode a while before he noticed something wrong.
He got above wasteland before he fell.
Isis realized she had not thought this all through.

Day was in shambles. The only light was a sunset at noon,
A bridal gown of rags.
The crops were in panic: Where am I? Cried the wheat.
The cattle wandered like drunks, and like drunks began to bawl.
The people just didn't know what to think.

Isis constructed a broad-backed bird that she rode to where Ra was.

Below, blades were gathering throughout the land, and torches were being lit.
Her name was on everyone's lips--
Then her name was in everyone's throats.
I am an idiot, Isis said.
But Nile—she loves me for my singing,
And she'll believe anything from one that she loves.
If she could, she'd drop open her legs
every night
And feel everything that loves her swim in.

So, the damned flood came at the wrong time that year.
You can still find old people who still bitch about their crops, and their farms, and their ruin, and that meddling cunt Isis. She just wanted to get Ra, you know, they say. All that secret name stuff, that's the story she'll tell.
Though of course we offer her incense always, you understand. . .

Isis broke her nose on the bank.
The flood was so violent—well, and she so anxious to get off at the right stop--
When she at last reached him,
her face was a bloody mess.

Ra was dying mean.

Your sister's monthlies, is it, he snarled.

Some for you, she snotted, right in his mouth.

He seemed to welcome the protein. . .but all went quiet.

Gambling—she knew now that was what she had done.
The sun, the Sun—sinking to real and irrevocable death on a bed right in this room.
Gold flesh slacking to bone, the foot-wound exploring decay.
His carnelian eyes, petrifying--
mere carven-stone lamps, their oil drying up, flames guttering as in wind.
She was gaming, all the bones in the world in her throw.
How cold, she wondered, can all the world go?

Chaos without, cries pouring through all the wind's channels--
From every compass heading, a horizonless navy hemming her in.
She herself was mortal, after all.
She knew now she might have to decide--
To lose.
But she would choose.
Her face she made like basalt, like bronze;
Her voice,
indifferent , like sea..
Her ears, dry reeds ranked in wind,
And her heart,
A pocket in muck.

You have to help me, he said. The world, the kicking world--it all depends.

It does, she answered. On you. On you right now.

You did this.

Me? I know not.

You like to keep secrets.

As do you. Yours is the price.

IX. Sway

The sky was a black mirror, scarred.
He fanned a kaleidoscope of blab.

He interlocked prisms of reason into ramparts none could blast.

He wrought fine nightmares,
filigree of fear no leviathan could escape.

He sang—a mocker, invoking every voice that had spikes.
They stabbed like sugar, like ice, and like glass.

She stood above him, enraptured:
All this does is strengthen my heart.
If I relent and live, I will never recover from grief of knowing this joy.
Keep on, she told him. Keep on.

All the world! He screamed. The world!
On what will you stand? You fool, the world gone?

The world, he groaned, all the world.
All the world, she whispered. Give.
And so the debate began.
The servants outside the chamber succumbed to sleep or wandered off to watch the end of the world . The crops began to wither;cattle made an effort at going mad, and the people just mostly got drunk.

She crossed her arms, and so did he.
She crossed her arms in conviction.
He crossed his arms for death.

I'm going, he said. Are you ready to come?
All your arabesquery, your armory of words--
You're going down too.
All your jewels, your ashes--
Swallowed up, silenced down, too.

Fine, she stood and told him. Let's go.

Beyond them,
The skies were bled out, and so was earth.
Just enough ichor for delirium, that was all.
Just enough--
For Isis, for darkness, and for Ra.

He lay,
Looking up like land. This I know not, he said.
I know it not, and I am afraid.
Down upon him she gazed, down.
This, she murmured, no mortal should know.

That should be enough, he told her.
More than any mortal, you know now.

Not quite enough, she said.
Reave it, she commanded,
Like a concubine's legs,
Split me wide your heart.

No!!!
All this went far through that night.
The servants were mistuned lute strings,
wavering, ready to bring platters, clean linens, run news--something, anything--
anything that would bring all to dawn.

But at last it was nothing but this:

Keep it, she told him.
Keep it, go die.
Keep it, and blast all the fools and the wild.
Keep it and cut me down too-
Keep it—you don't know how it feels to open and say it, do you?
With that, she won.
He felt his throat fall open like a purse.
He smiled.

Tell me, she said again.
I will, he said, and did.

X. Now

There was no fanfare; the next morning tough young Ra went striding as if no interruption had been.
Everyone else, except Isis, forgot.
On the ground, the children did not note that Isis, or the body that passed for her,
Never got bored with wari and had an ear that had been burned off

Isis had left herself behind
as Ra had left spit in mud.
But up above all light, coil by coil,
Coil by jeweled and mud-swaddled coil,
Isis commanded the choir of serpents that was herself.
She bid them rise
She bid them stand.
They rose: They stood, They sang.
The galaxy woke, unwound, and wailed.
So, she murmured. My mystery solved.
Idiot bitch, the one snake said.

Ra and Isis never spoke again.
One would think the gods would gab at parties;
But Isis and Ra did not.

She: What else can he tell me? What he said was all.
I brim with the black beer of bubbling stars.
Black am I, pissing light.

Ra was quiet in the pool of his heart.
But that calm wore thin like a cloak of clouds.
The sun is always sore,
And must rise up, or fall.

Who's here? Ra asks.
Am I lone?

Once, there was someone,
And I spoke.
I had to.
I spoke.

Who's there?
Will no one else come?

Won't you come?
Won't you tell me your travels?
Won't you scribe me up a map?
And could you make it twist me backward towards the east?

And then, if I beg you,
If I threaten, if I pay,
Can I give you something and send you out back?

There's a fire out there no one started--
Make it burn.