SELECTED POETRY

by
Catherynne M. Valente

SEDNA, SUBMERGED

I.

Father, forgive me,
I was so hungry.
I opened my eyes�one at a time,
as each lid came free of mother
like a pair of rough pearls pulled
from a closed fist.

It was all I could do not to chew the sinews
from her thigh as was drawn out by dry, flat hands.
It was so thick with meat and fat,
the smell of tallow and sealskin.

Her milk fell through me;
mother-swollen, I starved.

It began with the basket �
I only meant to suckle the furs
to soothe my breast-chafed gums,
I swear it, but the musk of their bristles,
and the salt-pelt!
I swallowed it all,
and a wet, black stain
spread out beneath me
stinking of shame.

It was the ice-house, then, and the caribou-bone slats
arching up towards the smoke-hole,
and the lichen (rich as crisped fishtail!)
the grated hearth, smoky and coarse �
my mouth unlatched to take it all,
quietly, quietly, so that I would not wake
mother and father, whose breath rattled.
the white floors and the clumping snow,
thick splinters of chair and bed-post.
But these too fell through my ribs,
like ice-shavings through a bone-sieve.
House-bloated, I starved.

Father, forgive me
I was so hungry.
I watched you as you slept, muscles shining
in the moon, rubbed with seal-oil,
hard and bright. I could smell the salt of your body,
and my mouth wept for you.

And arm, I thought, could not be too much
for a daughter to ask �
no father would deny it, not when his girl�s
belly howled so,
a waste of tundra under her navel.

I am sorry, I am sorry,
but it was so sweet,
like blood-broth boiling.

II.

Please.

Please. Let me up.

I will not do it again. I will be a good girl.
I will make you a new arm of moss and wolfbone.

(The canoe rocked in the dark water,
and I clutched uselessly at the leather rim,
my wet, black hair streaming over the sea,
and gooseflesh rose on my skin,
ocean-sodden, shivering,
under your impassive stare.)

It is cold down here, Father.
Let me back up, let me into the boat.
I know you did not mean it,
the current was so rough,
and I must have fallen �
I must have fallen.

(I will remember this, years hence, in the dark.
The flick-flash of a stone knife �)

No, Daddy, you�re hurting me �

(your pursed lips as
you sawed through skin, knuckle, marrow � )
Oh, please, I want to go home�
(the little splash
as my fingers tumbled off, one by one,
into the black sea � )
I�m sorry, I�m sorry,
I�ll be good,
I�m afraid, please �
(the thumbs last,
scrabbling at the edge of the canoe, difficult
to cut through � )
Daddy, Daddy, I can�t hold on,
help me, help �

(so white, so white in the water,
like dead things, like snow, and your face
rising away.

You did not cry at all.)

III.

I fell a long way. All around,
my fingers floated like severed tusks,
their whiteness a comfort.

But these too left me, becoming
unasked,
walrus, sea-lion, whale,
fingernails stretching into narwhal.
My own flesh swam slowly away from me,
afraid, too, of my yawning throat.

Which of us did that, Father? Which of us
should be called leviathan-god?

I watched them go.

You have rebuilt the house by now,
but I am not invited;
I am still hungry, you argue,
and mother treasures her new hearth,
the basket-pelts, her ice-throne.

Besides, my stump-hands embarrass
the new children.

The seafloor is a frozen waste,
and I starve there, wrath-blue,
under the glacier-ceiling,
my wet, black hair spreading out from me
like stones growing. It is
cold in Adlivun,
where you buried me,
and I cannot tell the souls from kelp,
the chum you spill overboard each night,
that drift down to me like thumbs,
like snow.

� Catherynne M. Valente
Reproduced with permission

---

SKADI IN THE FOREST OF LEGS

I.

I came to the scrim of heaven with Idun�s apples
strung through my hair like clay beads.
I came to the scrim of heaven with my father�s acrid wings
stinking of roasted bones.
I came to the scrim of heaven with a single red fruit
bound into my hoary jaws like a gag.

I came to the ash-pale walls of Hrimthurs the rime-giant
on silver snowshoes lashed with pine.
I came to the bronze-bolted door of Gladsheim
with my chest girded in ice.
I came to the wasted plain of Ida
and snapped the red fruit to its seedy core.

My hands were full of death and they paid me
with red-bearded laughter �
I held out my father�s denuded corpse,
embalmed in a smear of apple meat
no more beautiful or fell
than a rooster plucked for feasting.

I asked for death-payment.
I asked for weregild bright and cold.
I asked for grief and long laments.
I asked for black veils and mead-songs.

But they gamboled like village fools,
heads all motley velvet and jangling bells.
They leapt around me like mummers,
leering with pumpkin-faces and lantern-eyes.
They made my father�s dead limbs to dance
with shambling steps.

I cared nothing for their sport, and I expected
nothing of their gold.
I came to take from them� it is the right
of winter to take, to make bereft, to steal away
in the night�s freeze. And so, when the horse-haired one
tied himself to a goat, and all looked to me
to see me laugh like birches shaking,
I let my lips curl back
into something like a smile.
I let my orphaned throat
croak and tear,
and the sound was not unlike mirth.

These were the funeral rites of Thjazi Storm-Boar:
a blonde drunkard knotting his testicles to a goat�s tail.

II.

Instead of gold they piled up gods
like logs on a steam-morned riverside.
Instead of gold they laid out husbands
one after the other, like a hundred shackles
shaped to my own wrists.
Instead of gold, they showed me men,
nothing but men, hairy and dull as wattle.

Oh, they will tell you I was a silly girl�
vain as swans, eyes full of pig-lust.
They will tell you I was enthralled of
that line of stinking feet, the yellow nails
and matted hair, the calf-muscles like sacks
of beef, thighs reddened with the wind I bellow,
the winter I carry with me
like a son gnawing at my breast.
They will tell you my eyes were full
of those mange-ridden shepherds
scratching at their bellies.

It is true that there was one pair of feet
more beautiful than all the rest�
if beauty can be said to lie
in the brine-crusted ankles
of a fisherman dragging
his nets and cages behind him.

Surely, surely one of those cages
was the right size for me.

I put my white hand on the sand-scoured calf,
the calf which came from dunes blown with wildflowers
and barnacles warm and wet on ship-shanks�
frost crept over the coarse black hairs.
Icicles formed on the knobbled toes.
A thin drift of snow sifted onto the skin.

They cackled like a cat-chorus, clapping each other
about the shoulders, laughing again, again,
through their golden beards and d�colletage�
certain I meant to chose their prettiest boy,
certain I meant to mount the square-jawed bowman
with the shadow of mistletoe greening his breast.

How unfortunate, they clucked, that the stupid milkmaid
fell in love with the whale-ribbed sea god instead!
Women are such greedy, frivolous little mice,
are they not?

I hissed like snowshoes sluicing through the tundra,
and in the daisy-spring of Asgard
I froze the beard of the sea-rat.

III.

I came to the scrim of heaven with Idun�s apples
strung through my hair like clay beads.
I came to the scrim of heaven with my father�s acrid wings
stinking of roasted bones.
I came to the scrim of heaven with a single red fruit
bound into my hoary jaws like a gag.

I am the berry flash-frozen in December �
I am the reindeer�s tracks.
I am the storm-god�s daughter �
I am the death of all apples.

With a breastplate of snow-cased branches
I stole the warm ocean-wind,
the pleasant waters salt and shallow,
the summer tidepools red and green.
I took the shipwright with his cloak of oars,
I took the brawling, bright-haired boy
who was loved well.

I set foxes on his cages and unloosed
a slough of flashing fish from his oily nets.
In the crags of Thrymheim I closed him up �
silvered those fat calves in ice.
My chaste wedding kiss
shriveled his tongue black and gangrene �
and it was then,
for the first time,
that his blue-thumbed body seemed beautiful,
and I laughed in the star-clotted mist,
in my orphaned throat.

Before his great glass stalactite
I lay my father�s acrid wings,
a sacrifice still smoking.
Poor, broken things:

all those ashen feathers,
drifting in the sea-tinged air
like snowflakes.

� Catherynne M. Valente
Reproduced with permission

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ORIGIN MYTH

Once there were two of me.

The other was a fish, halo-gilled and tongue a-silver. It grew out of me, out of my throat like a voice, a bubble in my flesh that grew, day after tide. It developed alarming eyes, fringed in lashes green and bristled as spider-legs, a mouth which in its turn grew an alarming tooth, nestled in all that pink like a hungry pearl. Webbed fingers protruded�the thin membrane hanging between its bones were curtains filtering a glabrous sun. Day after tide it bulged in its way, another me springing from the first.

I was not frightened of it, but it is important that you know�from the beginning my skin was never my own. In the icelight of the nameless womb, my body was ambitious, and tried to split, thinking itself the primordial cell, diamond-ribosomed and infinite.

It could not quite manage the feat.

Instead this throat-sibling grew, hanging in its throb like a necklace, and I watched it struggle to breathe the water as easily as I did; I watched it open and close its piscine mouth.

There came a tide when it did not grow any longer. It had warbled enough, it could not fashion a limb which would separate it from me.

It wavered in the current, confused.

And I looked into its eyes, these other eyes which were my own, these arachnid moons that blinked in their wane. I looked into its eyes and touched it with my own half-formed palms, no more than fans of glassy bones, pulling it in for a sisterly kiss.

And with a mouth that had not yet learned to hinge, I ate my twin in the deeps of the dark, and closed my lips like clouds behind her.

Now, all these years later, in the root-system of my belly, she sits and practices her glottals, and taps out rhythms on the drum of my navel.

� Catherynne M. Valente
Reproduced with permission