Dreaming of an Altogether Different Place

On her feet she put a pair of shoes made of stone. Until these wear out, she said, I will not cease from journeying.

To an altogether different place where this time my grandfather will not have come from a landlocked country. He will not be any longer rooted in a dark wood waiting for the ax, petrifying until iron bites iron, no dog-bites-dog world, this time he will be a confluence of rivers flowing to the sea. The sea will spread itself before him inviting like a weave of silk waltzing in the light, and we will imagine that we can trust ourselves with all security on its waves just as we feel ourselves to be safe wrapped in dreams. My grandfather will be lithe as a salmon, he will be all his life a fisherman and will sew his pea jacket with sequins like the scales of the fish that leap into his boat recognizing one of their own. And the fish will not at all taste of barley; the taste of barley will not be in the sea. This time when he captures the Lorelei he will let her sing to him. She will bear him sons and teach them to see in the tips of the waves nipples waiting to suckle them. All around her the air will throb with her breathing in and out like singing, and the air breathed in by her sons will pluck from their vocal cords, like harpstrings, the songs their mother gives them. This time they will not seal their lips. In their middle years they will not forsake the sea to seek out landlocked places where they can put down roots and silence into trees with hearts of wood. Women will not say of them, You could drive an ax into their hearts and they would not weep. Their father, my grandfather, will not run away from the sea. He will not tell his sons, Your mother is dead forever and buried in the sea. He will not cut off their fishtails that they had from their mother and force them to grow legs, feet, toes so reminiscent of tree roots for the sake of their souls. It will make you human, if I deprive you of your last comfort it will make you human. He will not say this. This time he will shed tears as the ax falls to cut off his sons’ tails so that they cannot go back to the sea and desert their father in his need. Their father’s tears will touch their hearts, they will keep their father’s tears in their hearts even as their hearts harden. Their father’s tears will be as salt as the sea, this time they will remember their father’s tears when they need that final comforting when they wake as if from dreaming. This time women will not say of them, You could drive an ax into their hearts and they would not weep.