fighte fuaighte ("woven into and through each other")

gaelic.

my father's tongue.

fado. fado.

anam cara, listen to my tale. 

once upon a time.

in a lonely boat

sat a fisherman

who had drifted far 

from known waters.

he did not know

that other fishermen

stayed away from this bay.

"haunted waters,"

they would murmur.

oblivious, he sat and

his hook drifted

and sank

and flew

with the currents,

reaching down

to grasp and settle

in the bones

of skeleton woman's rib cage.

he pulled,

happy to have snagged such a large fish.

surely he would be seen a hero

in the eyes of his hungry people.

but skeleton woman

resented the disturbance

and struggled and thrashed 

against forced verticality.

her stubborn action

tangled the lines

and tangled her bones

and the kayak above

bucked

and

shook.

yet, for all her fighting,

she continued to rise.

he did not see her bald head surface.

 he did not see her coral-boned body

and the crustaceans on her old ivory teeth

until she clattered before him.

"aggggghhhh!" he wailed

and paddled hard for shore.

but no matter how he maneuvered his kayak,

she stayed with him,

blowing breath across the waters.

he leaped out when he reached shore

and ran across frozen earth.

and she followed behind him,

bumpety-bump in the night.

into his ice tunnel he crawled,

and she crawled behind him,

knee in her ribs,

foot over her elbow,

heel on her shoulder.

at some point

his fear abandoned him

and he looked kindly upon
this boney woman his lines had ensnared.

he sang, "oh, na, na, na.

oh, na, na."

as he gently untangled her

and dressed her in furs

when her bones were set.

and she

laid still 

and said nothing,

praying he would not 

take her out to the rocks

and break her apart completely.

drowsy from his labor and terror,

he soon drifted to the land of dreams.

she watched as some action therein

led him to shed a tear.

with a bony finger,

she reached out,

caught it, and drank it up greedily.

this single tear was living water,

and she drank, and drank, and drank

until her thirst retired.

and then she began to sing

and sang to fill her body with flesh --

with breasts long enough to throw over her shoulders.
sang for hair and pale moonbeam feet.

sang for the ripe divide between her legs

and all the other things a woman needs.

and when she was done,

she sang the sleeping man's clothes off

and tangled in the skins with him,

joining together in a good and lasting way.

...dadme la muerte que me falta...
so that the life i agreed to can live.

(inspired by and built upon clarissa pinkola estes's telling of "skeleton woman,"
which can be found in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves.)