A Clarification On "The Wren".

Having come back inside and suddenly turned on harsh fluorescent lighting in the bathroom (the Husband is a light-sensitive sleeper, and 4:45am comes early), it occurred to me that the previous post might need some clarification.

The sex angle is not just a random bit of titillation. See, I went out for a glass of wine and some paganly surfing when I got home, the Husband expressing two desires: one, that his fairly newly legal wife might come back in and make with the sexy when she was done with wine and surfing, and two, that he would be allowed to nap until such sexy happened.

So I came back in and was a happily obliging wife in a room dark and quiet, lit only by candles and serenaded only by the purring of the cat and the contented sighs of the dog. Those candles were honey candles, lit in front of Their cabinet, and then I slunk out in my bathrobe, covered in sex, to go deal with Death in my own weird way.

I don't know if I'm just starting to sound more like Ms. Dirty of Graveyard Dirt, but I doubt she'd find anything odd about me being out there in a bathrobe and the pair of Converse low-tops I wore to our wedding not-quite-a-week-ago, sniffing the magnolia scent in the air and the dead-wren smell so close to hand and the smell of me and Husband on my skin.

And then I came in here, lurking in the bathroom, trying to capture what I always think of as the wildness of the woods at night - a phrase that popped into my head some sixteen years ago when reading the "Song of Amergin". It was the "who knows the place where the sun rests" part; I immediately thought, "What is wilder than the woods at night?" No-one has ever given me an answer.

That, really, is where I am from and belong. Covered in horse and sweat and sex, carrying a dead bird around at odd hours so I can preserve its bones so that I can talk to it later, surprised once again at unnatural light. Don't get me wrong; I like my hot showers and Internet and being able to read after the sun goes down. But after being outside, seeing by either moon or stars, I always react to electric light like I'm unfamiliar with it. It looks odd, as I always think it must look to the animals who come up to our windows in the dark.

So there's your context; a strange yard with some weird things afoot, a witch who makes with the sex and then goes out to deal with the death, and the smell of honey candles, flickering in front of images of Them that I'm sure any of our ancestors could have and probably did make. A husband sleeping after his wife came to him like a succubus, a dog curled into a ball on a blanket in front of the altar, a black cat sprawled on the floor. And nothing wilder than the woods at night, surrounding all this on at least one side.