AGELESS CONFESSIONS

By Lilith Street

The wooden lady was the form of the Virgin Mother, in the prow of the ship headed for the bays of Portugal. Made completely of wood, her stone-like form was carved from the hulk of a tree. She was now silvery, grown soft and had a mystical appearance. The salt of the ocean had done its work. An almost catatonic figure, she was heavy, and no one could move her.

An unknown artist in London paints the images for the sacred book the Fleurs de Lys. It is given as a Christmas gift to nine-year-old Henry VI, in honour of the marriage of the Duke of Bedford to Anne of Burgundy. Her father did not know she was even an artist, and had her locked in an asylum called Bedlam. He assumed she was only employed as the scullery maid in the castle. But the prince had held the very book in his hands, and locked it away in his royal library. It was sitting there in all its splendour as a tribute to the truth.

From a king of the Old World with an olive branch to an olive oil prophetess. . . From a fleur de lys manuscript during the Renaissance to a fleur-de-lis in ironwork featuring the work of Miss Elizabeth. . . From a visit with a royal princess to a wild lily pinned on an ebony gate . . . there are many forms of confession, of becoming ageless and innocent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781387744541

Book preview

Copyright

© Copyright 2022 The Wild Lily Institute.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, except for brief quotes, without the written permission of the author.

This work of fiction in segue is based on a true story about real people and real occurrences. Names and details have been changed to protect the identity of persons and to protect confidentiality.

IBSN 978-1-387-74454-1

First Edition: First Printing 2022

Cover design and interior layout: Voetelle Art & Design

Cover photo: Adobe Stock Extended License

Published by:

Potter’s Press  Potter's Logo.jpg

a division of  The Wild Lily Institute

P.O. Box 3366

Mission, B.C. Canada

V2V 4J5

www.wildlilyinstitute.com

Dedicated to Melody

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Quote

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When poets become buildings,

they would be grand

and intricate

edifices, with rooms

containing carved benches

and small, locked cupboards.

–Onjana Yawnghwe, When Poems Are Rooms

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At length I remembered the last resort

of a great princess who,

when told that the peasants had no bread,

replied: Then let them eat brioches.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

Section I: Veiled

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Prologue

Jerusalem, 985 BC

The crown of Israel lay on the dresser in front of the artisan vase with a flowering olive branch. It was solid gold, and its jewels included the amethyst. That was a prophetic stone. He had been anointed by Samuel. He had been only a boy in the fields.

He was now King. He folded his thick arms. He was a songwriter but had grown tired of songs. The harp had been blood. It had been his nightingale for years, soothing his gods. There was a suppleness in his face and hands, from the olive oil in the bowl beside him. His hair was now oiled with the anointing oil of spikenard and cassia.

God have mercy on us, he had prayed. The mercy seat was the throne of David. Many kings would descend from him. He was Israel’s chosen King in the Golden Age.  The women of Israel washed out white wool and prayed for him. They knit blankets for their children, and he prophesied to them that they were knitting their very children together in the womb. How he was calm.

Calming mad kings was once his boyhood endeavour. He strummed, he chanted, but he wrote for one. Kings grow old and die. He wanted to be ageless.

He piled his poems. Young shepherd boys don’t usually rise up to take the place of tall powerful men, he had thought out on the plains. He had been a shepherd boy. He lit a rustic fire, and pulled his wool cloak tighter. Not in this kingdom anyhow. Their dark heads and even darker minds were saddled with helmets. When there was a war, they spilled blood. They took wives.

David had been a fair boy with a stone, a sling, and a psalm. He killed giants to the tune of battle songs, as armies watched in rank. But this was a different time. It was a time to gather one’s power. The weak of the kingdom were becoming weaker. They were running out of spiritual food.

It was like a siege. They had been taken captive spiritually. No one could go in or out, and the food supply dwindled. The women gathered herbs and boiled them in hot water. The men were uneasy. They were afraid for themselves, and afraid for their wives. Usually spiritual words spilled from their lips like grapes.

It was their unselfconscious moments, the light of their eyes, the music of their worship that he craved to know again. Their safety was usually unnoticed, and unseen. A child crawled into his mother’s lap. A daughter sang in the wind.

David had a gold amethyst crown, but he knew the jewels of Israel were in its silent and poignant moments. He could tell when there was trouble, they needed a prophet. This would be a standard and a sign to Israel. His brow furrowed. Who was the closest prophet to God right now, he thought querying the empty grey sky. It had been refusing to rain for some time.

His eyes were grey too, as he walked outside Jerusalem and watched the sparrowhawks in the desert. Their blue was almost the colour of rain. They were like a stone in a silver setting. Over the flat, arid plains and soundless sky, he followed their ascent. They winged high into the pale naked clouds. Another line occurred to him. He followed its train, then caught his breath. It was another song. He hummed the tune as he memorized its refrain.

He was out every morning, walking in the garden, but the overcast skies were almost poisonous, and refused to answer his plea. They rebelled against the light silently. Israel needed a woman poet and someone who could play, preferably. Someone he could love, even more. Someone who demanded his allegiance. Loyalty was everything in a time of treason. People were restless when they were hungry.

Abigail was skilled. He had taught her to play the harp. She could play when she knew he was troubled. She only played for him. The tapestries on the wall were ornate, shadowed in the hallways of the palace. They hid their beauty in the dark.

The bronze strings echoed across the stone floors, as she played to the Selah. She paused. Doves fluttered at the window as he drew back the drapes. The morning sun was his illumination.

He was taking all he professed as the keys to the gate of love, the Gate of David: his was a steady gaze to Abigail last night. But could she become a poet and prophet? Was she the woman he dared believe could lead a people under an oracle? She had once prophesied that he would be King, and the people of Israel had not forgotten.

There was an olive tree in the courtyard that was gnarled and had grown ancient now. It roots were buried deep in the earth. It was a tree without words, but it had lived 17,000 years. When they harvested the olives, they would shake and beat the tree with nets under it. When the Father harvested the nations, would there be nets too? he wondered.

I will make you a harvester of my olive tree, the voice spoke. Perhaps it was an angel. I am from your lineage, the voice continued. I will be named by your name, called the Son of David. The person was invisible, yet David sensed a presence.

Who are you? he asked.

This was the question he had asked of Yahweh all his life. And the fire of the presence had answered him. It was all consuming; it lived and breathed in his sandals. The fire of love demanded his all. He left the ashes of his old life in the dust. What was once a ring of fire was now an angel with drawn sword as his protection. Abigail was different. The call of the Lord demanded too much of her. She poured out her life’s blood. Sometimes the stress of it was too much and she took to her bed with sickness. It was then that they fed her only the Virgin Oil of the olive tree until she recovered.

When they bottled the oil from the ancient tree, like wine from its fruit, Abigail poured it into a goblet and drank it. Her gifts were not entirely unknown as she was Queen beside him, but her manner and eloquence had remained secret. Her sacred vessels held valuable oils that were considered medicine in Israel to the priests.

As one of his candlesticks, she was the candle and not the flame. The flame itself was Yahweh; this was tradition, he asserted. God alone was the flame, and the lit candle would be symbol for ages to come of the spiritual life of the people of Israel. They had separated themselves from the world, by leaving Egypt and all its treasures. They had departed under the prophet Moses.

David then gave Abigail blue and white linen garments to her feet, and a golden girdle to girt about the paps of the lampstand. This is how she became a prophetess. David might have danced before the Lord. His worship was more overt. She was more reticent; her songs were deep in the wicker bench. She was like the hidden manna. In the desert, they could not live without her.

David had a lampstand with seven lamps. His servant poured pure olive oil into the lampstand every night and it lit his chamber. There was a steady glow, and a comforting light. History told that the olive oil was the gift of the prophets; that they poured out golden oil as trees gave fruit. Zechariah had said this was more than the sacred bowls of incense that stood for the prayers of the righteous. This was the prophets’ oil. It was a sign of anointing, it was a sign of purity, and it was a sign of miracles to the barren.

Abigail was milky pale, yet strong, and wild as the sea within its bounds. Her red hair had glinted in the candle’s flame. She was privy to the flame, the true fire, ardent and passioned. Her intensity was like a hearth, warm and almost electrifying. She was a leader, and the threads of friendship bound her to her task, but that was what made him such an anointed king. There was oil poured out, and it anointed the Mercy Seat of David, the Ark of the Covenant. No one deterred him from his purpose to seek God’s will, to rout their enemies, to take the land that belonged to their forefathers.

We must pass through Old Jerusalem to find what is eternal, to sing eternity of the olive tree—a psalm, she had once said.

The copper key opens the bronze gate.

The silver key opens the gold gate. The servants paused. They rummaged in their sacks.

~

The people of Israel lit candles for Abigail. There were a hundred candles lit in the middle of the night beside their doors. She could walk through the dark streets with her bodyguard and see them glimmering. They welcomed her and relinquished her both at once.

The lights in the darkness voiced their secret allegiance to a Queen, their voices burning. When their throats swelled with anger, she knew. There was much in life to disquiet them, much to choke out their very lives. There was misery. There was hostility. Yet it was she who called them to worship, and not just in the temple.

They were vessels of a spirit they could not see. They let the songs of David consume their fear. It was a new kingdom under David that they had not known with Israel’s first King and he had brought in the Mercy Seat. He was loyal to the God of Israel, and even worshipped in their place. This made him not just a king but a priest. He was a warrior-priest. He did battle not just behind the curtains of the temple, not just in the bedroom of a king, but in the battlefield also. Intimacy with Yahweh meant victory in the battleground to him.

The horses in the stables of David were seven hundred, men knew—the thunder of their hooves would repeat upon the desert. When the men would depart each spring for battle, it was time. The winter would disperse with the new wind. They would leave behind everything they loved for war. They knew they must fight for what they believed. Otherwise the prophets would grow thin with hunger, and the people would starve too. His own wife, and a queen, was said to live on oil and aloe when food was scarce. She poured out spikenard. But he was a man of plenty, and he knew it was partly her anointing, her call to inordinate purity. Her blue blood made him shiver like he was holding diamonds.

Where am I, standing in the sand of time, that I might drink of the waters of your leafy oasis? In a palace of stone ramparts my soul runs dry while your compatriots pour the wine, asked Abigail. He knew she thirsted for the presence, and it was water.

His was a castle in a grain of sand, and she was the guardian. The nation of Israel would outnumber the sand of the sea. She was holding the key to unlock its gemstone gate of understanding. The grains of sand would cover the earth as his notes covered the page.

    There was a mighty seashore. The roar of the tide assented to a keeper of the poetry of King David. It would be printed by calligraphers in scrolls in many ages. All earth would read it through her careful preservation of its meaning, rhythms, and song. There were seven woman prophets of Israel, and now she was one.

Thus my sacred certainty of the next life, he thought. Paradisal birds rise into the sky, taking to docile flight, swimming across the blue—that this righteousness could not be traded for fine silver.

Section II: Doves in a Ginkgo Tree

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Chapter 1

In the dark, a little girl in a cotton shawl

struck a match to keep warm.

It illumined the stone structure

of the Peace Tower she leaned against,

the gargoyles against the night sky.

Gothic architecture

reaching almost to heaven

stretched its lacy fingers,

blotting the stars with its handkerchief—

its rhetorical icons

simmering prayers in the shadows.

There was a patchwork quilt

of nations, that had grown faded

with the rain and snow,

of the many colours of skin

that made up the face of a country,

of the many films from the National Film Board.

A match box was ten cents;

a passerby gave her a dime

as she stood in the gutter,

and she collected them in her apron.

There was a shadow on the sidewalk from the light. A starling fluttered, its wing sound, dry and void. It wrinkled over the pavement. An old tree leaned over the edge of the green park on Mary’s Street. The park children played under its branches, and most of them were Indo-Canadian.

There was a large population of Indo-Canadians in the city, and they had immigrated en masse and settled in the same area. It was the area where the Sikh Temple was, up near the North End with a sprinkling of settlement throughout the rest of the city. One such settlement was the new condominium building at the end of Mary’s Street where she lived. She was only a renter though. Although the Indo-Canadian population was wealthy, and could buy luxury apartments and castle-like monster homes, she lived frugally and counted every dime.

Ana pulled the navy cotton shawl over her head tighter. Her dark hair was covered from the morning wind. She was now training in social work at the local college. She worked from home during the pandemic. It was difficult, starting a new career, all over again, at her age. She felt old, and the first whisps of grey were beginning to form on her hairline, and in her eyes. Her textbooks were piled beside her desk at home, and the work seemed never-ending in scope. She was a little hesitant as a student who had returned to school, more mature now, she was not sure whether to believe the textbooks. Not sure whether to believe the field of knowing everything about the grittiness of life. She liked to think people’s lives were a bouquet of daffodils, but the field thought otherwise, and it was not pretty, though sloping and green, nor nice. She wondered if she had different values, after all, she had been trained and received her bachelor’s degree at a university of natural medicine. It had been a regular medical school, with even a cadaver lab that made for gothic memories on dark stormy nights.

The park on Mary’s Street had a pathway she liked to follow, meandering along through the playing coloured children in bright clothes and Indian men with turbans. Their slender wives had long flowing saris and glossy dark hair. It was spring and the red buds were beginning to emerge on the young trees. Ana could see the form of her long dark cotton skirt as she walked on in her way. She walked along the quiet neighbourhood, where the houses were brownstone and attached with wrought iron gates that swung open at each lane to the door. Every day she walked her usual tour of the familiar streets for an hour.

Ana couldn’t help but remember the young doctor in training with blond hair and blue eyes she had met once while in university. They had both graduated, and he had married and moved to another town. But twenty years later he turned up as a surprise to meet her at an awards night in her city. He thought she had promise as an artist, or he wouldn’t have made the trip across the world. But he had flown a plane all the way from the Caribbean. He said he no longer loved his wife. He wanted to marry Ana, he said. He had made a mistake twenty years ago. He wanted to right it.

Ana knew this was dangerous territory. Mial was trained as a physician and had two children with his wife. That he wanted to leave was because his wife was a different nationality and had lowered his social standing by her dictatorship of words. She had coerced her way to dominating him, and he looked for a way of escape. Her reign of fear was unacceptable to him as a way of life. His unhappiness was his compass.

Once the children were grown and had left home, he said, he would fly away, like a dove from a ginkgo tree. He ate a pear as he talked. She remembered him from a long time ago, and his hands were softer and more manicured than hers. He had smooth nails with half-moons. He could soothe a sore throat with essential oils, and was a naturopath.

Twenty years ago, in university, Mial had been a survivalist. He spent the summers at med school camping in the woods. In the fall, he led botanical tours of the herb garden for other students over the hazelnut pathways. He had studied botany for many years, and the nature of herbs and plants.

Mial had taken her to the medical library to do research for a paper, and they had spent the entire day there, just going through research. It took hours just photocopying from the vast rows of shelves housing the medical and nutrition journals of the University of Washington. There was an extensive and authoritative library for every subject at the university. The chemistry library was separate, and she ended up going there too to find a study on the composition of foods.

Now Ana’s hands were rough. She had only just escaped from the ongoing night shift that had stretched on for over a decade. There had been no holidays, and the work was seven days a week. There were also no medical benefits, and if you were sick, that was tough. You had to work sick and wear gloves.

She had thirty pairs of black cotton gloves as they wore right through in the fingers night after night. There was no leeway for any sort of constitutional weakness of any kind. At least pretend you are strong, she had thought to herself. She needed the work; it paid for her food.

She had given up her post in December to become a Social Worker. But until then, she had worked by moon’s candle, on and on, the invisible sweat her only cost in the darkness. If she had strength left in her, she would have continued, but now she was old, over forty, and only a retired racehorse. They had employed her as a human slave.

Only those who knew the industry knew the hours dictated only by your own toil and effort how much money you made at the end of the month. Only those who knew the media knew that everything else was sacrificed to fill the demand. It was there every day, never waning, but she was only the horse. And one of many.

It took twenty horses every night to pull the load, and each with a working car and gasoline. Each with a strong will that was nightly beaten, and refused to give up. This was the night newspaper, and there were three of them simultaneously in Greater Vancouver. This was the big leagues, not an afternoon dilly-dally through the park. But the manager would say, It’s a walk in the park, when referring to the effort needed. It was a walk that went on for six hours if you were in good form, and then back again the next night.

Each separate newspaper with different customers had demands. Every reader wanted their newspaper in a specific place, and in a specific way. This all had to be memorized, kind of like seeing notes in the dark. Every human horse was equally good at memorizing who was new to the customer list and who was to be let go. They each had their territory. Her flanks had heaved. White flecks of spit had flown from her mouth. Her muscles had grown strong. She was taunt.

People thought she must be a dancer. They envied her athletic form, but none of them knew the cost. If she fell, there were weeks and months of rehab at the physiotherapy office; but he nodded to himself, a doctor from Russia knew the Bolshoi was demanding—and she was a swan. Her toes curved down in swan-like form. Something fluttered inside her as a dancer immersed only in the dance world would. She was needed each night, on stage. As the prima ballerina, she shone with grace. She looked down at the physiotherapy office, and where her thick warm coat would usually be, and her layers of clothes to keep out the rain, was a straggling tutu in black mesh.

It was a dance in the cold and ice, it was a dance where you struck a match occasionally to keep warm and needed only gloves and a host of flashlights. There was the huddling in the car, and moments in the crisp snow before it became deep enough to trudge through, meeting the tops of her arctic boots. Her figure was charcoal against the grey night sky. She could slide across the ice.

She had a box of matches to sell. Each house delivery made only twenty cents. They were spaced far apart, the houses, so she needed to drive—and cover large distances, she could. Ana looked up into the heavens on the highest mountain in her district and could see the stars and their constellations clearly. It was the Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion, and Canis Major she knew by heart. She followed their lines with her deep eyes.

There was the navy crispness of the night sky with its flaming matches of stars, and the small figure creeping to the front doors of the large stone houses with huge landscaped properties along on the mountainside. Although she covered the distance from one side of the city to the other, it was as if she was huddled there all night and never moved. She was a fairy-tale-like young woman, dressed in medieval garb, the kind women would wear if they were overworked and died at forty. Perhaps a red cape, and a shawl.

Would you like to buy a match? she was required to ask each passerby. She was required to sell her service. It was only two dimes to her for every paper. She was standing on a street corner to every average commoner. They thought her face a little dirty from smudged ink. Her hands would have been inked too, if it had not been for the black gloves.

Mial found her at the ceremony, where her stories were being rewarded, and she was called an artist. This was separate; this was entirely separate from everything else. It was another self, looking in, who had a match to see by in the dark night. Her stories were being sold for a dime, and she the sole owner and proprietor. But Mial remembered her from before, before the hard long hours at the barre, and the night’s sweat, the cold white hands, and the blurred black ink.

Mial did not know she even thrived on the smell of newsprint and looked forward to the new stories every night. He wanted a better life for himself, he wanted happiness; but did he want the same for her? Perhaps her life after twenty years of begging for a sale and being beaten to take the pride out of her were beneath him. He only read what was on the other side, and could only see the stories of what her life had been in artistry and in journalism. Perhaps she was a dove in the Ginkgo tree. Perhaps she had been there all along. It is you