by Elazarus Wills
(09/20/06)
In the canyon lands, the sienna tinged sandstone absorbs summer's heat during the day, and releases it after the sunset, when the desert resurrection begins. Snakes crawl out from dark crevices, where they have spent the hottest time, stretching full length for a moment on slick rock before moving onward. Bats overhead, which live in fissure caves high on the cliffs, weave soaring, silent, dark lines against the moon. The landscape, which was the color of a Hopi woman's inner thighs during the day, is now silver-gray and green in the moonlight, the source of which appears to rest on a nearby cliff top.
The woman lies nude on the tilted stone, within a gentle groove that nearly mirrors the curve of her body. A tiny amount of water, smelling faintly of juniper, flows down the passage, under and around her pale flesh. Some penetrates her with its wet caress, and dampens strands of her long ebony hair. She murmurs with pleasure. The dark nipples of her full breasts expand and harden. Aware, but not awake.
In the hour before dawn, with the stone still warm, the raven comes, as it always does. It is black like other birds of its kind, but also darker, its body matching the deepest shadow over which it passes, which to an observer causes parts of it to appear to move in and out of existence.
It perches at first at the apex of the roundness of a nearby boulder, which has been shaped by water and wind to resemble the disembodied buttock of a goddess. The raven tips its head and regards the nude sleeping woman on her bed of stone. A short distance below her the trickle of water flows into a natural stone basin ringed with cattails, rushes, and one young cottonwood tree.
Spreading its finger-like wings, the span of which is almost equal to the languid length of the woman, the raven glides with only the slightest of sounds to a spot near her head. It takes a small amount of the water into its beak and raises it moonward, so that it flows down its throat by only earthen force of gravity. The raven continues to drink. Time passes.
The raven silently rests and watches the woman, the rhythm of breast and thigh, the flow of water, a dragonfly slumbering on a nearby horsetail rush, and the nearly imperceptible, but powerful, pulsing of heart-pumped blood traveling through a passage in the side of her neck. The woman murmurs in her almost-sleep.
Finally the raven moves with a sudden flap, like a wet piece of cloth in a sudden gust of wind, and launches itself up and over the recumbent woman, alighting at her feet. Again, he watches and finally...her lower limbs begin to part. When her well-sculpted ankles are a few feet apart and the way to her sex opens, the raven moves forward.
Halting before the flesh-sculpted opening to the woman's womb, echoing a nearby wild iris bloom, the raven dips his dark head. He obtains another beaked potion of water, some of which tastes faintly of the interior of her sex, through which a tiny portion of it has recently passed in its wet, earthen, penetration. Slowly, the raven moves closer still and carefully allows the water to run slowly from his mouth onto the woman's vulva. It trickles downward across her most sensitive areas, into her tilted opening, which pulses now as if inhaling and exhaling the scented desert air. A certain portion of the organ is throbbing just under the surface of damp flesh, like the visible beating of a baby bird's heart. The moon is now just above the rim of the canyon wall, a sliver of night sky between moon and stone.
Carefully, in near silence, the raven picks up and deposits the water again and again. The water now flows in a near continuous trickle across the nude woman's sex, beginning at the insistent heartbeat of the pink bulb at the top of the flowerlike lips, into her depths to caress the blood-engorged surfaces there, filling the passage to overflowing. Emerging from inside her, the flow continues down across her rear passage and joins the rivulet coming from above which has traveled the length of her naked body.
The woman's body is undulating gently now, her sex the focal point of the motion. Her knees bend and the soles of her bare feet, and palms of hands with outspread fingers, now find purchase on the smooth sandstone, pressing down. Her hips rise and her back arches. A sound emerges from deep in her throat, passing between lips that move in silent speech, alternately revealing and concealing white, even teeth that seem to emit a light that matches that of the moon. The sound that the woman makes resembles the cry of a raven.
The raven continues the application of water, shifting to avoid the upward thrust of hip, thigh, and sex, while rhythmically releasing water from his beak once the full buttocks are again pressed into the stone. He has done this before many times. A dance. A duet.
The woman screams, but screams softly in a language only the raven understands. She thrusts her naked body up and down as if impaling herself on twin phalluses, above and below. With one final cry, louder this time, a sound that echoes off of the surrounding walls of rising stone, she settles, murmuring and sated, back into her damp firm bed.
The raven takes a final beak of water, now tasting of the woman's passion, and, tilting his head back, looks up into the face of the rising moon as he drinks.
Morning approaches, as the woman lies nude in the deep canyon on the tilted stone within a gentle groove that nearly mirrors the curve of her body. The moon is growing fainter, a ghost now, against the lightening sky, as a wash of cadmium yellow appears over the cliff tops to the east and color slowly returns to the canyon lands.
As the promise of sunlight touches her, the woman's eyes open, and she smiles. High overhead a lone raven makes wide, deep, circles in the morning sky.
