Deda: cool poem about Merlin and Morgana! Very incisive.
I include here a long triptych first published in Obsidian Magazine and then on gothic.net, and this same myth makes an appearance herein...
peg



Avalloch and The Tree Fairy: a triptych


Part One (The Fairy Ailinn)

I romp towards Broceliande
a slippery undine
shrieking silent paeans of wood lust
my face smeared with pitch
thighs shining with vetiver, tacky with blood

Where are you?

Cloaked in mist, I huddle beneath pine boughs
breakfasting on fallen acorns.
I wait, and sing.

I have lost you to the dawn
running backwards to daylight
to your city
to timepieces and rough weather
to loved ones and gold coin and sour beer.

How could you have become lost among trees?
You, the huntsman who's plundered every acre of Bretagne?
How came you to the faery realm?
How, if not trapped by magic?

You ran me through
Herne to my Sadhbh
antlers singed in the spitting fire
hot meat juices dripping from your beard
to stain my breast the colour of venison.

You semen swirls in my belly.
My teeth are imprinted on your spine.

I wait.
You won't be leaving.

I could have been a mermaid
could have dragged you over rocks
knotted your fingers in my silver hair
offered you to any or all of my sisters
their combs in hand, cold hips floating.
I could have filled your lungs with salt and pearls
stopped your legs
kept you with me.

But I am alone in this.
I love you. I want you here.

An ageless and nubile forest nymph
I tempt you with peaty scotch and promises
luring you with apples and high sweet music
into the green and breathing temple of myself.


LATER:
In Celidon Wood
nine dryads play at calixte twigs, the old game
dividing the contents of a buckskin pouch
squealing with delight as each receives a bauble in turn:
chunks of flint, silver coins, golden needles,
stubs of tallow candles, black feathers,
oat biscuits, a flask half-filled with honey mead,
a scarlet silk ribbon,
a tine of stag horn carved with Ogham,
a knife blade sticky with sap.


Part Two (The Huntsman Avalloch)

Bitch.
No you never twisted my arm.
I wanted to stay with you.
Twenty years I gave, petrified
in the screaming orchard, choked with ivy and mushrooms.
Twenty years recalling the taste of your mouth,
while you seduced a dozen lovers
and I watched.

The fisherman, called to your side from his bleak rock village,
The selkie trapper, his silver eyelashes frozen to your lips,
The woodsman, his hatchets rusted in your juices,
Even the idiot farmer, with his gifts of barley and turnips.
I saw it all, enslaved as I was among apple trees
their clumsy caresses bludgeoning my stopped eyes,
even as they bruised your greenfairy skin.

But you are not as fragile as you look.

For they, too, have been imprisoned in the oaks,
in the hazels, the hawthorns,
put away, endless forest denizens rooted in the soil of Broceliande,
soil trod by Merlin, another hapless fool,
frozen in transfigured time by a conniving fey doxy
was that your work, too?


LATER (Ailinn Speaks):
What do you mean, you're sorry?
Oh my love, I had such hopes for you, for us.
But in the end, you disappointed--
too angry, too possessive, too too too monogamous.
It's better this way, don't you see?

Patience, Avalloch: our flesh may yet be one.
Think not on the others,
they will wither in six seasons' time.
You are the one I loved enough to stay the flow of your blood.
Your body is yet warm as milk, sturdy as horn.
For now, remain in the grove,
be my shelter and my food,
and remember those nights we loved,
your antlered crown tangled in my hair,
while a thousand colours woke and danced about us
and we named them all forest green.



Part Three (Merlin Speaks)

It is all one.
Frozen I have been, but powerless, no.
Magic has flowered in me, a thorned, odorous canopy
of roses, balm, and rubine foxgloves.
I could crush you like beetles, like dried petals,
and scatter you from the cliffs of Orkney.
I could send you to the heinous bogs of Lindow,
there to drown forever in her peaty stench,
embracing my kinsman there, a late harvest offering,
the stuck-up golden boy, an ungrateful druid
if ever there was one.

Perhaps his withered lips might rouse in you some occult passion,
stir your breast to sugared musings, or move you to pretty tears,
such as I could never wrest from you.
For I do long to see you wed, my dear,
as, in my dotage, I drive roots deep and deep
into river-wet rock beds.
I am become stone, my robes a melted, igneous drapery,
my eyes mere chunks of amber.
I have been in the unhewn dolmen,
and I have been in stag horns, and sea salt,
and my hard, gnarled roots have plumbed soils
richer and moister far than yours, my darling.

Stuck? Petrified? Mudlogged?
I am in my element, you might say.
A tree in the earth, a stick in a hole,
my arms forever raised,
my head forever bent, in benediction.
I forgive you.
Your time is almost done, you know.
And when at last red fire rents the air
and all save the Eternal Ones must die,
your blood and sinew and snot and bones
will all be dust, greying in the black wind.

But I will rise from this Last Burning,
a golden and phantasmagoric birdling,
something between a merlin and an ibis,
unfettered, unfrozen, undead
And I will remember you.

Wait for me.


LATER: (The Goddess Speaks)
Alas, my mountains, laid waste,
are sloppy with glistering guano.
My waters, poisoned, lie thick, unmoving, stinking.
The forests, the grasses, all picked clean of berries and milk.
Tittering, chirping, screeching, the very air is an insult to me.

Who would have thought, in my autumn years,
I'd have been ousted, raped, undone,
not by men, but by a myth?