I am the Marsh King's Daughter, my own, my child, I am the sibilant water. I am the sliding banks, I am the root system that reels in eels and scabbards of green and brown. I am the princess of amnesiac frogs, they offer their oiled backs to my tongue, but only when the moon is new. I am the grey sky and the rattling cattails, I am the pink bellies of swamp birds and the mouths of thick serpents and the elder-branches are my hair clambering over the estuaries and tamarind groves. I am the sleek rats paddling in the murky lake, I am the stork on her nest, smooth eggs scarifying her white flesh, I am the granulate snake beating the thick green water with thick green flesh. I am the flash of the heron blue in the fog, snatching her meals from the river-system with a scimitar-beak. I am the sweet grass and the spider's black belly, spinnerets vibrating in the westerly breeze. I am the bending palm, low and hushed, and the willow shrieking incantations at the nettle-moon.

Oh, I am the black rooster-eater, my child, indeed, and I am the strangler of horses. I am the bright bird's daughter, I am the egret's claws and the fat fish within. I am the mud-track and the tadpoles' wriggling, crowned high in knotted reeds and cicadas, with hairy black bees and jadebodied dragonflies. My skin is combed in date oil and the acacias flick their red, red tongues at my earlobes, and my feet are pointed south, towards the delta and the sea. I am the crickets threatening you in the night, promising the intimate breath of skin-slicing. I string ebony bows with my braids, the color of the unlit water, wetting the arrow as it flies like a vanilla-clean envelope.

Oh, I am the monster beneath the floorboards, child, my mouth overflows with silt and salt and the mud of your thousand mud-pies past, my teeth are ivory-alligator, ready to mark your flesh like a printing press--and I will write my story on you, in block capitals, pretty one. I will mark your railroad-conductor pajamas with my salamander-ink, with characters like wounds. My alphabet will scald you, the letters I will teach, the grammar with which I will infect your corn-body, warm land-limbs, my syntax will be the snail-tracks of cyanide on your fingertips, the swamp-gas participles and venomous consonants. I will break you, I will divide you liver from throat, you will walk the plank of my scoured body and love the grain of the wood. My bite-mark will be on you forever, the cattle brand of my black-toothed ideographs, the blisters of my arsenic hieroglyphs. I will destroy you with each noun, I will devour you with every ablative absolute, I will eat you like you knew the monster would. My language is mandrake slipped under your tongue, you will choke on it and dwell within it and bleed through it. Each verb will be a cut and how bright the blade on your skin, as you fall, as you fall, as you fall.

I will teach you to read and write, my pretty sun-loving child, I will teach you my oracular alphabet with the warm hand of a schoolmistress, the warm smell of angora sweater and freshwater pearls, and in my mouth the many knives of your tutelage, waiting for the innocent pinks and whites of your offered lips. I will teach you to speak my English, the English of fire and the blood of horses, of toad-flesh and burning moons.

Oh, my precious one, I am the Marsh King's Daughter, my footprints in your bedroom are watery and dog star bright, leading all the places you should never go, all the dark holes where creatures like me dwell in gurgling sublimity. My father's eyes shine up pale and leprous from those places, de profundis, the soft mud of his mouth on my shoulder, our shoulder.

We are here with him, beneath the mosaic-water, in the dark, little one, the beginning place of the little minuet we shall learn together. Now, have you scrubbed your hands pink and made yourself pretty for me? Have your sharpened your pencils and lined up your plump pink erasers like a chorus line of severed toes? Have you polished your spectacles and your shoes? Are you ready, shall we begin?