鋸草

On the lake shore where the gleam of the mirrored surface was not so bright that one could not pick through the rocks and the jetsam, a warm stone was nestled, oft-turned by the centuries, just the weight to fill a palm: a night in late spring, Kohaku at home, nursing another growth spurt. In his sixteenth year he looked more like his father than ever. Byakuya held open the curtain of energy which protected the rest of the manor from his son’s earth-rattling noise-making. Silently, invisibly he listened to the ululations emitted by the heavy bodies of metal which decorated what once was Soujun’s bedroom. Kohaku’s was a song of a thousand birds, birds as blades, birds poised for the slaughter and dying for it, for him, the leader of their dance. And he was dancing. Beautiful boy, deathless, Byakuya’s most cunning and most wonderful victory. 

Did you feel spring coming? Early that year, chased into the world by the waves of flowers through the fields. Body pursuing body to the edge of life. Did your flesh warm again under the sun, cradled in a red valley of blooms, the new limbs of earth all around you? Did you know desire, then, as the season reanimated your corpse? Did you ache as you might have in life? 

“Dad,” Haku says. Neither father nor son bend toward the house, silent and alert as dogs. The wind wraps around them warmer still. “Why did I leave?” The brightness of the valley opens into a hole. He knows this hole; he laps at it with a child’s reverence. Its emptiness commands he can only feel around it the way a perimeter of bluffs courts the sea below. In blank lust he traverses its decaying edge, too focused on the path before him to make out the foam and the rocks.  What you left was not a home but a crime. Crime of rot, unclean, what crime? Shinigami prefer to die than to age. What sin drove you from that house, that training yard where gods court death? When the wound was fresh, before the hole, you saw in the Kurosakis’ bathroom mirror your mother’s face. Why choose to live? Your father has wondered this all his god’s life.   “I don’t know,” says Kenpachi.

in amber

Izumi Shikibu, trans. Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

That was how the affair started: with the deformed fruit born of his first defeat, reared by his later recapitulation, and then matured on the vine. And he was ripe, ready to bruise under Zaraki’s heavy hand, ready to rot; he would not require a blade to his core for his pit to fall out. Zaraki fought him like he knew this and fucked him like he didn’t care. Byakuya had never orgasmed so much in his life.

geranium and salt

Stanley Plumly, "Love Poem"

Layered beneath the iron tang of Byakuya’s blood where Renji has broken skin, beneath the sweat, beneath the salt and the geraniums, always the geraniums, Renji can smell it: the telltale spring wind of Byakuya’s power, always threatening to rip free from its carefully-tended confines, never distant enough to forget, never close enough to touch.  The scent was so faint to Renji’s untrained nose the first time he stood near enough to Byakuya to catch it—that day at the academy, when Renji first glimpsed power, when Byakuya looked back at where Renji stood—only for a moment; an awful, meaningless moment—and seemed not to see anything at all.

Frank Bidart, from "In the Western Night"