Moon Eyes

Seven minutes: My eyes have changed from gaudy kaleidoscopes to half-moons

that witness the world as a dream.

There is an angel in my hair

who guides my fore-thought, my wisdom,

my knowledge of body and the pearls

that rest within it.

Enigma angels offer questions

and warn me of

my Pharisee tendencies,

my judgmental stance,

my narrow focus at the hem of

the Jehovah angel, who has sternly restricted my breath.

Have no fear for there are flowers, and the devil with the pitchfork

is small like a gnat.  Mama Angel love me, make me feel loved and blessed.

Make my moon eyes trigger the flowers.

Unicorns in Second Grade

Seven minutes:

My students wrote stories of unicorns today. forty five minutes of silence as they flew in their minds in their enchanted forests.  We shared our first sentences, standing up tall. No girliness and mumbling allowed. Cute isn’t squirming or being shy I told them. Be proud.  Wonderful listening. Magical worlds. Once upon a times. We left the classroom on our magical steeds and felt our horns begin to grow out of our heads.  The magic of writing was real. All are authors. All are creative . All are artist. Seven and eight and nine years old. Summer is galloping within our grasp and our pens create new worlds where unicorns are our friends.

Purple Cashmere

Seven Minutes:

My present today is a nubby purple cashmere sweater that has been regulated to pajama wear.  Blazing hot sun disappeared and it’s cool again.  I would love to live where the weather never saw ninety degrees, much less 110.  Give me fog and wool sweaters, a knit cap, drizzle.  The type of weather where a hot bath is appreciated.  The long cloudless summer is approaching.  Sometimes cumulus clouds appear on the far mountains on the other side of the lake. But here, it is endless blue skies from June to October as a rule.  Monotony.  The rattlesnakes are coming out as they do each year at this time.  It’s common for one or two to be seen at my school.  Friends are reporting their presence at their homes.  If you walk at Anderson Marsh, you can hear them in the rocks in the early mornings.  They could be the rhythm section for a mariachi band.  Trato de apprender castellano en mi coche en la manana cuando manejo a trabajo.  The nice lady and man with the beautiful Spanish diction never get frustrated with me.  I feel my head is very small.  My brain is at least.  But I need big hats.  So I’m back on that drizzle day in my large comfy cap walking along the beach with my hands in my pocket and breathing.  I can wear my ratty purple sweater.  No one will care.

Nanchuti Myth: When Old Woman of the River Got Tired

A long time ago, Old Woman of the River got very tired.  She was tired of always rushing her children down the river, all the fish and all the silt, tree branches and pieces of gold.  She decided to stop.  Her water froze, the froth of the rapids became little white stars hanging in the air, sun sparks stopped twinkling,  and there was only quiet in the forest.  The birds stopped flying because they thought the sound of the pounding river was what held their wings in the air.  Bear sat heavily on the ground confused.  All the weeds and bushes leaned over straining to listen for the mother’s voice.  Never had such silence fell upon the forest.  Old Woman of the River fell asleep in the quiet day.  One by one the fish vanished.  Each spark held by the air and water snapped out.  Bear’s body slowly dissolved into sunlight.  Birds put their heads under their wings because even the sun began to dim.  Hanla’chu sat on her hill and watched the world disappearing.  She cupped her hands and made a huge cry over the land. “Wake up, Old Woman of the River!”  A startled woodpecker cried out, flew from her tree, and vanished.  Hanla’chu saw this happen.  She stomped on the ground and caused an earthquake.  The mountains rumbled.  Panther, who still prowled the forest, growled.  “Wake up, Old Woman of the River!” Hanla-chu yelled.  Old Woman kept sleeping, but she turned over and the water of the river rolled with her.   One by one the stars where beginning to shine in the sky.  Night was coming forever.     A wind rushed over the sleeping body of Old Woman.  “Wake up, Old Woman of the River!” Hanla-chu  yelled.  Hanla-chu took in a deep breath of dark night.  She filled her lungs and blew it out with as much force as she could.   Deep in her dreams, Old Woman felt cold and began to shiver.  One eye opened and she saw it was night.  She called for the birds to make the morning but there were no birds to hear her.  Old Woman slowly rose and saw what her sleeping had done.  “But I was so tired,” she said, and waved her hand.  The river began to move again, but there were no fish or pieces of gold or life of any sort within its banks.  Panther let out a loud angry growl for he saw that the Earth was dying, and he knew that he too must die.  Hanla’chu also cried and her body began to break apart.  It became fish and bird and the sparkle of the sun on water.  Her head began to burn and slowly lifted to the sky.  Her skin became plants and deer and from her breasts all the birds of the forest were reborn.  Old Woman of the River thanked Hanla-chu.  She flowed on and on forever after this.  And no matter how tired she gets, she keeps flowing to the ocean.

My Heart is at the Window

 My heart is at the window.

I lean with longing on the sill.

I am at the edge of expectation,

Waiting, waiting

to see the future form, the grace

I have wished for, the humble steps

of hope, the whirlwind ready to kiss my cheek.

My heart is at the window,

I have been here so long,

the horizon has been hidden by the leaves’ ornamentation, by pages of years, by my too small courage.

My heart is at the window.

I pray that love sweeps down the lonely road

and breaks open my heart, so sadly patient,

into the seizures of a streaming sun,

shattering me into the light that taunts my vista.

When I Was My Grandmother

Seven Minutes . . .

Last night this strange feeling came over me that I was my grandmother Parala.  Never knew her as she died in 1922 at the age of 42, mother of Lois, Leslie (my father), Mary Ruth (dead at two), stillborn babies, and my Uncle Darius who is still alive at 93.  I saw a post card she sent once when I visited my uncle.  She signed herself Para.  I decided her mother was playing with language and came up with her name because they were sounds she liked, like a song.  She had a hard life, wife of a sharecropper who made moonshine, who wore her husband’s shoes, who saw her children die, who moved to Detroit and didn’t last long.  Did she miss Arkansas, and Mary Ruth, where the legend said she planted a white and a red rosebush at her child’s grave that never stopped blooming? The child whose head made a feathered crown on her death-bed.  My father, 12 years old, 1918, having quit school to pick cotton, remembering he did a somersault in the fields hearing the news that World War One had ended.  All in one  year, little sister he could not talk about even as an old man.  Was it the flu? No money for a doctor.  And his grandmother, Sarah Winn Johnson Eason, who buried half of her dozen or more children, whose life stretched out to old womanhood.  As a young woman in Mississippi, she buried a child and gave birth to another two days later.  I have Parala and Isaac’s wedding picture when they were both fresh and young.  I have his eyes and her thick hair.  The other two pictures I’ve seen, she has become this Grapes of Wrath woman, so thin and weary with life.  And I had this feeling last night that I was her and walked in her thin dresses and loved her children and how that for all them, save my uncle, did not save them from the darkness ahead of them.

Galaxy Girl

There is a question next to her,

a small dog’s face,

loyalty to what she carries,

a cluster in the sky.

She is a new constellation,

lead by nebula light

and a galaxy brain.  ‘

Shy girl hiding her face beneath stars, exposed with her large naval,

all the dark matter of her belly, the crook of her arm, womanly hips.

I am in love.  I believe she would carry me to the dimensions of dreams,

through the night as minutes pass.  Call her Midnight and be done.

Sad Elephant

  Sad Elephant (seven minutes)

The winged insects flew

in from another world.

My stomach churns diamond shards

but my tears only drop red paint.

I step into the desert half crazed and wary.

I was a dandy but now I am old

and heavy with stars, scars on my skin.

I look for the palo verde and hope for healing.

My tears become little men

who pick the palms.   I’m leaving the wild ocean

for temptations of rocks and yellow sand.

I am blessed to wear elephant shoes,

but I grieve the water wings

I leave behind.  Cacti rattle hymns

for the predetermined God, the One who lives

in arid spaces.  I’ve gone to listen for him.

The ocean was too noisy.  My birth jungle brims

with confusing myth.  My tears speak of the wild gifts

buried within my heart.

I pray erosion will uncover them,

the crazed animals, dear unformed art,

the unknown blessings.

Free Copy of Heron’s Path . . .

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Mother Eve and the Garden in My Body, Part 2

I was with a friend a couple of hours ago sitting on a dock stretching into Boggs Marsh.  We were in a garden of tules with redwing blackbirds, ducks, a goose, and frogs disquieted by our voices.  Muck of the marsh below.  The remnants of yesterday’s storm floated above our heads, blocking the sun, and a wind chilled us until we sat on the boards that soaked up the sunlight slipping through the clouds.

She said, “You were eating your maleness yesterday.”  I laughed because I didn’t know she had read my last entry, but also it hadn’t occurred to interpret my dream that way. 

We both admitted we have never felt feminine, that a sense of beauty, physical or spiritual, was somehow not embodied in us.  Not that I’ve felt  . . .  I’m giggling as I write this . . . manly.  Just to celebrate womb and breasts, natural grace, the clay that has made me, doesn’t come naturally.

I’ve always trusted my head more than my heart, sometimes with drastic consequences. But the head has felt safer, in general.  Perhaps movement brings emotion and so often with them chaos, the tension I wrote of yesterday.  That wonderful freedom I woke with, the woman who lives deep in my gut, the grace of simply being, is gone today. 

But the gift of the dream, experiencing the lifting of anxiety, of the silencing of the small voice of dread that has been my companion all of my life, has helped to reinforce what I know on the surface of my consciousness, on the surface of my skin, but don’t in the depth of  my body’s knowledge.  This shell that surrounding me is not my true self.  That spirit of yesterday morning, open and strong, really resides inside of me. 

 Eve, blamed for so much, lived in a garden.  And then she was banished, and the shell descended.  I would love to believe that the garden is beginning to grow again and that she’ll return home.