I've been thinking of posting this up here for a while now. I wrote the following prose poem slightly less than a year ago. I know this because within days after I wrote the poem, my cat arrived.
He is 1 now and I've got a quality piece of salmon for him in the freezer---awaiting the right moment for his party, to say thanks for being such a good familiar. He was about 6 weeks old when my neighbor found him in a ditch and I took him in. So we're about a month shy of the anniversary of the poem being written.
In tandem with the ideas expressed in my previous blog post ("a process in dream & photos"), I am amazed at how much has changed in one year----there was a deep sadness in me still last spring, as if life was happening & coming up without me. Now, today, my tulips are pushing through the ground, and I'm right there with them, literally feeling the earth of my energetic body break as I release outdated energies so that I might once again flower.
But i'm getting ahead of myself; really what i want is for this poem to finish the rest out, speaking for itself. I offer it in hopes it may comfort anyone who is feeling the way i did last spring. Offer it 1 year later in the spirit of the theory that we are organic beings, and, like plants, have periods of dormancy and growth, sadness and ecstasy. Sometimes the conditions around us support ecstatic growth; sometimes they cause us to miss flowering or fruiting, or to wither or be uprooted, or to die.
Thanking the 4-leggeds and the world,
rainwriter
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god’s animal
In the center of the house was a dark empty space where a tree used to live. Walking into a nest of dark, forgotten roots, and everyone died that year. Since there was a skeleton in the closet anyway, exhausted, I decided to honor it. I walked the ravines and hilltops for bones; finding enough, I made a makeshift skeleton inside. I thought about the girl in college who had a real human skull on her coffee table, bonded with some kind of latticed metal and made ornate. We toughed out death. We weren’t afraid of fear. Mine was simpler, full of gravity and hollowness and birds. I gave it apricot branches, sage, red flowers with grateful thorns. What else do you do when it’s real? And so began my altars, my heavy siltbed acceptance, my step into the ring to wrestle down the endless, feeding beauty inside the mouth of fear.
Next, I cut out a flock of birds, pasted their grey silhouettes on to the back room wall. I made their flight patterns round and endless, configured for intimacy. In my flock we circulated, no one bird ever taking the lead. we moved with the currents, trusted whoever could best read the wind, stayed together, changed it up. below the flock was an old chipboard bookcase I’d found in the barn: on its side, it too looked like an altar. I lit candles on it, sat with my tight jaw and dreamed, watched the circulation, prayed for an end to my loneliness. everyone’s loneliness.
On the back step there was a piece of flagstone that looked like Africa. It was gray with a crease in the middle, just like the Rift Valley. I stepped over it on my way to feed the birds. Every day I said “Africa” until the day I realized I could pray for Africa. I wiped my muddy feet on the Sudan. Bless you. Come spring the birds started to poop in white splats on my continent, and trees dropped their seed skins. I said “I love you” to no one in particular. I had to believe in it, these imaginary companies I keep, this notion that my love mattered.
After that, I left the house. Flew up and out the skylight, past the anger of the moon. Just like in kids’ books, there was a beanstalk there, and I shimmied my way to the heavens. I wanted to see if god would still talk to me after all I’d done wrong. wolves howled. I didn’t know how to cry anymore, it all got used up and recycled, I didn’t know if anyone was listening. did I not even deserve to cry?
in the blueness like ink there were no voices. there was something small that said “yes” but not in the way everybody else said it. I wanted that yes, to pluck it like a star hanging on the boughy plum branch of night, was it ripe? Patience, a friend said. I realized I was like everyone else, crawled under the table and cried, until god came out. he was thin, and weary, and old. walked with a cane and seemed exhausted. “Eat,” was all he said, and turned on his heel like a ballroom dancer, a chi gong master, a fairytale, and went back to his workshop to sleep. Dream, his animal said, skirting out from under the roots, the branches down to our world.
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QaR
December 2008 
rainwriter
Access: Public
