Grandmother Weighs the Water

The storm came and we weathered it. But we knew there would be more storms. 

And there were. It's how we lived.

Some of our children made a show where they used shadows to tell a story. Silhouette horses rearing against salmon skies. Hands reaching to clasp other hands. Hummingbirds and leaping fish. I sat and watched their shows and cried each time without shame.

But they—the others, not the children—sought our shame, pursued it with their ghost hounds: bible verses, uniforms, corrective lenses unsolicited, soap inside our mouths or worse, fingers in our pants, worse, the eradication of our language, the cultivation of our unwanted chastening. They enclosed us in brick, touched our secret places, and claimed we'd asked them to. Insisted on our gratitude and compliance then made of that compliance a defense, a vindication. They were sly, shrouding their dark urges with blame, concealing their culpability inside deviant retellings.  

That dark is still deep and lonely, but there are shafts of light now.

The baritone tattoo of a hundred hooves on pliant grassland, hollow and dogged and fierce, the sudden calliope of pollen burst afar and spiraling, bone ridge fingers through chainlink seeking a home, palpating the unquiet hearts of a thousand surplus tales.

Suicide is water. It cools your hurt and finds the channels, drains the great wild weighty hope of a fearsome distant peak to some quiet nearby delta. It is female. Yet it isn't. Because female is strong, not weak. We've forgotten how to think about this. Forgotten that woman is robust, that love itself is sturdy. That fierce is good and ironclad severity not so much. The human spine will twist and flex and carry monstrous burdens. Yet an iron rod encumbered incrementally will ultimately break. Suicide is neither female nor male, neither weak nor strong. We think in polarities. Suicide is the water on the lip of the falls, a precipice in our thoughts, propelled by doubt and certitude. Doubt we can go on, and certainty we're saved. On such fulcrums, where the present balances the past and the future, bury our hearts and cry hoarse and wounded and brave enough to waken hope across all this great Turtle Island. 

Cry for me. Grieve. Then honor me, revere me. And all my relations.

Quote Unquote

Traffic moves like blood cells, and grainy smoke filters everything. Forest fires blaze afar. The ardent pack gathers by the edge of the cliff face and we sense it's time.

I'm watching the burning edge of the sibilant bush and waiting to see how this will evolve, whether a spike-heeled lover will emerge or a stone-cold killer in work boots, one releasing its feminine musk or the other hissing its unfathomable rage.

Scorched orange. Knowing grimaces. A bright fury. A drop into oblivion. Wait a while and the truth will squirm in calico kitten ecstasy at your feet, reveling in its freedom to broadcast the words no one thinks they want to hear.

"Speak to me," you say.

Right. I want. I would spend a full day worshipping at the hot moist core of you, O my woman.

"Is this speech?" I ask, and you damn near moan—blooming, dreamy, anticipatory.

You almost understand me; I almost think I get it. Deliver to me your brimming, shimmering chalice. Grok me, absorb me, breathe me, drink me. Which is something rare enough to stop me in my tracks.

"It says good things, and for that we should revere it," you say.

Yes. Yes. You are serpentine. Oceanic.

I hate the sound of my narcissism. You not me are godlike. You glisten while I merely listen. I said I want. How respectable are we? Are we mortal? Confused? Intoxicated? Horny? Ghostlike? Puzzled, alien, and acrid as raccoon tears. Thirsty for salted rims and the sour wild tang of margaritas. Following highways and negotiating solemn guards. Blackish humourless sentinels. Brackish and hidden wonders hearing mordancy in salt flats and tasting the loosestrife arpeggios of minor chords. May we relax and feed brown-paper dime-bag peanuts to fat and homey prairie dogs, while both Dakotas—recent domesticates, and therefore diminished—wheel around some troubled and tawny fulcrum?

Could it be love? Could it? It's possible.

"What will survive of us is love," said the long-dead poet, adding, “Irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.”

We stumble over arcane tales of love dreamed and recounted by flapping garments on clotheslines in purple alleyways at dawn.

I follow the ragged, steaming pack up through the dry, gap-tooth foothills and into the precipitous drop-offs, snorting their glorious life-death and crotch heat. Keen as goat trails carved into precarious ridgelines. Portentous as a ledge of desecrated nests. All braced for a holy war.

What are we, that we believe absurdities? What do we know? At what point do atrocities begin? Perhaps where we admit—as was once spoken aloud in Cambodia—"To keep you is no gain, to destroy you is no loss." Perhaps where our loving and kindly neighbours are now named inyenzi. Inexplicable enough to shred the hardest of hearts.

After we shake our heads, releasing the dust of bewilderment, what in fact do we know? Perhaps only this: that awful things will arrive in the blackest hour of the night to utterly annihilate our lives.

And one other thing we also know, another desolate thing: "By iron, iron itself is sharpened." — Proverbs 27:17