I drank burgundy wine in Salem on the witching hour
With a blood relative we walked history laid streets
Believing not enough in ghosts and curses
When I woke vomiting, it didn’t stop for a year
Skin slackening like pomegranate robbed of juice
I visited a curandera who told me my lack of faith in god
And the broken parchment of family sin caused the curse
My mother said I brought it upon myself living in The Great Evil Of America
My neighbor brought me matzo and soup, as flood waters
Lapped at our doors, and storms flung their ragged clothes to heaven
It seemed it wasn’t just me who was coming apart, but the whole damn sky
Tearing with collective pain, in fragile gut, the acidity of global warming
My cat watched me writing on the floor, then yawned, exposing white fangs
it seemed oddly, a perfect response.
I think back to that time and I breathe
Into my stomach and into the devil I know intimately now
Standing straight like an arrow, shooting into the stars
I am re-purposed, ruined thrice over, still able to balance on one leg
For nothing has been the same since and just like those creatures of old
I am changed irrevocable, a hurled thing
Trying to find my way back is no kind of answer
Fragments don’t make a whole, we must recast clay
Forge and bake center where it will burst from white fire
Unrecognizable, a bird without parentage
My feathers are made of metal and tears
Sometimes when it is hot, they sweat into my eyes
Blurring my way forward
To some godless semblance of afterward
Looking nothing like before
Around it comes again, that verse from The Circle Game by Joni Mitchell:
“And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game
And go round and round and round, in the circle game”
And the world is changed and changing, and we in it,
Not as it was last year, last decade, last century, last week
And we not as we were in the persistent march of birthdays
The Carousel seems to spin faster as we ride the racing ponies
Amazing, as always!
The white fire is right here. 🔥
It was such an awful time
BIG BLUSH OF JOY
Thank you dearest John, thank you so very much my friend
It’s a hypnotic song isn’t it? She seems to just put her finger on the pulse of everything that matters. Makes you never want to try writing again when she’s that good, but then again we must keep trying to get close to her shine
Indeed – We cannot take such as she as making an impossibly high bar to clear, but as showing a path up a mountain, or how to see into the heart of things.