Where are the Grandmothers?

Where are the Grandmothers?

With family torn, history unknown, stories never uttered,

lineage not spoken,

where are we?

We become dangling dolls, feet like bell clappers,

swaying this way and that with no ground

beneath us.

So utter.

Utter.

Utter your questions and longings to the Grandmothers,

the Grandfathers, the Sisters and Brothers who couldn’t grow up,

the sharers and protectors from the other side where

viewing carries a different, sideways, deeper,

beyond kind of knowing.

Stir the waters you can not see,

the current carrying you, and ask.

Ask.

Ask and the formations for you to hold and gaze at

reminding you of the support in the surround

can shape, at last, in the wet red clay

held by your praying hands-

Grandmothers, Come to me…

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Where lies

If a push,

somewhere a pull.

Where taken,

pray it has been given.

The Western sense of community..

in itself a paradox?

We’re part–everyone–of centuries of history

cycling, tumbling, molasses-thick onward

with nanosecond “advances.”

No mystery that you, and you, and I

can not seem to catch our breath.

Faster is not forward,

as bigger not better, nor more money success.

Where lies the soul stuff making life

Life?

Come back

In search of meaning

but having to pay the bills.

Needing to matter,

but busy cursing the neglected dogs keeping you awake.

Reaching, yet thick in mud,

being with a sideways mess of months of days

and snarled in the wonderment of

what, in hell, this is all about…

Coming back, returning to echoes of your own one body,

again, again, again, again,

the home your fantasy conjured

minus the straightforwardness and glitter

of safe comfortable forever there

except it is precisely that in folly

and learning and diligent removal of concept

and heavy cultural residue.

This is home, your body, waiting,

waiting

for you to come back

to what is real, always with you, and still

strangely

not known.

The clay we’re given

Someone told me today,

“You have great energy.”

Someone else

turned out to be my middle school literature teacher.

Another day, perhaps, I’m terrible,

and a familiar stranger might not be

who I think at all.

Ground is uneven.

Earthquakes come, volcanoes blow.

A life is a creative act,

parceled out in retrospect,

birthed forward through chaos.

Unformed to the end

each of us shapes the clay we’re given.

The world will think

whatever it thinks,

what matters is speaking God straight back

into God’s own ear.

Symptoms

Aching back, pounding head,

weakening eyes, softening memory,

anger, nightmare, spasm..

Symptoms.

What loves to be complained about

over tea, through the phone,

aloud aloud somebody hear this, oh please.

Imagine turning attention around,

bear chewing his tail-

Wake to me!

Symptom becomes lotus

opening

from murky waters into light.

Manifestation of inner

to outer,

an offering

a medicine

a gift.

Pain is not for pain’s own sake.

With suffering,

we alter to listen.

Awareness reaches up,

roots down,

grows.

Writer without words

Dancer

unable to dance,

Writer

without words,

Climber

minus a mountain,

What now?

Not grasping for known

while Unknown is your becoming

means finding,

and learning

a whole new way to move.

Wiggle a little,

court the formless

in this precious release

of who you believe yourself

to be.

The turning of the world

It’s the twist of a good story

to say it begins where it begins.

Because who is to say what happened first?

The lines we lead, roads we walk, families we form,

always

always something came before..

and during.

Land of birth, food of soil, light of sun,

books read, laughter lived, sex, music,

slumber.

Infinite details of the turning of the world,

and equally many perspectives,

makes knowing

a sweet impossibility.

Twenty-five years on

Not until the attentive itch

do they exchange glances to mean

It’s Time.

And off we pile into the car, heading deep

into night and whatever flight waiting

with breath, rolling, in the wings.

Winding round and up and up and round

through dark and sensation

into rolled down window sweetness of valley grass and oak,

Stumbling, graceful, grit of dirt road scuffing,

spinning under 2 a.m. sky and flopping across hillsides,

the stars, sharp and grabbable,

become a spiral

spiral

spiral

as alive to be tucked in a pocket,

as hover, massive and in reach, directly overhead,

as rest in mind twenty-five years on.

The rest

An initiation ritual,

in the dusk-scape of dream,

of shared finery, costume, camaraderie,

and non-blood family

emerging from here, over there,

here, here, there

unexpectedly,

for the me before me,

with a gathering of eager others,

to mark time with life.

Saying no, no but I am not she

not anymore

no–

But as beads pass over head, and colors add up,

layers of feather, bone, cloth

none mine

each display on this body

currently

a light in mind shifts-

not for me

but she

who may pass through, closing

beginning years, finally,

in step with those knowing when it is meant to happen.

Dressed, prepared, without doubts,

I walk the procession.

To celebrate.

To say goodbye.

To welcome all the rest.

Thirteen-step boogie

Having lost touch with the beauty of chaos

a fogged vision sewn of fear

and the iron-grip of hoped for control

eventually forces bursting rolls of laughter, or

sphincters tight enough to pop

(not so pretty- quick, turn toward the pansies planted to your left).

If remembrance of having a tail to shake breaks through,

that romp, leap, roar and thirteen-step boogie

will plunk soul back in wild order

and life’ll flow naturally once again.