Earth Mother
I cannot escape my body. I am a woman with a legacy that stretches back through evolutionary time, from one hominid species to the next. Not all, but many of us have experienced the trials of giving birth. It is grotesque and humbling. It’s momentous and agonizing. After birth, the smell of blood glues itself to us for weeks on end. Our body loosens as water, baby, and placenta are all leached away. Our breasts become heavy like rocks and our sore nipples spew rivers on our beds. We become feverish with infected milk ducts and swollen veins. This is what it felt like to be an embodied new mother. And this new reality informs us over and over of our deep and inescapable connection to the earth. I am giving birth and smelling death all in one breath.
Behind the Scenes
Life is better this way.
And this is how it all happens, I begin to begin and the story guides itself to the meaning, it has created its own symbol, its own way without me having to force it. It is always brimming and there is no need to worry, it will show its seductive face. Always. This is where I feel alive, in these words, delirious as I am in the inbetween place, almost asleep, can’t sleep, need to stay awake, but need to create, have to stay awake because I’m working.
Life finds meaning again.
Keep moving. Like the water, always carve your way.
1.
I see a swirling mass of people/
Sputtering/
Words with mismatched mouths/
All the murmurs uncomfortably
forced out like a square peg/
The air is cold between us/
My thoughts can’t travel on this
Broken stream to you/
2.
My eyes move across the room—
They stop.
I look out past my glasses—
and see,
Something so strange to me.
People are talking.
But their words are out of sync
With the movement of their mouths.
I try to understand,
But I can’t,
Because their eyes are rolling,
their mouths are frothing,
and arms are flailing.
And they say they are singing,
But I can’t hear the melody,
and I can’t hear the song.
What I see,
Perplexes me.
Symbiotic
I was transfixed by the tree in front of me.
Its budding branches were crooked and elegant.
I hoisted myself onto its limbs and felt lighter with each step upward.
I stood higher and more powerful.
The wind swept in and pushed me to fly.
And every breath I breathed was sucked in by the tree,
and every shudder from the tree was sucked in by me.
Gold Road
The solid myrrh and smoke bells swayed.
Along the table, upon the alter, a crumbly mess was made.
The crowd wept,
Up up they looked, swallowing their tongues with song.
Choking chests and thumping hearts bore
the weighted pen,
Drip Dripped, on pages, buttery thin.
Smaller faces with good graces
Pulled their cheeks to grin.
Their heads were light
Not heavy like the rest.
Their hearts were soaring,
Not sinking through their chest.
And the sun broke through the fog
Elating all the best
The fog that fell, hovered over,
Sunk in and,
Consumed all the rest.
No Tree
A seed passed by me and tumbled to the side.
I grabbed it’s thorniness and pressed it to my thigh.
It swelled inside my body,
It swelled inside my mind.
I said, ‘this has to be,”
and so,
it bloomed within my thoughts,
it bloomed within my eyes.
But dry winds gusted through my yard,
and the grass was all but gone.
A dessert formed within my home
and vines refused to grow.
So I took the seed
and crushed it.
No promise, but a lie.
I blew the dust that remained and
sadly said goodbye.
Images
Images have tremendous power over us. From bygone cultures to the present they are preeminent aspects of society. A painting, an advertisement, and a photo can change the way we engage with the world.
In older cultures and perhaps present day, there were beliefs that images were intimately intertwined with what they portrayed. In Gombrich’s “The Story of Art” he explores this a bit. In ancient cave art it is proposed that drawings of conquered animals would effect the hunt. Voodoo dolls are an example of this kind of practice. He made the point that even if we are far removed from this belief, we still carry an evolutionary trait for this association. For example, most of us would be resistant to poking out a loved one’s eyes in a photo. Why does this make us uncomfortable? We logically know it won’t harm the other, but it still causes us to pause.
Images have a power and a hold on us, and we use them to have power over others. So this makes me think of art, the power of art over us, or even the uncomfortable nature of it. Take nude art, or the more realistic style of art through nude photographs. The painting and the photograph may be depicting the same model and the same pose, but the photo tends to make people more uncomfortable, it’s more real. Are we afraid that it is too close? Maybe because it confronts us and dislodges the comfort of the abstract buffer. We have to ask why this does though, why is one easier to engage with than the other? And if so, is that a bad thing?
My suspicion is that it’s uncomfortable because nudity is a part of sexuality and that typically makes people shrink back. We are not at ease confronting a topic that we have explored very little of. It Is easier to confront it abstractly because we don’t have a manual for how to approach it. It is an unknown and therefore begets fear. And it will remain so until we understand it.
In the words of Stephen King “If a fear cannot be articulated, it can't be conquered.”
