I told her your stories make my heart ache. Mercy no mercy, she
keeps them coming. If
it’s aching, it’s alive, she answers. Ache - to have a
continuous dull pain, often used in combination: an aching heart, a sad ballad,
someone left behind.
I didn’t want to be alive like that: I'm favoring breathing space, being space, the
fortitude of solitude, stepping out of
combination. Like the aspen, rootlets knitted to kin underground boasting to
sun and moon: Here I Am!
and she insists there is no alone,
there is no away! It’s all here, all together: the rivers that artery, the land
the quanta pixelating space. And now my ache turns to
growing pains - her stories, the elixir. I would have said that too, she
spouts, but you wouldn’t have listened.
Reciprocity
lines our combination, a sacred esteem of gates and fences, sovereignty
understood, our paradox: lives free and bound. Sometimes I wish she would be a silent lioness within me and I would
just know the joy of close family. And there are days, in my mind, I drag her
through waves and pools wondering, why don’t she swim?
Daydreams, reminisce - that’s
all she is, as if it were a botheration.
And I’m
dreaming too: a frog prince all puffed up,
pulling wide strokes across the pond. I
am he reaching to kiss her into lotus and mud puppies. Her presence - bright
as a blue moon - reminds me, we have been fairy folk most of our lives. The
tarot holds our triskelion: Magician High Priestess Lovers. We’ve grown from them all.
And I’m still swimming and dizzy, while she says, you’re stalling.
That grandbaby wants to be bragged on.
Crow about her brilliance, her new front teeth, her dance recital. Gladly, but I’ve forgotten what she smells
like, her voice has changed, we are both so
busy. A tyranny of vast geography
confounds us, and we’ve become figments of imagination. See the combinations my
story conjured. And an ache to render her recollection neglected as First
Nations. I can’t brag on what I don’t know. You got an elixir for that?
I'll compensate with larger legends to us mythic like this old
chestnut. Once upon a time there were queens: Gallizanae who fiercely loved their world as
self - the sacred groves, the cold dark sea, the rocky ledges and cormorants
that peopled them. A
finger of Roman empire crawled in. The terrible virgins enchanted rocks and trees
and bedeviled the invaders. Between the ranks they dashed in black, like the Furies. Hair disheveled, waving brands and curses,
paralyzing legions. Here live my grandmother’s stories, to raise hackles and goosebumps giving a cuddle of ululation. Hackles -
the erectile hairs that stand on the back of a neck.
Face to face, I stand with the happenstance that defines me: pruned
from family, uprooted from native soil, lost pieces everywhere. I cough up stories stuck in my throat. Maybe to render them into elixir of cat fits
and petulance, cathartic as the asymmetrical howls of ethnic chaos. Something to ease the mud from my toes and
heart. She
says, that’d make good compost. Roses thrive in
such ache: the A# below middle C. A combination much
like yawping with blackbirds along a two
track. They
have mud between their toes, mites in their
feathers and grandbabies who love to murmurate
with fog and wind.
Their stories make everything ache.
Yawping - a
strident sharp utterance. When I hear to her stories, there
are no sharp edges. Her voice takes little steps, is
wild honey with Cherokee and Scotch Irish slurs, a ribbon blanket of the day to
day, aspen clone kinship, sturdy invisible bonds.
And we're all here, all together, sovereign
and bound in a fine glory of growing pains throbbing among mycelium and
moppets, under
a big sky. I lean into the ache, she hangs sheets
between stories, a gathering breeze to billow
us. No better combination.
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