ch. 13 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Sunday, May 11 2008 

Journeys: a novella anniewoods 5:09 pm

Chapter 13

Dear Lucy, Zoe wrote in her journal, I want you to remember this story:
My best friend Kathy and I made snow ice cream in 1960, mixing fresh radiation and Shurfine Sugar in pink plastic bowls. In dreams our darkest wishes mutated into the rising shadows of neutron bombs. They infiltrated the ozonosphere of collective memory and worlds were destroyed one by one. After we ripened into the invisible melons of radiation, our bodies fed on ultraviolet, our bones in x-rays were the irridescent smiles of Halloween pumpkins, our souls split and fused all past lives into one simultaneous invention. We became cyber-goddesses making love with our own wicked reflections in the Black Queen’s hall of mirrors.
West Texas mothers continue to cook blackeyed peas and salt pork on New Year’s Day for good luck. But the heart has ascended from this ritual, leaving a hole in the ozone layer where nightmares bleed through and no child is safe. We have crossed all borders without passports, we now speak the same language, we lift our radioactive wings and fly on the same wavelength of history. Sunset clouds over Acoma Pueblo are thick as nuclear haze, ravens missing everywhere, swallowed up in all this. The Old Ones shift in their dreams, and into ours. They tell us we must harden our hearts into lead or we will not last out this century. Our words will evaporate into bitter aftertaste. Cool blue ozone layer ripped open, there is no place to hide, the sun will burn deep, our wounds will not heal.
Snake dreaming near Ayres Rock, Australia sees the end of this Earth in red spirals, knows the language of its shifting belly beneath her skin. She is our memory curled into heat at ground zero when the sun blazes down for the last time, leaving a sunset trail mushrooming purple and poisonous as a bruise near the edge of the world. The Aborigine remember the message in her tracks, color her snakeskin onto canvas with crushed pink and blue earth and the delicate yellow blood of wildflowers.
Curanderas die out by the dozens in Northern New Mexico. In Cordova, Ojo Caliente, Santa Cruz, Truchas, bells are ringing in crumbling adobe churches. Sabinita’s granddaughter, who wears a black shawl and carries red roses on pilgrimage to the Santuario de Guadalupe, will forget to harvest the chapparal in summer. She will forget where her grandmother picked the yerba buena near the Rio Chama. She will forget to boil the twisted osha roots stored high on the shelf in thick bluegreen mason jars . She will forget her history as surely as she forgets the dreams that tell her about the end of the world.
Space ships shaped like the silver heads of dolphins land on a sea of snow near Amarillo, Texas while the townspeople shift under the deepest sleep of winter. Later, over coffee in small cafes, they will wonder why the cows have all disappeared.
The night before war awakened in the Persian Gulf we could not sleep. We wondered why slick black oil greed should stir the oldest memory of fear. Oilfields burning wild as tumbleweed fires in Kuwait lift a heavy smoke that stretches the tender flesh of the ozone layer. Like radiation, it alters the atmosphere forever. Children stir this darkness into their snow ice cream and with every bite they remember.
The shaman’s shadow cannot traverse this realm and keep us safe. For thousands of years the prophecies warned us of the time he could no longer dance for us on the edge of the mesa, holding the radiation in the palm of his hand, laughing as it mutated to a crow or became a cloud shaped like a black bear. We must go, ourselves, into the metallic aftertaste of the ozone layer. We must crawl through the mirrored tunnel with our eyes open.
We must become the young woman in Hiroshima whose skin blisters from her bones. And her child drinking radiation milk. And the heartbeat of a small gray rabbit silenced in a cobalt cloud of death on July 16, 1945 in Los Alamos, New Mexico. And the collective soul of those whose fingers lightly choose the button of our destiny. We must become a single neonblue light body escaping neutron aftermath, a radiation angel hurled into space.

 

ch. 12 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Sunday, May 11 2008 

Journeys: a novella anniewoods 5:08 pm

Chapter 12

Journal entry, found Jan. 10 in 1958, 1969, again in 1990, then 2007:
Everyone talks at once in these odd winter dreams! The mulitiple selves of another lifetime all demand to be heard in this one. They make faces in the window of my third eye. The one I really want to see is the one comfortable with her anonymity. She is the medicine woman sitting high on the mesa, her face turned to the north wind.
I tell her, If I could slip back into your flesh for a moment, I would. I would flow my soul into your body and know what is true about everything. Like I knew back then.
In another life the medicine woman hears the alpha wolf howling and is not afraid. He is her kindred beast, a brujo hiding out in the animal kingdom. He prowls without fear through her bones into the blackness of the other side. He follows the shooting star and guards it with his life.
And in yet another life I was a girl in a small West Texas town. When I go back this time to visit, the medicine woman’s face surfaces in the bending reflections of memory, like my face dissolving into the warp of the old bathroom mirror in my grandmother’s house.
Go drive around the square downtown and honk at the boys, she whispers. Go have a cherry vanilla coke at Sweet’s Drive-In. Go make out at the movies where Clint Eastwood struts across the screen in ‘Hang ‘Em High. Do like you used to, girl, have a little fun!
She is relentless: Go look at the prairie dogs in City Park. Remember the fireworks there on Fourth of July? And you laying back flat on that prickly Texas Johnson grass, that grass half-dead ‘cause it’s such a dry summer. You never had a boyfriend on the Fourth of July! Now why was that? Fourth of July always fireworks and no boyfriend. That would make you lonesome, alright. All that light and no one to watch it with. No one to see the stars that kept falling long after the fireworks let up. The ones you can wish on till it all comes true.
I tell her to shut her mouth. That old girl, she talks too much. She tells me I eat too much fried food and play the clarinet without inspiration. She tells me my first love will not last, but I will not listen. I cursed at her then, Leave me alone! Like my Aunt Betty Lou, she doesn’t stay where she’s not welcome. She was gone, a Roman candle flash in the lonely black sky. Though on summer evenings, she would rest gently in my soul like a child in a hammock, rocking me to and fro. She sent postcards from a trailer park in Thousand Palms, California. She taunted me in my dreams, her face plastered white with Maybelline pancake makeup.
Sometimes in that other life the medicine woman became impatient. She confronted the girl and shook her by the scruff of the neck, shook her awake. They went off to hunt wolf calls together. They went to where it was true. She pointed to the biggest falling star, the one I lost sight of a quarter of a century ago, when it disappeared over the Planet Prairie Dog in Tula, Texas. It suspends in the nest of my heart, a full moon caught for centuries by the fine threads of its light. It is a golden spider who longs to be free of this earthly intention.
In the middle of this life, the one where I am fully awake, my mother phones. With that psychic twist of knowing possessed by all the women in my family, she remarks, You don’t sound like yourself. Meaning I don’t sound, anymore, like I’m from Texas, having traveled worlds beyond. The rest of the family–grandmother, uncles and aunts–mull over this peculiarity while playing dominoes and chugging hard black coffee. They consume their grief out of jelly glasses full of stale saltine crackers mushed into milk. They talk about me and Cousin Buster like we’ve died. That Buster, they sigh, shaking their heads, He’s gone to California. And of me they say (for Mother told me, she said it was true), they say simply, That girls’ gone. (“Got her ass out of here,” is the gist of the thought.) Buster, Roy Orbison and me–we’re all the same strange prodigal children and it’s hard for them to let us go.
And when I pass back over to their side, it’s crossing a time zone of nonphysical dimensions, it’s slipping through a distortion in the atmosphere. I buy a two-way ticket to what I want to forget. I am lured out of habit, and the need to know what is true. The folks in this realm travel the dream slowly, swaying to a Hank Williams love song. In their backpacks are Pepto-Bismol, Moon Pies, and a meatloaf sandwich. In the small town detour of time-out-of-time, the decision not to wake to this dream is easy as watching Sunday evening Lawrence Welk reruns on black and white TV. When someone dies, they are put in the ground and the door is shut. Mother warned me it would be different beyond that door. She should know, having been out there herself.
Snow white winter morning and I’ve dreamed a black raven that becomes an airplane. I’ve dreamed a medicine woman in the mirror who had too much tequila the night before. I’ve dreamed centuries of knowing stored in the secret Indian blood of my great-grandmother. I’ve dreamed falling, and falling some more, waking up to this other life.

 

ch. 11 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Sunday, May 11 2008 

Journeys: a novella anniewoods 5:06 pm

Chapter 11

Zoe sits alone facing the Ortiz Mountains outside of Vuelta. She hears the Ancient Ones hum from seven buried pueblos. They rise in a chorus, then fade to one voice which keens on the wind. Everyone is alone, Zoe says to herself, watching Antonio’s shadow slant into the distant road. Watching till he becomes invisible. She begins to chant:
A wolf howls in my heart. She has seen the full moon in September and will not release it. In this strange territory the brujo dances in the Great Kiva at midnight. He dances for the wolf in the woman’s heart.
I cannot say I have not felt darkness: nestled close, shaking its rattle in my ear. Its scales glint in moonlight, its belly scrapes the bright hard sand under the coolness of rock at high noon.
The brujo trains his hand to magic, invokes the raven from East and West, shifts clouds to thunder with a nod of his head. His eyes are hard to the sun, he stares at it fiercely. In another life he was a warrior, and the taste of blood is in his mouth. He drinks snakeweed tea and meditates on a crystal shard, but cannot banish the warm metallic memory of blood.
Is this my curse? he asks me, for I am the woman with the wolf in her heart. I tell him:
When I was a child, the moon rose full and gold in my throat. I had a galaxy of stars in my eyes and morninglories opened in my heart every day. In summer peaches were warm on the tree. In fall the Halloween pumpkin smelled raw and sweet. In winter the Great Spirit dreamed under a soft blanket of snow. In spring yellow daffodils sat on a table in my lilac bedroom.
If darkness edged these events it was harmless, the shadow of jack-o-lantern in early evening. If a chill caressed my shoulders as I sat on my grandmother’s porch in late October, I would think, This is the whisper of someone I do not yet know.
Now I place three stones in a row. Jasper, agate, pink granite. I wrap red silk against my throat. I do not remember the names of former lovers. I do not remember the color of their eyes. I remember the white lace dress I wore at 16, but I do not remember the girl who wore it. I tie a scarf the color of dawn around my waist, pull on black cowboy boots, and head out the door. I create the myth that will shape my life. I become the woman with the wolf in her heart.
The wiry curves of the brujo’s body intrigue me. His bones are close to his skin. He keeps magic locked in his heart. He whispers flute music in my ears, his fingers are familiar, light and tingling on my lips. We drink the sacramental mescal and merge our bodies under the full moon. The brujo, he thinks he teaches me his magic, but it is my own reflected in his soul. The warm crescent of his earlobe is cinnamon to my tongue, I taste him everywhere, the aroma of his skin intoxicates my breathing–I am hungry for the taste of this, a wolf who has gone for days without the taste of flesh, and it is a matter of survival. I am a shapechanger under the vast twinkling bed of stars, evolve to a silkworm spinning a warm cocoon, and take him in, take in the brujo who transforms to a butterfly with wings the color of autumn.
Do not give me your power, he says, and I tell him: Was I not the maker of the cocoon, and yet the butterfly? Everything you are, I am. I give birth to myself, and I let myself go. There is nothing I can do about this, no way to stop it.
The brujo says he walked once on hot coals. But he does not choose to do it again. Once the reason for a thing is revealed to me, he continues, I have learned. And from that lesson go on to another.
Lessons are forks in the road, the movement in our lives. My former lover, the man I left at the Warren Inn in Santa Fe, says my face is too thin, and that I am beginning to believe in magic. You look wild, he says, shaking his head, You run in a pack with your dreams. I have heard you howling in the middle of the night. I have seen your eyes glass over, too much instinct in the blood. I tell him:
My heart is a shapechanger, it is a wolf in heat, it is a rabbit darting under juniper, it is a snake curled on a rock, it is a windmill, a wheel of fortune, it moves at the whim of the wind, it lands where it will.
At Chaco Canyon, a brown coyote paused between wheatgrass and black sage and stared me in the eye. The night before, a star fell blazing to earth, five seconds of magic. My heart stood still, held safe as a baby in a warm spot. Mars lit under the full moon which rose over the Great Kiva while the brujo blew a plaintive song on his flute. There is a rhythm to this only a wolf-woman can know–the descent of the star, the ascent of the moon, the way our souls travel by instinct, riding in our blood and in our bones.

 

calculated risk Sunday, May 11 2008 

Poetry anniewoods 4:35 pm

Downwind of Los Alamos
the dream mathematicians calculate
the invariable ratio of poison to cell.
When we wake, hungover from a spell of radiation
everything glows with such an unnatural light,
those old mercury fillings
the rocks and sand in the arroyos
the edge of the world past the Sangre de Cristos
your children’s bones.

When we speak
what is not said
is radiation.

This equation will not change:
for each seamless particle of controlled radiation
emission
a cell dies somewhere,
in a brain
a sheath covering a nerve
a baby’s soul.
Life mutates closer to its imitation of death.

Technotalk detaches source from symptom,
the numbers and symbols conceal your broken
heart,
the smell of blood, a taste of something evil.
This isn’t a dream at all – it is our flesh,
the bones of our children, a baby’s soul
dissolving, like morning-after memories.

The percentage of survival slopes off
the chart.

 

some sort of meditation Sunday, May 11 2008 

Poetry anniewoods 4:30 pm

I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details. – Albert Einstein

You think you will be protected -
Oh, but nothing protects you
your dreams are a mass of longings
illusive archetypes, loves never loved.

I pray I will be protected -
Oh, but nothing protects me
I search in my dreams for clues, a parlor game.
I swirl in my dreams toward the Holy Grail
over and over and over
I am digging through the morass, I am looking
for nothing
it feels so real, this nothing. What is it?
The aborted child has darkened the
Holy Grail. It is covered in moss and
mourning glory vines.

In your angelic heart you forgive everything. . . .

Maybe this is just how it’s going to be
subterraneon meloncholy all the hours of the day
seeping into dreams, awakening into disorientation,
in another country, another body, on a train or
traveling in this very bed, the bed that holds
such sorrrow, in a body of such imperfection.
This is how it will be.
So, Oh…get used to it. Move on.

 

ocean’s edge Sunday, May 11 2008 

Poetry anniewoods 4:27 pm

In a clear rinse of tide, in a place
I cannot remember it is over and all is washed
clean. Smooth sleep, no more complicated dreams.

It seems the undertow of longing had hooked
me in forever. I saw nothing but your face.
I felt nothing but your soul. It was a drowning
of elegant energy, but oh so finely felt.

So there: it is done with. Breathe
into the void and forgive me for drifting
so close to the liquid rim of assuming this
or that. It is done with, the tide recedes

and this water so deep and divine
flows clearly through my heart
and the strongest currents escort you
safely back to sea.

 

south uist morning Sunday, May 11 2008 

Poetry anniewoods 4:24 pm

In May,
the sky rises before the sun,
filled with light, mist and some
haze of clouds. It’s for the heart
to see, where ocean meets
horizon. It’s in the heart
to know, such magic greets
each day.
This land so rich in history
and steeped in austere beauty:

I finally relax into a century
I did not know
existed in such a world as ours.
How could I know,
within those busy hours,
in a rush of time made up of things,
not real?

This was not planned —
to fall in love so shortly, so sweetly
and then to leave incompletely,
yet to forever deeply understand
such land and sky and sea that heals.

 

for emily dickinson Sunday, May 11 2008 

Poetry anniewoods 4:23 pm

Consequence
It is a careful — Construct
This Body and — the — Mind
— with Spirit — somehow —
Layered — as the glue that Binds.

Or so — is thought,
In Better Times — when Absolution
Fails, then All
Seems fragile, not Itself
— and Providence is Pale.

Inheritance
This sentient shield − Fear
− Restrains the Heart −
To retreat. Both Guardian
And Captor be − obstructing
All that travels near.
Decaying Knight −
Oh, centuries old! A rampant Gene
Gone mad within
The Blood of Memory −
With − Duty − tiresome and remote.

The Art of Control
Plots — and Plans
Like Pots —
And Pans, must be
Carefully arranged —
Lest they topple, Deranged,
Into Space —
Or perhaps,
Into your endangered
Life.

 

leaving galisteo Sunday, May 11 2008 

Poetry anniewoods 4:12 pm

Any foreign land will do.
Even the one by way of the road you cannot see.
The one past the Ortiz mountains,
where the crow flies.

You peel down the loose gravel road
set free as a snowbound jackrabbit.
Toward Moriarity, Albuquerque, the Texas border.
Each time the leaving gets easier,
each time the distance quicker to cross.
You see windmills on splayed legs,
windmills with wind easy as breathing,
their clack-clacking close to your heart as an iron lung.
You drive with a sure hand
in your blue truck reliable as any horse.

Snowclouds shape a man’s face,
smudge a moustache over his lip.
As usual, in these parts, dirt before snow.
Red dirt storm sky forbodes a lot of wind
filled with dirt, dead birds, and chicken feathers.

You cross miles in a day checking omens.
This is pioneer instinct you were born with.
Not unlike cow telepathy that points the way home.
This is just something you know:
that distance is a relative thing to freedom.
Unlike mother or grandmother
you cannot stay in one place.

If you drive fast enought
you can watch the storm behind you.

 

summer solstice Sunday, May 11 2008 

Poetry anniewoods 4:05 pm

All day on the edge of this, then
a dreamy sunset
illustrates the sky.
One moment, always moment that creation

opens up to us
ripening into bloom, and fruit —

peach and tangerine cumulus,
a slice of lime moon.

For a moment, forever slips into form,
leaves us awed, as if at the end of a storm,
the wordless pause, heart on a cusp.
The taste of it all, in an endless cup.

 

Next Page »