The mirror lies today. No child
looks back in innocence except
with the eyes, the same startled ocean green,
those changing moods.
Today, the tide rushed in and
I thought I was in my Easter outfit
sewn by my grandmother,
pink and white striped cotton with white frills
of  lace, gathered waist, bunny buttons;
the hat a woven bonnet
with acrylic daisies.
Such
a happy child, buoyed in the world,
treasured starfish.
I see her image dissolve into the pool,
waves loosening at my feet.

In time, the wind pulls seeds from the husk
at will, by season’s determination.
Nothing stops this, not all the wishes
in the world.

I slip out on the wire of air,
An acrobat in my own invisible life,
One foot upon what’s known, one foot lifted
on the hidden path of desire.

What drives such performance is a mystery,
resists even the hardest resolutions
not to fall.
The inevitable descent,
gravity
plunges a seed to unpredictable landing, into sand
or rich soil, to a foreign field, the debris of rebirth.

Your ducks in a row, your fields plowed,
your dishes washed, meals on a plate, geraniums that bloom –
such a sane a nest. So wise a decision.

In such a world, heads and lives blown apart,
sacks of flour and gourds of water a nurturing gold,
your geraniums bloom bloodred and sunburned pink,
so beautiful; silent to envy and longing
the threat that all will be taken away.

In this one life we awaken to, keep your eyes
open. Be gentle with those geraniums, add
a creamy peacewhite bloom, a hopeful peach,
a prayer of water.

If Saturn’s rings were gold I’d wear them

round my neck and ascend to ice,

My eyes can touch her through the speed of light.

She is the beacon, illusory and pragmatic.

Who rides those rings? I have, in a dream,

the same dream I witnessed Pluto shed himself

of identity and Chiron find his place.

I’d wear those rings of golden ice,

buried in her heavy mottled cloak – it’s

Saturn’s price to orbit her voluptuous body.

There’s sanity in not wanting to be bound to Earth,

its lack of sheen, its distant blue forever.

“An’ as it blowed an’ blowed I often looked
up at the sky an’ assed meself the question,
what is the stars, what is the stars?”
- Sean O’Casey, Juno & the Paycock

Forever wind annoys me, pushing in
dirt and despair from the West, a country
of bald landscape and suppressed rage,
a mockery of expectation. A truth-teller
of the content life, wind sweeps that illusion
bare and rough.

Wind is unforgiving, always in my face
demands confrontation, twists my words,
Wind is the force of god slapping me
as I daze in the gentle dreams of day.
A reminder
that what is on its way is a reckoning, a decision,
the devastation of all that came before.
Wind whips my hair in sharp snaps
on my cheeks: “Wake up! Or continue to avoid me.”
Of course, impossible, unavoidable.

I think of you when there is wind.
When we once curled up in the house and wind
cursed against the windows and doors.
Or when we walked a peaceful trail and the sudden strength
accosted us and lifted us up like angels, blew sand
and tiny bits of gravel into our eyes, we could not see.
Wind would win, tear us asunder as we gripped
One another’s hand, the help we needed to keep us
together.

Against wind’s rough push I clutch the steering wheel
fighting death on the road. I wonder
if I could do it. Die. It’s just a thought.
So simple to release the wheels into wind, to be gusted up
clad in wings of dirt.
Wind keeps me close enough to death
to want to live. Most of the time. It isn’t even
my decision, depending on
the wind’s mood that day, that hour.

Rainmaker: Monsoon Lessons

It takes
so many thousand years to wake,
but will you wake, for pity’s sake?-Christopher Fry, “A Sleep of Prisoners”

I.
I began to make rain at an early age.
The weeds exploded with sharp, tender stickers,
the laundry dripped small rivers from the clothesline,
and puddles of crystal liquid stood still as glass
in the cornices of buffalo grass and dandelion.
Not all such efforts were appreciated.
The hook-shaped yellowjackets jerked
into their dirtpod nest under the carport eaves.
My mother cursed the sullen sheets and towels,
the dog ran in circles as if possessed.
Rain can be unpredicatable in the hands of the uninitiated.
I wanted to do something about the thunder -
it was cause for alarm – the same sound as a bomb, I thought,
never having heard a bomb. The voice of doomsday.
Nothing could be done about the thunder.
So I learned to love it
and all its wordless warnings and commentaries
on such a small world as mine.

II.
The knowledge of the world comes on the tip of the tongue
it rolls in with the tide, covered in salt,
and leaves its bones to dry.
I picked the spiked and funneled skeletons from the beach
one by one.
put a shell of a word to my ears
and it whispered
shhhhhh…………….
There is a message in words beyond their remains,
and beyond the memory of what has already been said.

III.
Behind the great thunder that announces rain
is a question a thousand years old:
What is it that we see?
The same answers come back to us
in familiar shapes, scents, and textures.
There is a reminiscent blue, a sad green,
love’s round corners, and a pointed guilt,
the rough edge of a thorn, smooth oil of blood;
small roses that smell like hard red candies,
the twisted shadow of an iron gate slanted across sunlight;
an empty house deranged by ancient morninglory
vines that open full magenta mouths at 6 a.m.
In this life it’s the job of the rainmaker
to call forth a cleansing wash of color
over everything preconceived,
thought ordinary, over all the ten thousand
things.
Without intention, the clouds release rain,
Pockets of debris from other universes.
Their soft pink bellies hold food
for the sacred fish below.

When you begin to understandthe connection of water and words,
of sacred fish and food multiplied
for centuries;

when you begin to understand
that one contemplative footprint
is a word in sand, consumed by water,
you are ready for the vacant hope
of faith.

Faith leads the rainmaker, with no motive at all,
to wrench water from a sky that was hot and pale
with emptiness, just hours ago,
and to love the miracle, again and again.

IV.
Rainmaker’s logic is all about focus.
Begin looking now, into this light:
a candle burns without intention,
and holds in its waxy heart
the light that comes and goes.
Ask without intention. Pray as if breathing.
Prayer is a language cathedral
that goes dark at dawn.

V.
Soon after I decry the absence of clouds,
it’s monsoon season in the desert.
Kamikaze rains attack at random,
Wet steam rises from the cacti,
low-lying roads swell with dark water
and we swim through the air in a trance.
The sunsets are Neopolitan ice cream,
the sun a bruised peach simmering in custard.
When this is over, I’ll be waiting for
the wisdom that’s supposed to follow the storm.
These 40 days and 40 nights have gone on forever.

VI.
Something from that life spills into
this life
I’m waiting to hear my name called.
Like familiar water full to the lip
of the glass, I want a taste
of what I have created, sediment and all,
till it flows pure and smooth and empty
as faith.

Transit of Nothing

So Venus is running us down with her Love?
I lay on the highway, glued to the sweetness of
Her necessary trail of decay.
Love’s other selves remain behind Her galactical spin,
salving the wounds of cracked hearts, opening
arteries and swelling them in unison, pumping
blood Love blood Love

So this is the Initiation? I’ve read about it.
Forgot about it – and here it is.
No lacy hearts & pretty roses, this one.
Long days of rest so deep it’s death,
arising from a nap as if a tomb
stretching arms in resurrection.
Nothing is remembered, but somehow
I know more about this world.

This body does not control itself.
I follow the coaxing pull of Venus,
its multiplying rules of change, its determined
path to mortality — cracked heart —
If one survives this introspective broken dream
then surely wings will lift us up.

I can spot her yards away: Her exquisite skin and straight shiny butterscotch hair streaked with fading burgundy that whips in the bone-chilling wind. The way she trudges solidly, wearing what seem to be the same jeans I usually see her in, paired with one of three wrinkled t-shirts and no jacket. Startlingly malachite eyes are unfathomable except when a matrix of the knowing imp sparks its sheen, then submerges into a private space where perhaps everything and nothing exits. Sometimes I glimpse into that void when least expected; I see beyond the mirror, into somewhere I should not be. I see you.
Heather’s zone of cool smooth stone doesn’t feel like reflection or hidden thought; it’s more as if she has tuned out or is plotting the next excuse to escape a class, or to spurt random, confident comments that have nothing to do with anything in particular, but carry personal meaning and weight from the depths of an inner world.
High-functioning autistic? Gifted “enrichment-placed student”? Labels don’t fit and I don’t want to know them. I take her mystery as it comes. It is what it is. And because of this, I cannot even imagine her inner thoughts. Her boundaries are impenetrable, unpredictable, a rainbow of personas. Sometimes I feel pictures, fleeting colors of her vacillating moods, the bright bird of her intelligence.
Heather occasionally makes comments that I am not sure to believe: that her room is a closet in an old trailer, and she sleeps on a blanket, that she is marrying Taylor, on whose lap she sits for awhile in art class.
In any class she sits apart, yet comments loudly, often off-topic, or spurts an opinion that has no relationship on the class discussion. When she does this, I see the spark of the imp, knowing its ability to manipulate reality. What is Heather saying this time? Why is she saying THAT? Other students seem to tolerate this without judgment, though on closer observation I see that their behavior would really be called ignoring. Heather is not there.
During a Socratic Circle discussion on character, the boy leading the group becomes visibly peeved when Heather, sitting back from the circle near a wall, interjects several intelligible comments, then announces that her new baby niece was “born with character” because she was laughing when she came out of the womb. You are not allowed to say anything unless you come over to this circle! he retorts. Group faces gaze at her with kabuki expressions of nothing. Having had her say, Heather leans back in her desk and balances it on two legs against the wall. Mona Lisa smile. Later she crawls to a cramped area near the circled desks and drinks a bottle of blue Gatorade.
Heather’s math work is impeccable, done quickly if she feels like it. She calls out, I’m done! when she finishes her test, which is wrinkled and covered with doodles. She slams both palms on the desk. Bam! So what are we gonna do now? Can I go outside? She goes outside.
Heather, where are you?
Fleeting moods emerge, surprise. One day she pops up next to me and puts her arm around my shoulder. Later she passes me along the corridor between classes and I am nobody she knows. Hey! Heather yells across a courtyard when she sees me come up the front steps one morning. Later I am once again nobody during an entire class.
I think I understand her behavior because I share the need to surface when I feel like it, and swim deeply when I need to, although over many years, I’ve had time to perfect my art so that it is more subtle. Also, I do not have Heather’s courage. Is it courage or a brain blip or a combination of both? It takes courage to be different and not care. I really don’t think she does care, despite the show of bravado when she chooses to slide up to the surface and be seen. My concern is that the not caring will prevent her from blossoming, will someday whither her unique view of the world to cynicism, when the innocence passes.
Heather, I think you would understand Emily Dickinson’s observation:
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?

Chapter 20 of 20: Coda

[under construction]

Chapter 19

Epilogue, Journal entry, Circa 2000 A.D., found in the bottom drawer of an old oak armoire, in a house by the Gulf of Mexico, South Texas maybe, the other side of the moon:
While I am waiting, I fall asleep in a kiva. In this place there are no maps. There are days of walking without direction, though it seems my head was facing North, and in the West a flock of ravens eclipsed the moon.
This is what I know now: that lessons thousands of years old are learned in the world above the rim of the kiva. The raven tries to guide me in a way of silence. The glide of wings is the message to keep flying; the rest on the telephone wire is the message to stay still.
In this lifetime the lesson is about boundaries: trip over an invisible edge and fall forever. My heart wants to be clear, to rest in itself and fly free. The raven says Go to your dreams and I’ll meet you there. I’ll take your Heart, for She is one of us, and belongs to you no more.
I remember something about another place when I look at the night sky, before I fall asleep in the kiva, before I leave this world. Ravens and space ships–are they one and the same? Aunt Opal said something about not forgetting our roots. She said the only thing true is what is born in us, what runs in our blood. That blood drums in my ears, my eyes are blinded with stars. For a moment the heart stops, and I fall into the dark place where it is safe, where the medicine woman makes no mistakes, where the raven is eye to eye.
There is another side to this, where ravens have clipped wings and medicine women make snakeroot potions for the spirits of those afraid of the dark. I have been there without a map, hidden behind rocks, wide awake.
Before they sent us, we were given maps and dreams, but some of us lost them on the way. We are the ones who sit in the kiva until it is time to go home. We are the ones whose hearts race with each shooting star. We are learning to draw maps with stars, we are learning to dream.