The Witch Series

Book of Shadows

Her book. This book,

spanning all the time she’s been allotted.

All of them neatly folded and tucked

between two of its pages –

Father, so long Dad,

so long, his legs, his darkness,

hang(s) out bookmarking gloom.

All of it yellowed by beer,

river water running under the bridge

as he hurled himself down and slipped under.

Mother, hello Mother, saying goodbye,

her phantom breast, its tumor shadowing

a line across her chest. Her kitchen simmering

with delicious mystery, kindnesses from

strange men, her wild waitress friends.

Their separation, the chasms it multiplied --

his family’s disapproval, their withdrawal,

the brittle crackling facts of abandonment.

Catholic school, Sister This, Father That,

their stories about martyrs 
bloodying page after page,

the few teachers who took 
an interest in her, the poetry

she wrote, a string of A pluses 
strung up like prayer flags.

Witches she knew and admired.

Witches she loved and feared.

Animal familiars. Animal tutors and chaperones.

Dogs and cats, foxes, hares, elks, bears, elephants,

her fear of mice. Crows, always crows 
disposing of carrion, gathering 
shiny things, squawking at the moon.

Then the rituals, her intentions

floating away from her,

seeding the future, her hands tying knots

for stability, a candle burning against

the wall, the flash of residual ashes

that let her let go, Loved ones on

moonlit nights, as they hung

from high branches,

twisting on the breeze,

tiny outlines of dollies

bearing messages

to the underworld,

litanies of hope, yearning,

praise and blessed be.

Little parcels weighed down

by rocks underground,

what needed or wanted burying.

Spells for babies wanted by friends, for babies

who had to be given back before birth,

love spells, sweet mingling of cells 
as they decompose, healing 
tokens of friendship and admiration, 
talismans for courage or protection,

planted in tree trunks around her house,

spells chanted over water, over food to

enhance its nourishment, over little heads

while they’re fast asleep, spells to ease the body,

lift it away from pain.

All her optimism and acceptance tucked into

this book’s many leaves, her life a wheel

turned by the earth’s steady compass.

She can feel herself growing lighter,

as the shadows take on weight.

The wildness, the weediness in her,

the roots reaching out from between

its pages, all of it flimsy and fleeting.

The sun moves across each day

in a woman’s life, leaving behind

this dance of dark upon light.

It feels to her like enough.

                         

from Firefly, Brightly Burning

Was It A Crow You Saw?

Or a priest as you flew down the highway,
his black cassock waving in the cold air?
And you picked him up, didn’t you,
with his pack and his traveler’s hunch
although you never really slowed down?
You picked him up imagining the possibilities
he carried with him: where he was going
with his young face, his anointed hands.
What hand moves him along?
Is it the same hand that moves you,
that moves the deer to leap
across the highway and be killed?
That gives you the blessing of horses
lying at ease in the chill, haloed by the steam
before winter chases them into the barn?
Ah, but then you catch yourself.
Who said it had to be a hand?
It could just as well be tentacles, or a claw.
It could be an oozing polymer, you haven’t a clue.
And maybe what you saw was a crow after all.
This game you’ve been playing
makes you hungry, doesn’t it?
Too bad his pack is empty;
all that he carried now circling
darkly in your head.

The poems in Firefly, Brightly Burning were written and compiled over many years. When I first put the manuscript together, it seemed like a patchwork of unlike things, perhaps because it contains a number of serial pieces. I tended to see those as discrete from the other work I was doing. Many of the poems come from a fictional, narrative impulse, though certainly not all. The Anna God poems, in particular, were instigated by a photo in the newspaper of a college girl asleep on a couch in a triangle of sunlight. Her name was, yes, you guessed it, Anna God. Some of her poems come from my direct experiences as a teacher at a university, one comes from an incredible newspaper story, and one from reading Lorca. Nevertheless, one's own concerns have a way of sneaking in despite our intentions,  don't they? 

Recently, I read a quote from Melissa Pritchard's book, A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, And Write, that, "art [is] a form of active prayer." That seems true of this book, which moves from frustration with organized religion, and the way it fails women, in particular, to direct glimpses or experiences of the divine that have been there all along.