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.

                         

The Witch Series

               Collage by Romare Bearden

Conjure Woman

She’s got them all teetering on

the tips of her fingers, tiny as mice.

One flip of the wrist and all the men,

who ever tasted her; then turned 

their faces away, and all the men,

who drove them to ruination, 

go flying to who knows 

where, and who cares?

She holds them up in yellow

curtain light, watches them shift

their weight to keep from falling.

Each one of them knows what he’s

done or not done. It’s chilling them

to the bone to see she’s wearing her

haint blue dress. No more feathers,

no Adam and Eve root. That’s how

very much danger they’re in.

Outside, her bottle tree glistens,

as she squeezes them for good measure,

rolls them between her palms, before

laying them out like sardines

in the bottom of her reddest meanest box.

The Witch Series

Ritual Against Separation

Take one of her leopard

print high heels, and one of his

long seldom worn dress shoes.

Hang them out the bedroom window

on the extra clothesline from the shed,

so they dance in the breeze.

Once a week, pull them up, hand over hand,

so you can stuff more hair into each toe box,

hair you’ve been collecting from his hairbrush,

her hairbrush, stuffing his into her shoe,

hers into his, then lint from each of their

sweaters, and any loose threads you can pull

when you hang their wash on the line.

Each time, lower them down

a little closer to the bushes limning

the house, until you see a swirl of

grass beginning, soon mosses

and feathers too, mingling

with parental flotsam, each shoe

transformed into an aerie house

for tiny eggs that will give birth

to baby birds, all beak and need,

their cries a tenderness, a sun burst,

a glitter cascade, almost unbearable

in the fullness of its gladness.

Watch the parents guard them,

feed them, and teach them

how to fly, their larger bodies

dipping below, and bumping up

the smaller, until the currents catch

them and they glide. Call your

father Carolina Wren, House 

Sparrow, Nuthatch, call your mother his

mate. Tie the ropes in a triple

knot, and hope for the best.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version was published by The Paterson Literary Review in 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milk Time

It was the sacred time: the little cartons

delivered in their plastic crate

by an eighth grade boy

who looked like Gulliver

for a moment, striding through

a cloud of Lilliputian first graders.

A quiet knock, then he’d come in

all hunch-shouldered, quick, and shy,

to set them down next to my desk.

And there they sat, piled in little hills,

like shanties after a cyclone.

How my head spun with the changes

from day to day: This school. No that school.

This classroom that ticks along like a clock,

that one that has no lesson plans, no paper.

This was Paterson, New Jersey.

I was twenty-one: a substitute

who knew nothing about the world

and how it worked.

In one school I nodded

in agreement as the Principal

told me, a red finger nail wagging,

that we must never, never, never

use corporal punishment, no matter

how rude the children might become.

In another I trembled at the Principal’s

booming voice as he hit one of the boys

in front of the class, a trouble maker,

he insisted I identify, and I suddenly

felt so exhausted I let them do whatever

it was they wanted for the rest of the afternoon.

But milk time. Milk time was sacred.

Each one of them carefully opening 

his or her own little house of goodness, 

stepping into a clean white space,

a silence punctuated by an occasional 

bubbling noise, as someone’s straw reached 

into a corner to grab the last few drops.

I didn’t know then that, for many of these

children, this was breakfast. For many of them

ten o’clock rang like an angelus putting an end 

to stomach growls and shaky hands 

that could barely hold a pencil.

All I knew was that at ten o’clock

they sat still. They were quiet, and

they were comforted. I was too.

Sitting at the big desk, in the front of the room, 

I felt like a little girl again, the one 

who stood against the wall in the playground,

watching her classmates ease into smiles 

and whispers, as they filed inside, sat 

at their desks, opened the cartons and savored.

A little girl on the margins, hungry for love.

And here it was: milk time again,

all of us in communion for the time it took,

to swallow that daily ration of decency,

that blessed little half pint that got us through.

Tuesday Poem: previously published in Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women's Spirituality, ed. Marilyn Sewell 1987

Image from Apron Stringz blog by Calamity Jane

domestic poem

Nightfall I sink

into dishwash meditation :

steaming china prayer wheels

crystalline bells of a lost horizon

breathing slows

din and lull of running water from crockery mandalas

moist heat muscles soften

zen poems drip from silverware

air hums out a chanting

cleansing melody

washing the frantic stew of a day

down the drain along with the suds

those transient rainbow things

thin skin of the passing instant.