Category: Mythology

To Break a Wall

Notes from Crete.

There is a certain pitch to plans made in prison, not

like the half-baked dreams of anywhere else. The wings

as real as the wax, and the sun, the son the sum of the

parts you gave, dreaming him. There are flowered

children elsewhere in a field that never knew walls

except on set and you cannot blame them for the

glow of their faces how they won’t age it takes

absorption to do that but to these it’s all water

rolling, the waves        the waves        the duck’s

back                all joy              and fun            except

for the highlights        the chase scenes         so

good for ratings          so good for saying       watch

look what I did. No sense explaining to the scions

of such gentle suns how yours will kill you, quick.

Offer anyway what you have of shelter and an

ear to the running stream of tears. They roll

off the backs of them              stop looking for

logic    they roll because        those backs are

the backs of                the sons of the sun, 

o child

how I wish                    to pretend.

The Sisters

In the late days of long wars.

We wanted to mend, so kept company with our mothers’ ghosts. Our yesterdays were wounded and came to us until every bed was full. 

O muse. Your song was bleeding out. 

We brought cloths and went to you. We wrapped you tight and held against the flow. It entered then.

We are still, holding. 

Flight and Son

For want of wings.

Before the feathers fell, a morning star and six moons gone. But still, the golden chains, the prayer. O bird in one hand. May you not be killed by the stone in the other. But the exile was long and the cliff just high enough to launch himself home, son of suns, into light. And the light, in recognition, danced to see him until it took him back. 

***

Inspired by the story of Icarus.

Calculating Risks

Proceedings, with caution.

If tortoise asks eagle for flying lessons and man for the word––and once given, wants fire. If the seed begs for better ground, let it hear the bird warning smoke. If the wolf takes the sickbed in costume to hide its want, if the girl takes the stranger for familiar. If the bull. If the labyrinth. If the thread. Run.

Trickster Rituals

Possibilities for movement.

Something that is was just here. It has significance but will not fit any storyline. There was a grotesque beauty reveling. And then, and then. Every soul has its way of coming to terms with its containment in space, contending with death. It crowds the psyche, back against a wall. It has no end, and isn’t going anyplace. It’s always going on. And then, and still. Unlike the notion of story­­––something that, as they say, happened. The order of movements is crucial.

Annals

The stories we keep.

Which history? The people, or the book? Language or lens? A soul reveals itself by the memory it keeps. It is less like the cementing of bricks than the stitching of squares. The quilters’ collective eye has its aesthetic aim, an effort of seasonal return. It is a functional art. But to forget either one of these––function or art–––is to make it something else.

Reverberations

Descendants of an aftermath.

When the smoke cleared, we left what was left of the temples and abandoned our sacrificial cups. No longer painting the chapel walls, we made canvases of our skins, our creed now take this body, and we gave it up. Nothing could save us, and we carried this truth as a torch foisted before our faces, marching into the long night. We were something else now, wild, painted creatures of flesh and word, with no more monuments to shield us from the elements that mocked our feeble forms. An awareness grew, of an element breathing among us as we moved, but we would no sooner mark this with a sign than claim the wind.

What Spills

Chasing Time.

Hurried notes claimed our footsteps, dancing us to the next moment.

Quick, the chorus called, Time is running. We, ever after it, had never known stillness. Do you mean, we wanted to ask, that once we stayed, and Time with us? What would that be like, we wondered, to climb the craggy rungs of his beard, tethered between once and will? Instead, we spilled into Space––into spaces, flooding.

Something was off, or all of it. If stillness came again, we meant to ask. We thought we knew the flood story: an ark, the saving rainbow, dove of peace, but in an age on the run the known ones would not hold. How could we be the flood, the water itself, the coming storm? What did this mean for the rainbow, the dove, no longer of us?

Who floats, then, into the next dawn––or what?