I am listening to the sounds of soft traffic while the hush of a sleeping baby fills my tiny house.
I wonder what rituals people are doing in the houses next to mine, what my neighbours do in their most private of secret ways to create spells. To ward off the inevitable change/birth/death cycle that is turning. Doesn't everyone secretly believe in an apocolypse? What did I do to make my indifference different?
I watered my arms to hold an old friend. I watered my garden to feed my kin. I made a puzzle from dirt clods and then, I wrote a quartz letter, I sent it to them.
My letter is as beautiful as the snow sculptures in Japan after the earth breathes her last feather'd sigh.

WEFT

Women wore cast
topographical nets
on those shoulders sheathed by
sirened and intersected knots

Outside in the ball field the storm’s
wires, horizontal.
But the trees, who never know which way, always end up upright the rain is
Diagonal and cuts the scene on the right grain to make
soft meat of the afterstorm.

Why girls keep failing numbers
is beyond great grandmother’s guess. Weave, girl!
pattern 1: When girl stole boy from girl
pattern 2: Watertight button clouds
pattern 3: Flying fish at the shore

Numbers that murmur to themselves, the ones who hold water - the ones who kiss your fingertips
These are the ones you left out and now you don't remember the birds or snowflakes, their perfect equations cupping eggs or wind.

I admit it, sketches in the sand have made sturdy features. There is one outside my door now, a feature, the light creaking metal stiff.

520 b.c. Under the olive tree picture the brothers, Frater and frater, easy forms leaned against tree or thighs in triangular folds. Fingers and sticks feverish in this language.
It’s true some maps are useful.

Across the high school football field, the stadium lights flex aluminum ping against the wind, up to the mood filled sky.

A closer divine is the construction of the thigh bone.
Eiffel Tower in all its ossified homage to our thighs, our thighs,
To Our gelatin scaffolding, hidden in
gestation, knees to chin. Each platelet turns to greet its neighbours.
How may I serve you. Patterns of forebearance.

The fecundity of not what they do. Woman, you knew your mother's over through under, your plaited hair.
Patterns as thick as proteins suckled back into the forest floor
pig to truffle our old, old maths.

When my son is captivated by something, or fiercely concentrating, one of his hands unfurls into a Christ or Buddha-like shape, palm facing out, open, with a tiny, delicate cascade of pearly nails, pads, metacarpals. I wonder to myself as I watch him, what have we built on? What are the oldest memories before the memories, like the dark ones of Ireland or the Appalachians? There was a time when each new life was seen - truly seen - by the entire community, the tribe; it was luminous. Each movement, each posture, flexion, shape, was noted by the watchful eyes of the powerful mothers. Remember that women once held the seat. And slowly, they began to see the patterns, the similarities between the movements and postures of each new life. They regarded them as holy, as coming forth completely intact from an unbroken source. Our interpretations are built on the first truths, when nothing was anonymous. The mudras of a perfect being - I see now that so much of what we see as God-like comes from what we come from, our infant selves. The mothers saw these, gave them names, and what they observed was listened to with reverence.
My son and I touched bellybuttons today and I began to cry as I explained to him that his belly was kissed by my belly, which was kissed by my mother's belly, and so on. Like a beam of light breaking different frequency barriers, or points in the spider's web, our lives are marked by these imprints of our mothers. How appropriate that they are unique in all the world, like the Little Prince's rose.
Matthew, 10:30, “And even the very hairs on your head are numbered.” This too, comes from an older source. When I nurse my son, my eyes swirl as they follow each curl and lock, and it is true that I do know each hair on his head. I imagine women who have done this since the beginning of time, who have watched the child's eyelashes sprout one by one after their babe is born.
We are the matrix, the bearer of gems. The secret to knowing a deeper history is to look to the embedding stone. The madrigal, the perfect love song who comes from the matrix, the womb, is the babychild.

showy growling
sow glowy things

I want to stop for a moment and stay with an imperceptable movement. There are things growing slowly all around us, with a mantis-like fixation.
Who captures the intersections of what it takes to make something so inveterate it can produce a tree, mold spores, a bog, a life? Each one a culmination of connexon, one part light, one part water, one part hidden, one part more hidden than that, and they all descant.
Tiny growing parts and shapes take on a structure in my mind's eye.
Today in traffic, I imagined a spider weaving her web by a stream, a saturated trickle filling my ears, my nose, my eyes. She was nearly soundless, and this gave me such a peace.
There is an eerie, perfect silence out there, further away all the time, as reticent as granite or the stars, but salient nonetheless.
I hope to capture it in the ways I know how. I have a friend who can do so with math. I am the scientist, my words tiny little glass beakers with bits of earth and water inside.
It can be done in any medium, any language. In movement, a dancer who waits for the last bit of room in a beat to move.
If you hear that wordless, private place of slowly growing things, translate.
Open your refrigerator and inspect the old food. That place is there, just as the stags are crossing the river to the north of your house.
Hunt for the machinery inside the biotic fecundity in any place you can find. A forest floor, a fingerprint, a water ring.

Just finished writing a seven page paper on the trends in advertising in high gloss magazines. Pretty fascinating, although it may seem even more so b/c I've slept even less than normal. It was a good exercise for me because I had been using magazines as my surrogate for television. They are both flashy, loud, riddled with ads and a great escape.
But the real reason I'm writing?
Thinking about how grace and gratitude have the same roots, the same stems. They have a grandmother in Sanskrit that means to sing praises. Pleasing. And to be grateful in the highest sense of the word. To embody grace, to take it on in the soul, means that I must remember what I feel when I see something or hear something pleasing.
When something prompts me to think of the word pleasing, I almost never feel anything else other than that emotion, whereas with other forms of pleasure, I may have an immediate sister emotion to the first one. For instance, if I think something is amazing, I have an undercurrent of disbelief. If I think something is gorgeous, I judge - imperceptibly, but I do. And so on.
But when something pleases me, I am in a warm shaft of light on a fall day where it seems time has forgotten her keys and is standing still. I am utterly present.
I would like to do that for people. Make all else fall away in the gentlest of manners and let them feel pleased. The apple blossoms have done this for me lately. They are the other side of grateful - so connected to and so much a channel for all that is good and right with this world that they put forth with abandon.
I am grateful that even though I am broke, I know where I am going, I have a deep desire. I am grateful that my things do not dictate my security. I am grateful for my family. I am grateful that I can sing off key. I am deeply grateful for this evolution I have been gifted.
The nine muses sing to me, sing forth my son, my heart. I can nearly hear the whales' resounding praises as they pass through the bay, looking for coolness and food. There is a place where it makes more sense. I'm getting closer everyday.
Thank you to Rev. D. and to Oxossi, who keeps coming to me. You are hand in hand with Bridget.

The pieces of the cosmic filter in and out - they've been here lately at the edges, ephemeral as an aurora, but just as real, too. Cosmic means finding new women or seeing the magnificent ones in my life with new eyes. Going to the computer and saying a firm no to the internet and writing another scene, another page in the novel. I have an old journal where, at one point, I had one of those naive but sweet epiphanies and scrawled across a page, "Discipline is freedom!" But it is. Doing the work creates a synergy, a change that never stops astounding me.
I have begun dancing with an old friend of mine. It humbles me to turn to this art form after my art form, my mother form, my true to form has gone through such a vast change this year. But I had been praying for dance to show her face to me in a different guise, and here it is. I am learning so much from dancing with this woman. And I was inspired by a visit from another old friend - one who also does the work. She reminds me: imagination is one of the most important torches to hold. And all this happening right around Imbolc - I had asked Goddess Bridgit to help me take my new form and give forth from it. Fire speckled salamanders take the embers of my dreams just before I shake them away by waking. They put them in a hidden crucible by the early morning light that falls on my wide-eyed son in watery, expectant tones.
Let my dancing be the liquid part of glass. Let my work be the hardened state. Let my words be the form it takes. Only fruit wood can coax glass in the best way. Take your time, grow sweet, but grow solid - then form from fire.