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selections from Shadows on Rice Paper

closing summer

Here in thinner air

from the earth

irish picnic

I dream as your father dies

meditation on fire

Moongalba’s Island

full moon fire ceremony

watching her brush your hair

closing summer

End of summer words are difficult.
Much easier to sit on the porch
on a folding chair
dragging my toe in water
dripping from pots of fuchsia
and listen to cicadas.

Slower than the rest of summer
cicadas sing slower
than your heart pounding
since spring waiting
for your dance to begin
slower than the drums and dances
this chair has watched.
Our voices grow deep;
cicadas’ voices stay the same.

Above the uneven line of hedge
I trimmed a month ago
beyond the green and tended park
where children make their twilight home
an ice blue wash
bruised charcoal cloud.
Ramming the indigo night
four vigas point
to where the stars begin.

Here in thinner air

Here in thinner air we move
more easily through deep canyon
myth and mountain.
Here the earth stirs at our walking
Amber streams of air rise from our heels.
The veins of the hills open
and flow at dusk
ribs curve dry and brittle
heart beats drums.

We emerge into a new world
carrying in brown hands
feathers from ancient selves.
In the winds circling the moon
they dance licking each limb
into old forgotten fever.

Messengers come plaintive panting
from lower hibernating lands
hump on their backs
our sloughed off skins
and curl upon themselves.

We curl around each other
double rainbow after storm.
The new moon carries the old
in her blue arms.
Yet must we singly weave
new cloud new earth new sky
spin from silent eye
new webs to hold
across a windy dawn.

from the earth
for the buffalo maiden
on her dance day.

They swept my four corners at dawn,
they swept me,
picked up the candy wrappers,
cans, lifted an old man
out of a doorway and carried him home.

Now, silent before sunrise,
I am stirring, ochre,
stuff of the potter’s pot.

They call the small stone
at my end
earth mother, earth navel.
I am beyond mother
beyond father beyond time
perhaps.

To my east
below the horns of the mountains
lies the kiva
made of me
which you will enter
after you dress.

In the early dawn you will dress:
embroidered manta, deerskin boots,
shot, tanned and sewn
by your father.
You will dance gently on me.

I await your footsteps
Buffalo Maiden, Buffalo Men, and Hunter,
down from the hills
across the snow.
I wait for your step.

In the kiva they gather now --
all my singers, the elders,
some weary, some tottering.
Yet when they enter the plaza
in split-leg pants and colored shirt and kerchief
we become one heart.
They know my name
and I know theirs.

And then you, Povi -- born to me --
your long black hair
the rain that falls on me,
all day you will lift your boot
above me, just a little only a little
while drums drum
and the chanters chant
and mothers tap their babies’ feet
to the heartbeat of the buffalo song.

Buffalo Maiden,
dance on my heart.

irish picnic

I am accustomed
to diamond sand
forming shot satin waves
below shrubs and salty pines,
to curling waves
singing home songs
in Capricornian light.

Not to this
ancient, watercolour picnic
white hands passing food
prepared in stone-flagged parlours
peat fire burning.

We sit beside black and mossy rocks
away from the Atlantic winds
covering haunted faces with straw
and wrapping knees in wool.

They are shocked when
I rip off my shoes
to run with the dog
along the water’s rim.
The sand is rough, cold
like the dog’s coat,
smells of seaweed,
attacks the nose.

A hundred days, a hundred miles
of bright patterned solitude.
This is what I know.
They warn and worry,
soft, rainy words into my ear,
tuned to other wildness.

I dream as your father dies

Not in a hood,
as a skull,
as an ovoid blackness,
the angel of death
wanders through my night
but as a plump, ordinary woman
midsixties, motherly,
quiet, comfortable,
practical-shoed pace,
smiling, unremarkable,
short-haired, grandmotherly,
not designed to preside
over businesses and corporations
but over the small particulars
of the last breath.

And she tells me without words
she does doubleduty
as the angel of life
presiding over the small particularities
of birth, of the first breath.

She watches
settling her rounded plainness down,
as your father rises this dawn
from his bed, disconnected,
and stands
tall, magnificent, frail,
with elegant, large eyes
and looks his blessing and praise
upon each of you
one by one
.
She is as quietly pleased
with her work
as a cook
to whose sweet bowl we return
to lick our fingers
again and again.

meditation on fire
for the Abbess Chiko Komatsu

The Abbess of Jakko-in
walks in her garden and asks

"Is there anything that does not change?"

The maples burn with their own death.
Beside their ashen trunks, a red-aproned stone child
gleams with moss and bamboo-ladled blessings.

"Is there anything that is not painful?"

A bony leaf shatters in the pond
where suns and moons of coin
catch fire.

"Is there anything that is not empty?"

Paper prayers hang like moths
on a brushwork branch
against a smoking sky.

"Is there anything that is unselfish?"
The iron brazier smokes with incense
clouding the torii gate
like a dragon’s breath.

And having walked, replies

"In the morning and in the evening
my prayer is peace."

Moongalba's island

Moongalba's tribe was mostly gone
when Peg and Bert (British Army Retired)
arrived and built a hut above the beach and scrub.
Bert wore the olive grasses down
with drunken evening walks
("Escaping me, " Peg said.)
He squatted by palms on the headland
to watch turtle, porpoise, and whale,
move by below in the opal Pacific swell.

When Bert hired Matilda (pregnant and black)
Peg had even less to do twelve thousand miles away
from Home and the officers' wives
she had come to trust, being childless.

So, to stretch a Captain's pension
and to fill the hours not filled with rum
they built some huts with glassless windows--
frames for Southern stars
and wild horses who blew warm air
into nights so dark
only ears could believe
in the trees and the waves.

After the storms moved south
the latrine and shower block were built
and when the ferry brought fishermen,
Bert had someone to drink with
and Peg,
"Some bungalos by the sea-- for friends and so on--
you must come out !"
(she wrote on Bush Xmas cards to home.)

The fishermen brought wives and children
who chased frail sky-blue soldier crabs
into crafted holes in clouds of sand.
Bert drank more and swore at the kids
and their mothers told them to stay away.
Matilda fried the fishermen's fish
and collected eucalypt honey for dessert.

There was talk of a bridge
and the huts peeled paint.
Bert grew thin, Peg used less stamps.
The ferryman stopped polishing the brass.

The miners came
with prizewinning conservation plans
and guides to native animals, plants
and tribal burial grounds.
And severed the arms of the island's dunes.

Spiders took over the huts
when Bert fell down and Peg went home.
Matilda grew a lump and died.
The fishermen's children bought blocks of sand
north of the reconstructed dunes,
and built vacation houses of weathered wood.
They named the highway after Bert
and the township after the tribe.

full moon fire ceremony

The seventh full moon:
on this cooler summer night, the dogwood leaves
cast trembling mandalas across our path;
light glazes the bridge
as we describe its arc.

Om bhur bhuvah svaha
vayave idam na mama

The island firepit embers pulse
like fine-webbed veins before a meditative eye.
Through indigo apple trees we see
fish bruising the pale skin of the lake
and hear the fire chant.

Om bhur bhuvah svah svaha
prajapataye idam na mama....

She bends in blackened space
to dip one finger in the lake
and in the holy ashes of the dung,
then mark the place above her eyes
consuming her forever.

Watching her brush your hair

Your head in her lap,
she brushes your hair
as only she can do.

Two women talking
of women’s things,
you are each as old and young
as the moon.

Beneath the waves she sees
what is hidden:
the slow, shedding of old visions.
Even your hair grows weary.

You talk of destiny, fate;
of gratitude, anger;
of surrender, and standing alone.
At what precise moment
did you each turn
to follow this lonelier path?
She speaks of acceptance;
you, of proud, blind, slingshot attempts
to stone down the planet of your fate
in full trajectory.

Seeing your snake skin sloughing off,
she does not flinch.
She brushes firm and gentle,
patient and rhythmic,
until the last of your loss
lies silent as snow
in her green lap.

"The oils are releasing,"
she calmly observes.
"I’d better wash it then."

Like a cloudless sky,
you stand, washing your hair
as Pueblo women do
in the acequia madre
for ceremonial days.
After, they dress in green boughs;
they dance for a long and fertile life.

You emerge
and, hair still wet,
farewell her.

Tonight, you pass the tall mirror
you each used these last days.
Waves glow and dance
in a way you had forgotten
since last she brushed away your pain.

You feel her hand still,
her hand brushing away
old sorrows, joys, and hopes,
her hand resting quietly on your life,
your new and unctuous life,
still, for these few moments,
in her hands.

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