What follows are three different pieces from the last weeks since I arrived home in California. They form a kind of triad, an animal-hoofed-circling around experiences of the holy, from different angles. There are lots of votives being lit, animals becoming votives, black bears making home in the pinewood, mountain lions walking about making the writer nervous, and a poem about a boat that slipped in sideways, whose meaning is honestly somewhat mysterious even to me, and yet feels like it is speaking to the others, a kind of riddle for me to carry forward.
(Photograph is of gold leaf jewelry from the House Tombs at Mochlos, circa 2500 BCE, Crete)
Part One
Votives
And I said to myself, if I have to light a hanging votive for every place you were sure you were dying, I will come with my matches and my little box of cloth wicks, and I will set the fresh wick in the cork and I will float it in oil as old as the oldest trees at Eleutherna where I first heard a voice call me daughter of God, daughter of Paradise, and I will burn sacred resins, and I will love you, there I will love you, and there by the oak tree where you were too terrified even to swallow, and there by the neighbor’s trash bins where you thought you could’t breathe, and there at the sound of the front door closing, the sound of two hundred days of being afraid of your own heartbeat, two hundred days of parts of you dying over and over again, of that one piece that never rose up out of the bed, the one piece of you that was too tired and too sad and too scared to remember how to live— there, there, even there I will love you. For was it not where Demeter wept, and gave up hope, and became mortal, that the temple of Eleusis was built? A hanging light marking the place where she almost died of sorrow, but did not, where she asked that her sorrow be turned into sanctuary? What if this were true for every place where we too have been shattered, and thought we couldn't go on?