Turning

The song is Gaelic now, peridot words the color of fresh timothy gathered by red-haired women; or the song is the bony white oak and rhythm of Miwu, a knowing that breathes against angles of granite and meets the ground in a flurry of sound. Or the song rides down from a star over burgundy boulders beneath a dazzling blue sky to find the old words buried deep in the earth. But this heart listens. This song.Hi-tsah-tsi-nah, the precious rain awakening. On this you come as a prayer in the flesh, on this you ride with the roll and rollick of rattlesnake. On this you sing volcanic birthing words and obsidian cools where the blood bubbles down. Oh look, a little girl is lost although she stands close to her mother’s heart. With great energy she scrapes the missionaries from her ribs. Shoulder blades curve around the spine and the pestle dances, acorns flying, and dust collects in the creases of her hands. Or she is kneeling in a small room at the edge of the mesa, polished black bone of earth, cherished piki stone, moving back and forth this act of love, grinding the corn until it is dark, brushing the white cornmeal into one basket, the blue into another, thinking already of the daughters she will bear glowing in the sun. Or she is standing at the bog inside a mountain meadow, hands raised up to tie back her hair with a thin red rag; seeds loosen and cling to her shoes, her stockings, her long skirt, her skin. She fearlessly walks through gold fiddleneck, small mountain lupines, clouds of white popcorn flowers fallen upward out of the ground to cover the hillside like snow. Or a woman gathers loop after loop of heavy rope to guide the head of the horse she straddles and sometimes she is the mare and the soft sandstone and the hot rocks rolling in acorn soup, trying to heal the gash spread across her path where the crescent moon has sliced the earth. Ocean to mountain to mesa, the bundle she carries is a sacred memory, a rainbow that arches from one side of the sky to the other. Or a woman is closing a steamer trunk, has to sit on it hard to get the latch through and the leather buckled; seagulls dive outside the wall of the ship, she hears their demands, maybe one has come inside to brush her cheek with its pointed wing or maybe just another tear warmed by cooling blood. How she aches in the cold, she is so thin; and when she pulls the blanket around her and lies down on the floor, she is no more than a pile of old rags, a few sticks of firewood, a broken broom. Steady against the roll of the sea she is patient as the rocks that wait for the ship along a northern corridor, angry as the storms midway across the Atlantic that shake their fists at those who must leave home, and as deeply hidden as the icebergs that threaten to disembowl. She has already seen the world dissolve; now she feels the breaking of one last thread to ancestral land, feels the very break of it.