1.
The wind is wild, the roses are
beset by rust, the potholes are treacherously overflowing with water.
What is calling my heart? My
mother's four bluejay feathers, carefully labelled, in a tiny plastic
container?
Yes, it must be the bluejay
feathers, which I extract, to place them onto my hand-carved stone eagle,
together with the kingfisher feather Ed found in the garden.
2.
It is in such minutiae that
many women find comfort, private rituals occupying a waking dreamscape,
unconscious processes that flow through the embodied world. Processes that, in
some ways, make, build and hold together the embodied world, which everyday life often seems to destroy or ignore.
The wind is wild, the roses are
blooming despite the rust, most drivers steer carefully, pay attention to one
another, swerve gracefully as baby rhino, pause, guess at the depth of the nothingness
under the mass of small and large dots of water in the tar.
3.
Bluejays, I read, are a part of
the crow family, intelligent, vocal, social, resilient and threatened. Who or
what is threatening them is not said. It is understood without having to say it.
My mother conscientiously labelled the container in which she kept the feathers. A walk. Place, date, who she was with.
The wind is pausing. Resumes, with a bellow.
4.
Barbara gave me the stone eagle. She said it was from New Mexico, and that the carver's name was Peter. Little stripes of news, patterns of information, more than decorative. The limbic brain takes note, stores the stuff, as if these things were fragrances.
I suppose these lines follow the bluejay's feathers, compose themselves into a variation on them.
The rods of the bamboo chime
add their opaque song.
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| Photo by the author |
