clara, cathedra
a poem about burying a chicken
Clara is in the ground
I see Clarita in the ground
The hole narrows at the bottom like the edges of a prism
come to meet, destined toward earth’s center, a noble tomb.
The ground is laid with grape leaves and her neck is soft
and curved in the way of death like a swan peering
backwards, not just behind but all the way around,
outside the matrix of time, with whites of the eyes
rolled back into skull, snaking around architectures
of chronology, gesturing toward a horizon or
a black cavern beyond our cosmovision.
José calls me an artist of death–
I remember grandpa with his eyes wheeled back,
mouth lolling open as if making way for a long wind–
I remember my tranquil rolling rush over state lines
in the back row of a greyhound, green plums in my lap
for offering and I remember bursting with morning light
spilling over native land at dawn, folding in to the center
of my chest the sun’s reflection off the cement of each city,
and the wheatpaste in royal blue that glinted my name
reading, beneath a common three-eyed deity,
Survival is political and
praise god
I remember arriving just in time to hold him,
his body already surrendering over to a twilight lagoon
where ugliness is only one language of decay and where
you remember, finally, that the earth, She always accepted you–
She never brushed you aside and She could never disown you–
and in the grotesqueness of your unmaking, you remember that
humanness was never a curse, not an experiment
nor a heinous blessing, and not even a season
I walked with you til you could walk no further
You held my hand til the blood ran out
I fanned your temples til they stole into nighttime
We reveled sweet rebels in the dusk of forever
come again see you never i cherish you
Madrecita
Clara is in the ground
I see Clarita in the ground
billowing and ruffled, thick chested, fat breasted,
stately elegant woman of the yard, mother of us all,
a family home held up by sturdy strutting legs, a house
on stilts, said by western europe to eat children
but we know she fed them all
Clarita who gave me the gift of song
when I first found myself in a narrowing place
two men at either side, their hot unconscious like
daggers rupturing my attention, so young and
having just arrived with eyes black and piercing
still wet from creation, focused on a vertex
no one could see but me,
and these men, with their
unburied dead their forgotten
grandmothers their untended
graves their unwatered soil
their skeletal flowers their
whispers of dust hovering
just beyond my peripheral
vision, invisible but casting
a shadow, blocking the sun.
And Clarita comes
And pats my head with water,
grandmother water
And pats my womb with water,
grandmother water
And pats my heart with water,
grandmother water
And wraps my head tight with cloth
And places drum mallet in my hand
And gives me song of return to sing.
When I sing, I call the waters back. I call the seasons back, and the winged ones back, and I circle within my song as the great water wheel turns and turns, watching birth as it arises, and death as it falls, and breath as it widens, and sun as it slips, and Clara is in my voice, her wings unfolding, holding open the cavern as I slide earthside, making way for my sound, ensuring that it fills the room, unmaking and remaking a walking wound into Woman, cathedral.
Clara is in the ground
I see Clarita in the ground
We cover the hole and see no more.
There, in the tomb of all blackness
I know a light comes on.
