still birth, old earth
Tags: Whales, Ancestry, Prayer, Great Conjunction, Menstruation

giant-boned divers minister this sphere. crossing vessels arching in praise of the forces that propel them. my consciousness is floating nearby, though without form. like a single eye that blinks at the center of a mountain, or a cavern in a mothering body. sees without sight. i cover a span called we, witness the moment where the oceans are thrust up, trench becomes valley, ridge becomes mountain.

mercury spins slow, exacting, exerting. magnetic.

my blood is the precipitate, planet pulled. it lands in my underwear like a pickled plum or red algae. like a memory.

i am here reassembling the bones after the world has shifted. knitting sinew and tender, sewing spirit back with tendon. i must nick skin to kiss again.

eiko otake, “a body in fukushima”

in the times of deepest ache we recall that our body is not ours alone. from down on our knees we remember that we were never meant to be severed. recollection can never just be an exercise of the mind, but a ritual embodied. even when the mind is gone, trapped in anguish, i walk my body to the shore of the water where i once prayed beside my sibling. it’s like reminding myself to eat even when i’ve lost my taste. for as many nights as i bleed, i give my blood back to the sea.

the songs i know are enough. to call a seal to the surface, a coyote to my car door, a spider to my keyhole, a racoon to sniff at the border between darkness and light. the prayers i speak, with shaky voice, at the precipice of collapse, pushing through doubt until reaching a resonance that sustains sound, are enough. to cross over, to make the passage. from separation to wonder. wonder is another name for the place i come from.

eiko otake, “a body in fukushima”

i used to trace my name like a shoreline.玉 meaning jewel or soul, 手 meaning hand. kanji protects the sound, spoken by those who recognize the meaning on their tongue. my name led me to a word, which led me to a world that i lived my life in search of. this is the very same world i was born to, concealed in plain sight.

we search and search for that which we already are. we become strong from not hiding and not cowering from that which fractures our sense of reality. not breaking as if we are finite and can only contain so much, but expanding, holding like a breathing belly. it is neither wrong nor your fault that you were not taught the specificities of dialect (love song to region) or a way to pray that would activate the cells of a stone. and yet the rush to adopt, to fill up on someone else’s ancestor’s love, that’s where the tunnel becomes long and dizzying like intestine with no outlet. i didn’t want to be that character in the story, the one who didn’t know, the one who lived on ignorance. but this is where we begin. after fighting what we are, our ego elapses and our bodies are dragged down, gently, to where the land meets the sea. this is where we bow down low and ask for the knowledge we were told was nowhere. we think we have nothing to offer, but we have one song, and it is enough. then the beloved is everywhere, blinking at us, crystalline eyes in the skies.

eiko otake, “a body in fukushima”

i’ll be born many times over again. i came here for this learning, however slow. observing friction, observing comfort. i write to myself when there’s no one to write back. it’s not protection but a law of energy i’m spiraling toward the root of. how much love to give out and to where? its not a calculus. maybe it’s that simple. how are you? i’m well. and that’s all it needs to say, to contain so much. i am the question answering itself. the friend and the solitude. a mirror and an echo. i hear you, all the way back through my past.

“She wants to be the sacred ingredient which turns each situation from mundane to inwardly alive…If we take her with us, she will take us all the way through.” Elias Londale