I found a pathway. Or made one.
Yes, made a pathway into being:
Picking and bending my way up the dried river bed–through
thorns and fears through the tatters of colloquial language and
old admonitions–
to meet with the indescribable known that
waits in the walls the cells. To peer into
a well that is mine alone and yet ministers to all.
My guide, my guardian, my angel is me
and is not me. She is an accumulation of
grandmothers and great and great great and also
the intelligences and deep wisdom springs they drank from;
sometimes, many times perhaps, without realizing what they were doing.
She is an amalgamation of the lands and languages of Slovakia, Africa,
Ireland, India, Greece
the bodies of landscape that shaped the bodies of the women
that gave me mine. She is the root of me, this daimon.
She is deep inside the well inside myself.
There is a feeling of going inward, downward, behind.
And there is a presence there.
A self within me, yet more than me–
more than this personality I’ve adopted...
collected? Over the years.
She watches and whispers, in forms I do not
recognize because expectation blinds:
as I wait for a pre-conception to
visit itself gracefully upon me like an image
from the Bible (tell me–what to do!).
The well speaks with my voice, shed of detritus and contrivance.
The detritus–that which accumulates
in a crowd: the dilution and misunderstanding and confusion that
results from slight exaggerations and the paranoias
each fragment, each individual contributes
to the mass of us, the mass of me,
the push and pull and constant babbling of the blind
trying desperately to map the unfamiliar
with line, calendar, post-it.
A familiar voice, but without the desperate,
gnawing hunger. Because beneath that debris, behind it,
below there is a river or perhaps it is
a well–to dip from. I remember and
so I duck behind the meyhem
and find a pathway to the water.