Messenger

Ah, Grandmother,
I lay it all at your roots,
Mulch me, honey, here is my shame
and my showboatin’
Here is my doubt, my fear, my Not Enough,
my jaded stare, my I’ve been there,
there is nothing new under the sun,
here is my where’s MY epiphany?
Here is the one who don’t believe
there is anything in that black bag for me.
Here are the ruby slippers I forget I’m wearing.

You, so beautiful in your weathering,
Every fire has made a new map into your being,
the topography of destruction, creation, re-creation.

Granddaughter,
I can tell you everything and nothing,
except what happens when
you stand in one place and bear constant witness,
when it is not possible for you to step aside
from the fires that must reach
through what is finished
to break open
the seed of your destiny.

All I see here before me,
the etching in your landscape, too.
You took in dragon’s fire, not of your choosing,
Scraping and strafing your interior with a shock and awe for a visiting enemy.
These were not your weapons, your language, but no blame.
I did not choose whether it was heaven’s lightening
or a cigarette butt
that sparked the many fires
that have touched me,
and there have been many.
Look at me.
Look at you.
Look at us,
a couple of charred crones.

I never met a tree that was victim to the wild.
The raised scar on a horse is called proud flesh.
Wear your proud flesh proud, daughter.
You would not have stepped toward me
if I had not worn these fires on my being—
they are my being now, mark a story on my trunk
that begs your reading,
and the story is different for each soul who sits at my feet.
Wear your story as a gift—let it be a pearl or a cipher,
hidden in a million jeweled boxes,
each unlocked by one of a million
different songs of longing.

But look at me again, and tell me what you see.
Decide which side you lean against.
The burned crone, yes, bears witness,
but there are supple green fronds sprouting
if you look higher.

I am tree, I am river, I am lungs,
I am fractal, roots down, arms up,
I grow in layers like you,
not straight up, but from the inside out.

So stand still, let life burn through you,
bow
to the many parts that have germinated
through knowing fire intimately.

Yes, you may run your palm
against the Braille of my backside,
the part hidden from the bright path,
stay there as long as you need,
take in the glyphs of worm and flame.

Your story is here, yes, and hers, and his,
no two alike as every shift of shadow
offers up another poem,
the sound of what each of you came to hear.

But please don’t fix yourself to my broken
and ashen
and gorgeous back,
because you will miss this,
this seam of life running its river up my trunk,
folded into itself like elephant skin,
bearing life, only life, along this insistent
cluster of branches flying from my throat.

There is nothing in your own weathering that is not holy,
as are all things holy, when truly seen.
Whatever you bring, all of your woes, and hopes,
every story of every regret and unlived life,
just make mulch of yourself at my roots,
which long for nothing else but what falls
to feed them in its release.

Because there is nothing, nothing
that falls in the forest
that does not nourish the life
waiting beneath the soil.

Eilish Nagle
Santa Cruz Mountains
Oct, 2013

The Guest

The Guest

When you arrive at the tavern,
you breathe, first, on the window,
draw a wet spiral toward the keeper inside
You have wandered
crabwise
for years ,toward this beaded light,
pulling the thread from edge to center

whistling along the periphery,
But here it is,
drawing you toward the aching and brilliant dawn
through this deep playa night.
If you follow that call
to the dimly lit threshold,
you’ll know you’ve arrived
by the catch in your throat

So there you stand,
teetering on the liminal
wood beneath your soles,
wondering,

are you welcome? You know,
peering in,
that you will sweep this cabin empty
if it is your nature,
you may raise holy moly hell
and blow pinwheels from your unholy orifices,
and even still, yes, Welcome

You knew
the moment you stepped
from the great prairie,
delivering punctuation
to the infinite
with this one word,
YES
resting on its carpetbag,
drawing its name in the sand

_Eilish Nagle

Ferry

A liminal start
three nights
running, remembering
Ruby slippers, clicking.
The way home is easy,
but somewhere back and back,
I forget the cradle
of my diaphragm,
its rocking

Now, my pedal to metal,
I can barely pause to tell you this...
that last night I finally remembered
that forgotten thing:
my third arm,
or that I’ve always spoken Cantonese,
or that my flute master
is still waiting for me,
twenty-three years later,
in her mahogany parlor.

It slapped me awake, bright and insistent,
then hopped back onto the ferry,
disappearing
with all of its rigging,
into the mist

Across the night sky,
my mother rises
at 3 am, stumbles around the house.
Every moment, now, a ferry
she has just missed,
trying to remember what she has
forgotten,
crib sheets tucked into her sleeve
with the names of the children
who cracked open her rocking pelvis
seven times.
This boat too, taken back
downriver,
this life,
an overripe berry,
dissolving,
on the tip
of her tongue

the heart of it

The thing about writing the thing you know you have to write, because of the big thing that happened, is that even afterward, especially if it's a big thing, a thing that, while you are inside of it you are so busy surviving, that the idea of pulling our your journal while you are treading water seems as ludicrous as...pulling out your journal while you are treading water, even though that journal, you know, has been a life preserver many times over.

But suddenly it is after the thing, and regardless of how long it lasted—a day, a year, or two years—it doesn’t matter, because you have been suspended in the frozen dreamlike timelessness of a car accident, though the thing wasn’t a car accident, but still, it was as if we were in a car flipping slowly, roof over tire over roof, air bags deployed, seat belts straining, for days, then months , then years, everything else flying through the air, all those things--like the double decaf latte you stopped for and I stole over half and you were mad because you love that foamy first mouthful and I always do that—that latte, not seat belted, ejected like a missile into your forehead and everything else—the ancient Tums and coins and the boots I shed when I sit down--all of the detritus of our life, suddenly shrapnel, and some, buffer, and it is clear what is one and not the other—like the thoughts they say are repeats of thoughts of the same ones we’ve had the day before, and the day before that, and you know that if you ask each one, “Are you shrapnel, or soother?” you will know pretty much immediately. And unfortunately, if you are like most of us humans, most of it is shrapnel.

But I am not here to talk about the latte or the shrapnel it becomes, and I’m not sure I’m here to talk about the buffers or airbags, although I am, because people in this kind of wreck will tell you the kindnesses that emerge far outweigh the other stuff, even more than the terror who wants to claim every inch of every breathing space, that big blowhard spreading himself out at the party, but even he can’t touch the larger generosities which arrived constantly, the meals and prayers and outrageous celebrations of life and the millions of small gestures which mean everything. Don't underestimate the impact of a short email just saying "We think of you guys every day. We're holding you in our hearts." And even now, it makes me cry to name this, because I never doubted it to be absolutely true.

And then there were the other serendipities, like the Tibetan lama showing up at my doorstep to give me the Red Tara Chant one day, out of the blue. This is the chant you remember when there is nothing in your field but blood and fear, and which I pulled out of my bag the moment the hospital called to say he had a brain tumor, and I heaved and cried every line of that chant for hours because there was nothing else to do with that fear except meet it with the name of the goddess who rides it like a dragon, and I chanted for what seemed like years…until the next call came, the one where they told us, sorry they had been mistaken, no tumor, just a squiggle, just a vein in the shape of a snake, just a hiccup on the film.

Until the next call. And so we learn about saddling the dragon.