A Chat with a Changing Woman

A Chisera is at the spring this morning
like an elk returned to browse the aspen
or one white buffalo in silhouette, spotted
on the mesa. She and I have met before
with little time to talk.

She sits in a triangle, crosslegged
on the rock, smiling vacantly.
Her eyes are closed for travelling
on a sunrise melody I can’t extract
from the din of roosters
and diesel trucks gearing down
on Auberry Road. I am so new
to the Sierra from the city, the first thing
I still do each morning in a prick of fear
is count days running in a deadline,
then splash cold water at my face.

This day could be an early start
to Canterbury, through royal
lupine and mustard meadows,
escorted by the needleback through
pink tints of morning haze, or a day
I could have been a child curled
within her lap, so I was at first
disgruntled at discovering the crone
slouched over leaching acorn mush,
thinking of the basket she will weave
and where to find long redbud threads
in this year of no snows with gentle,
steady rain. San Joaquin is a river again,
brodea bulbs are thick as tule, but
rattlesnakes are waking and buckeye pods
are poison ripe. How to live must be easier
to learn in lucky years, so I close my eyes
and she says,

Hush.

You are an illustration.
This is the corn moon, May, when a wild girl,
Yellow Woman, will spread her vulva to the sun.
She was kidnapped, she will say, by Whirlwind,
a dusty vaquero idling on the river bank.
But that is a lie: She goes for the going,
to feel her love out in the open. Old ones
remember that warm smooth slide of him
against the moistened thigh, like giving
shores of Earth in the beginning.

Yellow Woman will birth two boys, wild ones
like their mother. And she will find it hard
to keep them at her milk until their own
pearled seeds are succulent. Ten times
the work of filling a new moon, it is, but when
they leave they will reseed in perpetuity.
The gift to the giver: painless births
of grandchildren, who cost no more
than space in a heart that can expand.

The Chisera and I sit in the foothills,
wrinkling toward new heights
among the loveliness of ruin:

the glow of the barren moon,
eolian relief in the disintegrating rock,
a memory of the galaxy on a Rub al’Khali
night, the questions of a wanderer.

And hers:   What can’t you see?

Suppose you are stone in the wind, she murmurs,
then you feel life moving; or suppose you are
alone sitting on a stone, then you know nothing
is beyond you. There is no other middle, no
errant molecule, no conjugation, nothing
to count. There is essence
and there is changing.

Sunrise blows the lilac, orange blossoms rush
with bold, fermented sweetness out of season.
I shift into their bloom and ride them,
rousing my husband from the bed. He finds me
sitting in a triangle by the spring, alone,
a Monarch on folded wings.

©Frontiers: Journal of Woman Studies, 1996
©Copyright Anne Prowell 1993