MOUNTAIN WOMAN: Guest Blogger: ELIJAH MORGAN

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: Guest Blogger: ELIJAH MORGAN: Today's guest blogger is Elijah Morgan , son of Sara and "Tater" Morgan. Elijah was in kindergarten at Cullowhee Valley School when he ...

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: OUR OWN WILD LIVES

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: OUR OWN WILD LIVES

Mountain Woman: MOON-ROUSED

Mountain Woman: MOON-ROUSED

The Goddesses: Athena

The goddesses stay with us, often keeping to the shadows until some event in our lives calls them forth, with their luminous mystery drawing us to them.   Here is Kathryn Kirkpatrick's invocation to Athena, from her new collection,  Unaccountable Weather, due this fall from Press 53.  The books can be pre-ordered from Press 53 right now.  

I finally met  Kathryn five years ago when I was Writer in Residence at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC.  I felt I had met a soul-sister, and that sense of connection has not diminished with time.  I've read her new book with wonder, asking how she could weave such seemingly disparate  women's voices into one seamless fabric.   

 (Athena, the goddess of Wisdom)

Kathryn  is a poet of such thoroughgoing honesty that reading some of these poems feels like eavesdropping, they are that closely focused on the details of experience. Whether  waking up from surgery for breast cancer  or describing the massage therapist kneading the scar on her chest, Kirkpatrick does not prettify the moment. Nor does she diminish it.  What makes this book memorable is how she weaves her own perspective  into a tapestry of other presences,  creating  a chorus of wounded, healing women rather than one solitary woman’s encounter with death and renewal.  The goddesses are here, with their grave and luminous visages.  And women you might meet at the local laundromat or fast food restaurant. Who is speaking this book?   The feminine.  Everywoman in her fear, her wit,  and her  Interior grace.  

Athena

Not the saucered face of an owl

but a serpent coiled in her hair,

the shape of its head, on which everything

depends, indeterminate.

Triangle perhaps. Maybe oval.

She’s not wooed by the snake like Eve

but one with the snake like Medusa.

This is wisdom with bite,

appraisal cool and round as an egg.

Forget the olive tree, flute,

yoked oxen and bridled horse.

Forget Prometheus who tried to take credit.

The flames at her chest tell us

what she has suffered,

what she has made of her suffering.

Sandhill: Exit, Laughing

Sandhill: Exit, Laughing

A Poem Poster for 4th of July, 2011

I stood a long time in front of this poem at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.  It's one we all need to recite to ourselves today.

I

ROSES AT MISSION SANTA CLARA: Marie Ponsot

For days I carried around Marie Ponsot's new book of poetry, Easy, another of my purchases at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. It rested in my handbag as we rode the Cal-Train to San Jose to see our friend Mary Warner, who teaches at San Jose State. She took us to see the beautiful Santa Clara Mission, where outside the roses were in full display. Raised Presbyterian, with the fierce anti-Catholic attitude that sometimes comes along with that upbringing, I have always loved the interiors of Catholic missions.

I remembered a Ponsot poem that had captivated me the night before, a short piece entitled Transport.

The rose, for all its behavior,

is smaller than the lifelove it stands for,

only briefly brightening

and even its odor

only a metaphor.

Or so we suppose

just as we suppose the savior

we employ or see next door

is only some hired man

gardening.

The eight white crosses on the front lawn memorialize the 1989 martyrdom of the six University of Central America Jesuit priests and their co-workers during the Salvadoran Civil War. The Santa Clara Mission brought back into focus for me the real meaning of Christ's message, a message too often ignored and abused in these days of fundamentalist dogma that has made me want to keep my distance from any church interior. Strangely enough, I stood inside Mission Santa Clara and felt an unusual sense of peace and history, even knowing that history was filled with blood and suffering. And outside, the roses, the roses.....