(I recommend listening to the audio version)
At the checkout counter, the southeast Asian guy whose country affiliation I can’t quite figure out smiles at me and asks how my day is going. We smile back and forth, subtly catching each others eye, like we are in on the same joke that neither of us know. His haircut is high and tight, he’s got a golden wedding band, he’s always here at apna, the Indian cafeteria and grocery store I come to for cheap chai, dosas, and studying.
Afterwards I leave, watching the South Indians get in and out of their Teslas, one in a beautiful red and gold sari, from another world, a life not mine, one of big birthday parties and the hanuman temple nearby, prasad and arranged marriages and grandparents in Chennai and pujas.
I head down a trail I quickly find is empty towards a highway and come across a bumblebee queen being tended on the ground by three drones, one of which is locked in copulation, the other two wait their turn grooming. Or something. She is almost as long as half my thumb and in a state of ecstasy and surrender. I push her aside off the bike path and continue on—
—to a wooden bench overlooking a beaver pond. Where I now wait in the humid days lacking sun, and begin to speak these words into existence.
…
…
There's a dull buzz in my head, and it's around 9pm.
The late summer light infuses the outdoors with a solemn glow.
This is the season when everything has ripened—
is finding itself pulled inexorably earthward.
And I, too. My birth season. I am pulled towards reflection.
The sun slowly sets as the oak trees leaves across the street deepen into deep blue green shadow.
I choose a track from an album and float along with the melody.
So I sit and reflect, alone in this quiet house after everyone has gone to bed. I think of the ashes around the firepits in the longhouses where young men and women would go for solace, eating cinders, no one meeting their eyes, their tasks forgotten, in the underworld, washing in the ashes, bathing in the cinders, taking time to be within themselves.
I think of my sets of years in the ashes, how time passes, the long slow developing of a seed to birth and fruition, then the gravity, the decay.
This gravity is composed and linked with levity, a feeling of floating I draw on and come across from time to time,
a bend in the creek of the mind,
where light flickers on the waters surface.
Is this when, I ask myself again and again—
Is this when....?
Is this when it all makes sense?
When I stop and look back and it all has been and become?
Is this when time begins to rhyme and life feels sublime, like an unwinding spool, a golden thread, wound round a notched birch branch,
stored in the corner of a loft,
for others to come across and find?
I have nothing and everything to say.
I greet each day, and yet the feeling never quite leaves
of something being incomplete
day after day after day.
This seems to be the way that life goes on?
There are so many songs I have sung, at the top of my lungs
in the mountains, on the plains, and tears I've cried to dripping down my face,
pulled over to wait
to hear the sound of the water, the result of ten years of struggle, born fruit.
I believe
we are born for truth
and what is true.
For love and care, not fear. I hold this small piece of metal in my hand
a gift from the desert where I was born
which feels like a lightning bolt, comes from the story of two brothers
who felt the evil in the world, and set out to find their father and its source.
The one I am
was named Born to Water, and he was darker than the other,
learned silence and to be quiet and slow.
Across the plains I heard a sound amidst all the silence
I try and look to see what it was, but as I turn there is no one there.
The heat flickers, the grasshoppers leap, my feet keep moving,
the thin silver ingot stretched to form
some semblance of a tool to heal people and land.
Can I really become
what I know I already am?
I'll dip into the myth that created me and where I belong,
for one hundred thousand years
the place my bones grew up and turned back over into the ground. Be patient,
says the land,
the badgers,
the porcupines
the reindeer necklace around my grandmothers neck in my dream
the lights of the carnival party and the water flowing by in a stream
and the wind finally rises somewhere in the distance and finds me alone yet whole
free and on my own and so sad and broken and renewed and solely within myself
like a dark yet glowing coal—
and the wind reaches me and it says with a warm patient certainty,
a love and care that speaks only to me
in the sound of the pine, in the long and lasting line—
“It takes a long time.”
“It takes a long time.”
“It takes
a long
time.”
Mind of mine it is making me, brains of mine they are taking me,
Down the path to start my singing, to the lyrics they are bringing,
Family glories should be winging, lays of legend should be ringing,
In my mouth the words melt away, sounds of speech break up and decay,
Trip to tongue-tip tales of telling, but they break on teeth, untelling.
Brother dearest, friend of childhood, golden playmate of our pinewood!
Let’s go down the path to singing, as the lyrics us are bringing,
Joined as one by song word’s tether, we’ll the rocky wood trails weather.
Rarely do we get together, rarely flock as birds of feather
In these miserable borderlands, in these wretched, poor Northern lands.
Let us put hand in hand again, fingers resting in grip again,
So we can sing out well and true, well and true songs oh we can sing,
Listen to the golden dances, track the paths of wondrous fancies,
In the rising generation, in the just-awak’ning nation:
Words to receive from worded ones, verses to take from versed ones
From the belt of Väinämöinen, from the forge of Ilmarinen,
From the sword of Kaukomieli, Joukahainen’s bowstring steely,
From the fields of the Pohja land, Kalevala’s forested band.
- Kalevala
