"Portrait of the Crone at her Food Processor"

Collages by Bill Fulton

       It is 5:20 on a Friday afternoon. I have been out on my deck all afternoon  writing false starts. No real inspiration - the only thing that has arrived are a couple of squirrels, a raucous jay and my cat who gets into a chorus with the squirrels - they chatter and she hisses. I feel like joining them. I could be the third line in an interspecies fugue.

     We have to leave for dinner at 6. I need to  get organized, get dressed - and a First Line arrives from the Muse.  I type it, and she sends more, this feels Right, I can’t just stop, could She/I (not to mention the jay, the squirrels and the cat) hold on to the The Rest till tomorrow? I could Get Back To It when we return this evening, or, maybe I could cancel our plans?

     It is now 5:40, and I’m getting dressed, running the lines through my head, so I won’t Lose Anything Important...maybe I could take out my Little Notebook and write during dinner. I picture myself in the restaurant writing with my right hand and dropping salad on myself with the left. I could bring an apron. Wear old clothes….

     Welcome to my world. The song says “When you’re hot, you’re hot, and when you’re not, you’re not”, but I like to believe I can summon the Muse. She laughs and prefers the word “prepare”, as one would for a religious service, or important guests, the newlyweds William and Kate, for example, or a Nobel Laureate. The house has to be orderly - not perfectly clean, she shares my impressionistic, astigmatic view of the world - but orderly. Everything put away. My desk has to be cleared off, though I haven’t written on it since I bought it.

     She also likes a little chocolate. For a while she wouldn’t appear for anything less than 70%, Dark and Imported. Now it’s chocolate blueberries, available at one place only, which is miles from my house. My muse is happiest Out of Doors, next to a river in a rain forest

Photo by Bill Fulton

                                                           
near exotic ruins, within sight of a mountain range, somewhere that costs a lot of money to get to. Fortunately, she is willing to appear on my deck.. She once haughtily informed me that she wouldn’t be caught dead performing in a café on a laptop with “dingy people” (her words), unless it overlooked the sea.    

Photo by Bill Fulton

                              

     The Muse. I have been known to name everything - animals, cars, the dishwasher - but she has never announced or accepted a name. When I once referred to her as Sophia, Wisdom, she told me to get over myself. She believes that her origins are in the Ancient World, but where exactly, I don’t know.

      She adores mythology, from any culture, and prefers to mask and cloak the uncomfortable realities of my life with a convenient archetype or deity. Take aging. I’m at the point in life where it is better to hide the week before Thanksgiving and avoid the country, so my emerging turkey neck won’t tempt a hunter. My muse has turned eagerly to the Crone to handle this phase. Not the fearful, wart-faced tempter of Snow White, with her poisoned apples, but the wizened, liberated Old Woman of the Crossroads.

The muse can be very generous to me. No cauldrons or broomsticks for this crone -
she’s willing to provide me with modern conveniences, as she does in

     Portrait of the Crone at her Food Processor  

Old wood stove under her skirt    
she still flirts   to sweeten the pot
the base of her broth is calcified bone
knowledge levels a quarter cup of fear
she slices decades of laughter
adds centuries of sorrow      
finally dices the old secrets
Only the moon knows her true name  
only the moon will remember

"Portrait of a Woman Weeping"

             Picasso. Revisited. An exhibit at the De Young. Another exhibit at SFMOMA  features his work. Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris have edited and translated his journals into poems. (Pablo Picasso: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & other poems, Exact Change, 2004). I order the book, curious and wanting a new inspiration for my own work by the artist I have returned to again and again.  “Poetry Unhinged” Michel Leiris calls it in his Afterword, “closer to Dadaist nihilism than to surrealism”. Was that Picasso’s desire, to destroy meaning? We know how he broke from the past, but nihilism? I won’t continue without giving you a sample, and I’ll choose at random:
        the slender sojourn of the secret price of pain simmers on the
        low fire of memory where the onion plays the star it
        detaches itself from its lines having read and reread the past
        but at the crack of the riding-whip caught straight in the eyes (p.98)
“the secret price of pain simmers on the low fire of memory” is a wonderful image, but my brain, which looks for continuity, for meaning, for revelation or narrative, gives up, as though I have entered a dense labyrinth with no center, no way in - but there is always a hint of minotaur, for he wrote during the same period
    “If all the roads I have been down were marked on a map and joined
     up with a line, would it not represent a Minotaur?”  
                               (Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris
                                Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. P. 141)

Minotaur and His Wife

       The minotaur, half bull/half man, at the center of the labyrinth, the garden. What, I ask myself, if there was no censor, no conscious linear narrative, between oneself and the maze of images, feelings, and archetypes that make up what is usually hidden, would that explain the fecundity and astonishing flow of his imagery? Another random selection:
     entangled in the rainbow of their feather oxen plowing up the
     flames of crystal of the howling that perfumes the angles and
     the curves snared by the web of nails and begging help……..(P. 206)
The selection covers a page, and these pages were written daily - a kaleidoscope, a display of fireworks, or simply an inventory, or what comes in with the tide. Imagine a basin that is never empty, but the source is unknown.
      Years ago I concentrated on Picasso’s experience during the war years in order to understand the relationship between art and terror, which is so strong in the 20th century. The ‘macho’, the womanizer accused of sadism, of feelings of omnipotence, the toreador lover, and endless innovator experienced terror during the Spanish Civil and World War II, a terror he was ashamed of. Here is a selection from his journal:
        "....sky....fear and anguish...what horror what distress and what cold
    in the bones and what unpleasant odor ....wing.... ...desperate cry...
    girl dead of fear....black liquid [rains]...the dead fall drop by drop....
    clouds shit...horror and despair....wing[ed tank stuck in the blue sky...
    the nest of vipers...the desperate cries of birds...the infinite center of
    void on the skin torn off the house.... 
                          (Picasso and the War Years: 1937-1945, Ed Steven A. Nash, 
                          Thames and Hudson, 1998, P. 57))
The savagery of the war resulted in paintings of literal butchery:

Sheep's Skull

     The Spanish painter Zubaran painted racks of lamb, and the skull was a frequent subject of Spanish and medieval painting in general, as a symbol of vanity or the brevity of life. But Picasso’s skulls still had their meat on them. His overburdened psyche found release in art, and despite the Occupation, and the warnings and threats he received, he continued to paint what he felt.
     In 1942 the wartide was turning. America had entered the war, the allies had invaded North Africa, and the Nazis were facing defeat in Russia. Picasso began the drawing for Man with a Lamb, and you probably have seen the result, the bronze which currently is on exhibit at the De Young:

                Lamb of God? Good Shepherd? Abraham’s sacrifice? Picasso would only say “there's nothing religious about it at all. There's no symbolism in it" and that he just wanted "a human feeling, a feeling that has always existed." (Ibid, P. 112) The sculpture remained in his studio for the rest of the war, and if postwar visitors wanted a photo, Picasso posed next to the sculpture. I think this was a victory - over the panic-stricken, butchered imagery that had taken him over, and he took pride in this victory. He had overcome hell and returned to the simple humanity of everyday life.  “Dadaist nihilism”? I don’t think so. The urge to annihilate, in the man, in the world, was overcome.  
At least in that instance. In that world. At that time.  


Portrait of a Woman Weeping  

That ridiculous hat
her face made up 
in prisms of comic book color
those petrified animal eyes
The face of  Europe
breaking and weeping -
The woman    Dora Maar
the cruel brushstrokes of her lover
her crystalline surface   shattered
What man can watch a woman weeping
without seeing his own death?







                                                                                          




                                                                      

A Meditation on Re-imagining Mary by Mariann Burke

Annunciation by Fra Angelico

        I was raised Jewish in an observant household. There were many taboos, and most forbidden were All Things Christian. Years later, I developed a chronic illness. The potions that promised to take away symptoms were more harmful than helpful. I had a dream: My classes are over, and I’m driving home from the College of Marin. When I stop for a red light, I see a huge, animated billboard of a blind man, dressed in biblical robes. An image of Mary appears next to him, and he tells me that I will find her nearby. If I could kneel and pray to her, he says,  I would find relief. I woke up shocked. Both my agnostic stance and my list of Must-Nots were deeply challenged.
Two weeks later my tragically mad mother calls me to say that one of her Voices told her to  visit a Mission. Soon! I was startled that she, consciously or unconsciously, knew of such a place. I took her to the Mission San Rafael, which happened to be midway between the college and the special care home where she lived.
I had never been to the Mission and the first thing I saw in that intimate, inviting chapel was the statue of Mary that appeared in my dream.  What secret, synchronous process had brought us here? I took my mother home, returned to the church, chose an inconspicuous pew, knelt (another taboo), and prayed. I began to cry, and as the tears came, the pain and exhaustion seemed to flow out of me.
      
     Years ago, Mariann Burke was studying to become a Jungian analyst in Zurich. She tells us that
       One day as I sat in my basement apartment reflecting
       on a picture of the Annunciation, energy seemed to surge  
       through me, and lifted  me above myself. Tears brought me  
       to deep center. (p 1)
Burke tells us that artists open “windows” whose depths may be unknown even to themselves. She “longs” to see other images, other paintings, “other versions” of the Annunciation. This is the beginning of her journey through the art of Mary, expressed through the deep connection she has with Her. She speaks of the power of spiritual imagery - the events depicted are not out of a lost past, but “Like a dream. the image is happening within”. (p. 3)
      It must be true that whenever artists or writers bring back mythical images from the past - Orpheus, Eurydice, Antigone, The Mother Goddess - those figures are “happening within.” As Carl Jung wrote in The Red Book “To give birth  to the ancient in a new time is creation.” (The Red Book. p. 311) There is a poem in After the Jug Was Broken that brings Mary and Ann (Hebrew Hannah) into both their Hebrew origins and our “new time.”:
 
                        "The Education of the Virgin”
          
                                          after a painting by Georges de La Tour

There is Ann with the book   Mary with the flame
Will the mother explain first bleeding   the rule of seclusion 
set forth by the fathers   Perhaps she is learning her aleph bet   
or the declaration of faith:
“Here O Israel the Lord Our God the Lord is One”
Ann would know nothing of a Son  And sacrifice? a lamb
on the altar   The cross? a woman’s to bear for her otherness
her breasts  the nest inside her
How to prepare   How to prepare the weeping woman on the front page of this morning’s paper who lost her son in a drive-by  
How to prepare the woman on another page who lost a son 
in each of our wars 
St. Ann mother of mothers   Teach her how to survive past grief
Teach her to seek healing and relief  And that said   Teach her
the prayer for the dead


      Mariann Burke’s goal in writing Re-Imagining Mary is not simply to take us on a  tour of Mary’s appearances in art. She writes:
     “The historical Mary needs to be recovered from a view that
       sees her as totally  meek, submissive to male authority
       rather than her feminine inner authority.” (p. 6)
      I sympathize with that goal. The Church saccharined Mary into submission, but what is the true nature of the Madonna? An ex-Catholic-now-Buddhist colleague once asked why that “meek woman” appealed to me when there was such a need for powerful female inspirators. I answered that Mary was another aspect of the Great Mother. She is  a symbol of compassion and healing, like Kwan Yin and the Taras for Buddhists, as Lakshmi, Saraswati & Parvati serve Hindus. For Jews, the Sabbath Bride, the Shekinah or Divine Presence, symbolizes the feminine, and who was Mary but a young Jewish woman pregnant with fate and prophecy?
      It is not only Mary that Burke wants to redeem, but Eve as well. She characterizes Eve not as evil or disobedient, but curious - a curiosity [which] “leads to greater consciousness. Eve’s “yes” to the serpent, and Mary’s “yes” to the angel represent two aspects of the journey toward wholeness.” (p. 23)
      Burke explores many Annunciations, a few that I had no knowledge of. Did you know that Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali painted the angel’s visit? Burke writes:
     “Salvador Dali’s Annunciation looks as if an explosion has
      ripped through the room catapulting Mary from her prayer
      stand and swishing Gabriel to the ceiling.” (p. 63)
She suggests that the News “shakes up the life of Mary” as our own lives are shaken by events. “How shall this be done”, Mary asks, becoming somewhat undone, and Burke responds that “out of unknowing understanding comes.” Her discussion of Warhol held the same pleasure that her descriptions of other artists did:
I could not anticipate her reaction or interpretation.

Annunciation after Leonardo da Vinci by Andy Warhol

        The author moves from the Annunciations to the expression of Mary as Mother and Sophia. I was delighted to find  a Gerald Manley Hopkins poem included that I had not read in years, which begins:
                    WILD air, world-mothering air,
                    Nestling me everywhere,
                    This air, which, by life’s law,
                     My lung must draw and draw Now
                     but to breathe its praise,       
                     Minds me in many ways
                     Of her who not only Gave God’s infinity…...
                     Mary Immaculate…….
                                                                 (p. 110-111)
As “world mother air”, Burke tells us, Mary is a cosmic temple, who allows us the freedom of our own finding, of our own breath. She offers liberation within a protected domain.
     Burke intersperses the images she presents with her own experience, her dreams and those of her clients, and her knowledge of the goddess as well as the religious understanding that I would expect from a woman who was identified in Italy as  “a monstere incognito” - a plain clothes nun.
     In the last chapter, “Sounding the Stone Dream”, Burke asserts that “all religious revelations are psychic realities. There within the soul we may discover our gods, and their matrix, the one source that mothers all.” (p. 150) Amen!  

Annunciation by Jim Janknegt (not included in book)

                      

Product Details
Re-Imagining Mary: A Journey Through Art to the Feminine Self
Paperback: 180 pages, 20+ illustrations, Index, Bibliography
Publisher: Fisher King Press; 1st edition (March 8, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-0981034416                                                    

Ghost Pony

     The surrounding landscape is magnificent, but the New Mexico town is not charming. For Sale signs, rusty cars, a general store of old cans, old hardware nothing for us but Ice Sold, though we wish we could spend our money here, instead of the supermarkets  in Santa Fe. 

      An acclaimed Hispanic weaver has a shop here started by his grandfather, or maybe it was his great-grandfather. He shows us the traditional regional patterns his father wove, and I think I recognize borrowed Pueblo designs. He prefers the perfect stripes he creates on a hundred and fifty year old loom. An artist’s studio down the street has a mural marrying the Day of the Dead and the cult of the Penitentes in Pixar color. I was once warned that people here were unfriendly to strangers, but all are talkative, and they look us in the eye and say God Bless You when we leave - and we feel blessed. Bill photographs what-used-to-be, seeing art everywhere.

               
            Main Street eventually becomes a dirt road and Truchas Peaks and the deep-hearted fields appear. The clannish pines are arranged in family groups, and the air at 8400 feet is so clear. Open-hearted and exhilarated, we explore in the morning, imagine history in the old cemeteries, 
work in the afternoon.

We stay at an artist and writer’s retreat, a large adobe house we have to ourselves. It feels like a great gift. We are supposed to be collaborating on an art work involving his images and my poetry. The theme is India, where we spent a month a while ago - but how are we to concentrate on India, when the spirits of the Sangre de Cristo mountains are spinning tales for us, Coyote sings for his dinner, and a Ghost Pony flees his logo on the front of a store and appears in my dream?

          Ghost Pony
 
Ghost pony    you come to me
white as the dandelion
white as life turns
before it blows away
 
Take me back 
to when you cantered these lands
granted in the name of saints
in the name of mercy  in the title of kings

Blood of Christ they named their mountains
Our Father they would say   Holy Mother they would pray
There were looms then  there are looms now
there were carvers then   there are carvers now
It was spirit and necessity then
it is spirit and necessity now
There were ponies and stallions and livestock
there were coyotes and wolf and bear

Altars of saints met kivas of spirits
they danced around each other  they sniffed and
growled   Coyote and Corn Mother crossed over
Guadalupe and Jesus joined the stars and
the great raptors in the haunted sky

Some women lit candles on Friday night
because their grandmothers lit candles on Friday night
In October they asked their neighbors for forgiveness 
spun strangely marked tops before Christmas

Wrapped in silk  in a trunk was the mystery
an enameled hand  with painted eye 
and a six pointed star
from a previous history

Can you take me Ghost Pony?
Can you take me that far?

The Cave Painter

       When we stayed in the Lot Valley in southern France, we visited the cave called Pech-Merle, and saw the hand prints, and the powerful images of dotted horses, bison and mammoths. "They've invented everything",
Picasso said when he visited Lascaux.

      Lascaux was closed to the public when all the human exhalations caused mold to form on the art. Chauvet, discovered in 1994, had art older than all the others. To protect the art, a steel door had been placed on the narrow entrance, and only a small team of experts would be allowed to enter. One of those experts came to Cal with slides shortly after the discovery, and the auditorium was filled. 
My friend Tim and I stood in back to hear him speak. The images of cave art he showed were startling masterpieces, and we thought we would only ever see these images in books or slides.     
 
    I read all I could on Chauvet, intrigued by this mysterious 30, 000 year old art whose origins and meaning might never be understood. Was it Tim who gave me The Mind in the Cave, by David Lewis-Williams, that remarkable book that claimed shamanism and initiation as the basis of paleolithic art? There was, Lewis-Williams claimed, a direct tie between the shamanic rock art of Australia and the ancient images on the cave walls. 

     In Lewis-Williams' earlier book, The Signs of All Times, written with the anthropologist T. A. Dowson:
  “The authors cited laboratory experiments with subjects 
in an induced trance state which suggested that the human 
optic system generates the same types of visual illusions, 
in the same three stages, differing only slightly by culture, 
whatever the stimulus: drugs, music, pain, fasting repetitive movements, solitude, or high carbon-dioxide levels 
(a phenomenon that is common in close underground 
chambers.) In the first stage, a subject sees a pattern of  
points, grids,  zigzags and other abstract forms (familiar 
from the caves); in the second stage, these forms morph 
into objects—the zigzags for example, might become a 
serpent. In the third and deepest stage, a subject feels 
sucked into a dark vortex that generates intense 
hallucinations, often of monsters or animals and 
 feels his body and spirit merging with theirs.” 
[Or maybe the spirits are contacted?]
           http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06
                               /23/080623fa_fact_thurman#ixzz1NidPi4EF

       
When we first read about Werner Herzog’s 3D film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, we were very excited, and last night, when my back was sufficiently healed to sit in a the ater seat for the length of a film, we went to see it. Constant background music, eerily contemporary, kept us from experiencing the deep ancient silence of the cave, but the images on the curved and sometimes undulating surfaces were remarkable. Just a few lines, just a few perfectly executed outlines, (what Zen artists once strived for), and the animals of Aurignacian Europe, as though drawn yesterday, emerged from the rock face. Were they spirit animals coming through the porous rock from the underworld they inhabited?  Rhinoceros, lions, leopard, bison, aurochs and horses - a quartet of horse heads so beautifully drawn one thinks of Renaissance draughtsmen. 

       Herzog says it is as though the human soul awakened here. On a phallus-shaped  pinnacle suspended from the cave ceiling is the only picture of the human figure.  It shows a bison above and surrounding a woman’s sex. A fused figure, from a shamanic vision, perhaps. There is a bison-woman at Pech-Merle as well.

                           
      Recently we downloaded a film made by and about the Inuit people, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. (http://www.isuma.tv/fastrunnertrilogy) At the end of the film a shaman must either give up the old religion or starve. He sends his spirits, who have always been with him, away. He tells them they must go, and they are sobbing, they are weeping and holding on to each other, and they finally walk away. They turn around after walking a few yards and look back, but the shaman repeats that now he must accept Jesus or starve, because that is the condition of the Christian feast another converted Inuit is holding nearby. He must eat the taboo animal organs that shamans must never touch. That will be his communion. He is crying. He is without choice. He has a wife and daughter and followers to feed, and he does not want to die the agony of starvation.

I think of the shamans of the Aurignacian, and the power of their visions. An archeologist in Herzog’s film says that perhaps Homo Sapiens is the wrong name for us. Perhaps we should be known as Homo Spiritualis.

  The Cave Painter         

And then
   suddenly
             to us it is sudden
              but not to them
        they discovered murder

the animals had been idolized terrors
but now     they had the spear 
when they woke up to what they were doing
it was not morning
killing came into their nightly seance
animal spirits invaded their dreams
carrying spears thicker and taller than cedars
and shredded carcasses
           washed down night’s river

and the dreamers were us
just as smart and no longer innocent
and they promised   they begged   they offered
and they couldn’t forget
and they made it the task of one man    one woman
to remember   to be remembering every minute
and he or she   make it she
went into the caves on hands and knees   snake belly crawl
touched her hand to the farthest wall
she knew   they all knew by now
    they were certain
           the spirits lived on the other side

Let her place the torch  on the bear-trodden floor
and press her hands against the shivery membrane -
She   the one with hands    the one with a body
the gods count on our hands     they use our bodies
the animal spirits see the future through cro magnon eyes
see the hills   the rivers   the forest   there were animals  yes
     but not them    not a one
      
so they send her their own true shape     
           and she grinds her colors   picks up charcoal
               and leaves us the auroch   the bison

Enter the caves
     and the ancient age
    of what you believe
                 we just invented
              will be shown to you
             
           and you will not be afraid
    
       

Red Book Mondays

                                                                  

        Monday is Red Book day. The reading of Carl Jung’s extraordinary book is a ritual, repeated weekly. I sit in my large chair with the huge book (12" x 16" and 9 lbs) across my lap, and my laptop balanced on the wide arm of the chair, and enter Jung’s mysteries, revelations, horrors, and prophecies. I begin with his words, some of which I copy, and then immerse myself in the paintings, which are not mirrors of what 

I’ve read, but windows into the psyche’s symbols. 

      I read one short chapter at a time

and I never look ahead.  I follow the book chronologically,  and of course I do not know what will come next, and neither did Jung when he wrote it. 

The Red Book is the record and self -interpretation of Jung’s journeys using active imagination, a journey where he encountered both the sublime and the sinister. At the beginning he is a scholar-scientist, egotistical, ambitious, and concerned with the world’s opinion. 

He reminds me of Dante, at mid-life, lost in a dark wood, his soul demanding a place for herself. When he finishes his very private, (finally published) Red Book, all that he encounters within himself, all of what he will call archetypes & anima, all the darkness he will name Shadow, the process he will call individuation, will appear in his written theories and consulting room.

From the beginning I respond to Jung by taking phrases from the Red Book that I find particularly inspiring or jolting and write short poems - expanding, denying, struggling, adding my own imagery to his. At first it felt audacious to respond to Jung - now it is simply what I do on Red Book Mondays.

“I am the holy animal that stood astonished and cannot grasp the becoming of the God”
How privileged and peaceful 

the dear ox and the donkey 

in the manger  Since animals are sinless  they may Witness
Sometimes   in ivory    oils   

or stained glass 
the ox and the donkey stand close  
smile down on the newborn   
Even the kneeling kings  the wise men  
step aside
 

The Image: The Opening of the Egg
He bows before the egg
the power    rises 
becomes a canopy  of fire and flametears
falling like raindrops
in the jadewalled chamber

“He who had been pressed into the core of the beginning rose up”
And so the universe might have begun
a collapsed black star  infinitely dense
exploding into a trillion holy suns

But if the soul dips into radiance, she becomes as remorseless as the God himself….
Margaret of Cortona   Christ-bitten  ecstatic 
starved thornwhipped body
She lies on the cold bare floor on Easter mornng
begging to feel His wounds
unable to Rise

Who Wrote the Song of Songs?

                                                                                  

Warm. In the Eighties. Sunny. These are words I don’t often use together. Where we live ‘foggy' and’ cold‘ are partners, and  can describe summer. “It’s been raining all week” is also common. It’s May, the roses are blooming. and the rhododendrons and the lilies. I’ve been working in the garden daily, planting, weeding. The Gardener in me responds to the season, and the earth takes over my week.
                                                                                                         

The Curious One did manage to sneak in today. Now that I’m not teaching, this inner voice announces herself with a question, and must have the answer immediately. Today I was thirsty, sitting on my writing deck with a hot sunbeam penetrating the treescreen, but the Curious One wouldn’t let me re-fill the glass until she received the possible answers to her question. You see, there is rarely only one answer in cultural history. You get “probably written in the  9th century B.C., “may have been written by a woman who was black”, “must have been written by a highly skilled bard”. Nary a fact to be found, and if one is provided, it is often overturned a few years later.
                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                                               
Finally, the question-compulsion and the possible answers dissolve into a poem. Before I finish the poem I return from 900 B.C. to my deck, and the sun finally reaches me. I stop and hear the birds. I listen to the birds. I walk over to the garden that Bill & I have created, and realize I have a blog post.

      
Who Wrote the Song of Songs?

Who wrote the Song of Songs?
Excuse me Rabbi
you want me to say
it was Solomon
and I say not Solomon

A woman says a woman wrote it   it was womensong
a dreamscape of love if love could be chosen   and this woman
is black  the woman says  a Shulamite from the village of Shulem
                     
A man says “an extraordinary talent (a him  a his)
created this Hebraic masterpiece of world literature
sometime in the 9th century B.C.”

Have you noticed that narratives never borrow
not “This came to us from Persia”   or  
“that was taught to us by African traders”?

How unwilling we are to admit
the cloth of culture
is woven from threads
handspun in a dozen places

I think of Persian erotic tales
the artful consummations of Indian Gods
and wonder if The Song of Songs was on loan
Is it  or is it not
a wonder
that hero sagas   chronicles 
warnings   exiles  
            &
613 commandments
were canonized together with
a Garden of Delight?

Sunlight and birdsong
finally reach me
I turn away from questions  
from answers
to the truth of this moment:
It is so good to have this song
Especially since the songliles
the roses  the apple blossoms
“have appeared
in our land”
and love    settles down beside me