A reflection upon entering the Pollen Basket

Hey there. This weeks post is a lean-to of a response to a really beautiful piece that is up over at The Pollen Basket here: I doubt anyone heading there straight away and giving it read will feel disappointed that they did.





Barbarian

Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem.

                                             -Julius Caesar's The Gallic War
Mshiah Qam.
-Miriam Migdala

She fingers the blue on slowly, wilded in the wake;
she counts the steps from inside out the fenced-in fields of grace.

A vitrumned likeness wavers, a cats-lick from the rim,
in the teacup in the circle of the saucer's closing ring.

Let the tongue tip shape the watchword in the shallows of its bow;
let sentry sleep and serpent sing beneath the shuddered vow.

Here is where their end is born; there is nothing at the gate
but ink and skin, the sylph herself: the shekinah-rivened state.

Caesar may misread you in the camber of his glass
or more likely overlook you, a needle in the grass

but as you plunge into his heel he will see the face
of what gives womb its dark and what gives blood its taste.

Hey Sylvia!

Thanks you so much for sharing the work that you did. As I mentioned in the brief note earlier, I read it upon being woken abruptly in the Stir, around the third hour,  when one is shook awake to realize they have slept while the Other has faced the depths until the sea of them has gone blood in the dark between the trees. The gift of your work watching into that One, wondering into that When was right in the key of the moment.

Martin’s piece of the colors from the night before was still naming the red, the black and the white of it all while I was running the fairy tale of the Twelve Wild Geese up into the wind as my own banner of the season. It is a story that for me, at least for now, sings from the under about the re-peopling of our world, about re-membering our way home clothed in the patterns only the feminine can knit from the edges and the forgotten.. Bogdown and aster, flowers of flotsam and wreckage , knitted in silence and speaking only with our feet and hands to the questions of meaning and love. Storying what can’t be easily worded into certainties and creed. It is finding ground again, firm enough to raise a sanctuary but never unyielding enough for a scaffold.

Interesting  that the woman/child that knits us home in The Twelve Wild Geese (from which this substack gathers its thread) is named Snow-white and Rose-red. As if the black feathers of the winged body, the same black of that Good Friday you worded out from just couldn’t be confessed aloud. In the Kabbalah the lowest sefirot, Malkuth, is that of the exiled feminine. Her color is black. Her sending off, outside the walls of the city of G-d, the source of so much of the mischief and the costs now coming due. The longing of the old order of sacrifice is to spare the self. To send sin or whatever other name you have for responsibility into the desert upon another’s back. To pretend to the Red and, so, to fabricate the White without paying any real price. Abraham could hear G-d asking for Isaac, or suggesting the throat of the antlered other in the bind. Bethlehem comes to and suggests in the clearest way possible that the only fair game for the altar, if altar it must be, is found in the mirror not in the snare. It is Shekinah all over it, this Way.

The swallows here (we live among the barns of Maine) are a blend of the colors in question. Another Sunday has come and as I wake this Father’s day morning, still owing you a response, they are fledging their young. In them I find one more color to blend onto the page between our work. Martin’s post today speaks of the need for the underdog to negotiate some minor change, to find maybe some angle unto sanctuary. His tale of the spyglass prescribes adding a fourth to the three. Isn’t that what shekinah offers as Miriam, as Sophia, as the Dark Mother unnoticed between the lines and in curves of the burning black fires of the lettering in the missives corked in the bottles flung from Jerusalem, riding the sea of us to the shore of now? What you lose upon earth will be loosed in heaven, yes?  For me it is midrash and story against the static and the literal. It is the forgotten blue, color of multiplicity and the not-yet. It is what I see when I imagine myself in the fabric She would shelter us in to re-call us to a participation after all that has happened since we left whatever was the garden of our beginning.

Mandelstam spoke of the poem as a swallow coming to us from across the divide. But sometimes the word we knew for a second slips off, startled by hubris or lurch,  before we can gather her song into the storehouse of our tongue and safeguard her gifts. Osip’s “blind swallow” returns to the “palace of shadows.” Like Barfield says, the soul is harp, not camera. Anything worth speaking is the wind/spirit that precedes us come vibrating through the strings of us. The string matters, each one of us a never-before and a never- again, but the illusion that we say something when speaking alone, beneath  the glass dome of our materialism is a delusion.

I heard swallow-wing all about your heart cry to Miriam and her Son. Saw the flash of her red throat in the red-egg amulet before Tiberius. Odd, maybe that the bit I reflect back in solidarity with this red of the She-Moses before Pharaoh is Blue. But isn’t that just the same blood upon the other side of the heart squeeze, still current but spent  from its turning through the channels and so coming home into the air where it will drink itself back to red. In her work on the ancient Jewish text the Sefer Yetzirah, Jill Hammer unpacks the approach of the unknown authors to the divine feminine in the image of the Three Mothers (shalosh imot), a multiplicity balancing the Oneness, corresponding to air, water and fire, partners of the creation of space, time, and story that we call the universe. This eight-armed blue  is, I think, just now coming up for air, both skull and rose about her neck, some days waxing red like Miriam before Tiberius, some nights singing us into that cobalt vespering, just as vibrant and unbowed, but teaching a drive and a taste to be known and had by the wild and the sacred rather than to know and to have. Let no orthodoxies stand between us and this elemental cure for the deficiency we have nurtured far too long.

Sylvia, your disclaimer for the pedigree of your essay, the string of images and dark songs that directly took me through the blood and water and wind to the deep black-blue Sea of it all and the White deeper still was that you suggested you don't have a mastering of theology.  G-d forbid you ever trade such as this for such as that. Yeshua, time and again, said to his companions “You have heard it said, but I say unto you....Theology paling before Story from the God-man's mouth. And so also to the human since everything that is emanates from Ein Sof (you are gods) the implied command to go and do likewise. Again, what is set loose on earth….

The shibboleth of the piece you shared called out at the threshold not in timbre of the idea among experts but in that of the bond among people, human and non. It is in the same key as The Sabbath Empire of Graham with its  fetching wish toward a Yeshua waist deep in the petals. I found both those cries at the checkpoint in the mother-tongue.  Salut the return of the Exiled!

And companions of the flotsam to watch with.

In the end I find this response of mine more refraction than light. Maybe the swallow got away but if all it does is send some folks over to read your piece then it has done its job. Trued by my own promise to bogdown before fabrications let me end with one more poem to acknowledge that I suspect that realm more leaned toward bringing this across.


Murmuration

"...and how there is then revealed to her her own condition" 

At first it was only at dusk
and just part of the way.
Holding fast to the braid of form and sheet,
slipping the toes of her mind, 
one breath deep, into the Swallow sea
at the foot of her bed.

The feathering began in her middle.
Hox genes in dark flutter,
their sussurate music rising 
from the black past the ledge,
purling through the weirs, unloosening
the ties at the scapular link.
Skin quilled to barb and vane. 

Night air—miles of meadows
full of sweet grass, 
dryas and juniper—
ran the contours of her cheeks, 
condensed in her lashes.

On the cool underside of soul,
Bird beaded, distilled 
from scuttled bits
of mammal, salt, and milk
until, in wing-bowed bank 
she awoke mid-whorl,
old be-longings drowned in dark,

knowing come known
having come had
truth gone trued

no one, they flew.