Burning Quail Woman

                         

                                  

Quail, the lady of bronze and smoke, she died midmorning. Neck snapped, not a mark.
The little sparrowhawk with red eyes must have dropped her in the long grass.

Mother found her. I carried her limp and warm in my hands, stroked her feet and her beak, laid her with yellow tidytips lupine, baby blue eyes, at the uproot of an old pine.
Her eyelids closed, peace on the dust-blue lids, full in elsewhere now.
A male called from the bough.

Once she danced for him, tail feathers swinging, a fan of desire: charcoal copper dun.
The sway of her plump body
in the leafmold
in the amber duff
in the thrushsung dusk
was the sway of all abundance, the promise of worlds.

A man with brown feet and brown hands helped to skin her. One cut at the breast, the rest with fingertips, like taking off a coat. I gave her juniper smoke and roses.
Cicadas clicked their wings in the dry oak hills, and called it summer.

Before Olympus there were the Titans. Big women and men of earth. Asteria, daughter of Phoibe, was mother of falling stars and dreams. She gave birth to Hekate. Her mother was the moon. When Zeus chased after her for sex, she became a quail to escape him.
She fled, leaping into the sea, and became the island Delos in the blue Aegean.
It had no bottom. It floated, and the quail flocked there on their journeys south. Later when Zeus chased after her sister Leto, the island sheltered her.

Asteria was aunt of Artemis who loved the woodbirds and the wood, who loved the ones she hunted, who was the deer she ate. Artemis wore quail feathers at her waist, and helped them birth their spotted eggs.

I placed the quail in the adobe brick kiln we built at dusk to fire earth-made pottery.
Skinless, plump, wet, she smelled of sweet flesh and comfort, an offering
to the clay to the fire to the night and stars, to her mother and her sisters
Asteria, Artemis, Leto: women of the quail, of instinct, wilderness, care

She burned with her tailfeathers still on so she could take them up there with her, dancing
Her fat glazed the pots, her fat popped and sparked, her bones turned to white dust, delicate as crabshells by morning.

Up there in the stars, quail women are dancing.
They are dancing with her spirit they are singing in the smoke
They are shaking their hips and lowering their blue-dusked lids to look upon their lovers

I was so sad at first for her beauty, lost to death. Her body was perfect in my hands.
I could not bear it. I thought of her mate, his loss. I did not want to erase his sorrow, the love that birds know. I felt so sorry for him, for her.
But she was far wiser than I, that quail, little woman.
She showed me her death, she let me see it
How her beautiful feathers were only a skin; no less precious for it, but a skin nonetheless.
That what was underneath was tender, that it could nourish me, a gift.
The body is a gift, but more than that the body is an offering on the fire
Borne on embers above the coiled pots she was transmuted
She became smoke and heat and air
She glowed, her bones molten. She became starmade again, the first sacrament

A woman offers a quail to the goddess, offers flesh to the earth and stars
In the face of what we perceive truly there is nothing else to be done
Learning to be fully human is learning to handle the dead this way
The old hunters say that animals offer themselves to the arrow because they want to come into the human camp to be sung, to be turned to fire, to be danced, to be part of that pathos, that beauty, that blaze.

I did not understand fully how to offer her, but she did. She went to my hands and the fire and taught me that we are not whole without this, without looking into the underworld, into the body of the quail, into the earth's hearth and there giving up what we know for the sweetness of a grief that is feathered, that is wise.

Down there quail woman is carrying an ember in her feathered hands. Through the underworld she is carrying it. Underground the dead are but sparks in the bellies of seeds. The spark does not go out, only leaves our view for a time. Quail woman is dancing there. Quail woman is dancing in the stars. As above, so below, and the kiln in the center where all is transformed.

Back home I buried her bones, half dust, in the bishop pine wood where she was born. With rose petals, red wine and a pot sherd from her fire I buried them. At dawn, two quail called, flapped, sang, right outside our door, nearer than I'd ever heard them. All through the daybreak they carried on. Mating maybe. Mourning, maybe. She lives everywhere now.

The Inner Rhythms of Winter

Here in the lichen green house all nestled in fruit trees, here in the sky blue attic dormer where the winter stars are clear at night despite the city lights (Orion, the Pleiades), I have been doing my best to move to the quiet and slower rhythms of winter. I love this season. I love the long nights and the frost in the morning. I love the rain (oh god, how I love it) and I love the birds that visit at this time of year and fill the air with sweet notes—cedar waxwings, ruby-crowned kinglets, varied thrush, pine siskins.

I love the lemons, ripening all at once like a thousand yellow morning stars. 

(Says Neruda of the lemon: 

So, when you hold

the hemisphere
of a cut lemon
above your plate,
you spill
a universe of gold,
a
yellow goblet
of miracles.)

I love the way the persimmon leaves (which have now fallen) turn to embers, turn to flame. There is a stillness I find harder and harder to find in this loud and sad and chaotic and bright-screened world, but I have been seeking it nevertheless, as the days dwindle and the light feels more and more like a low and smoldering hearthfire.

There is a savoring of small things through the senses, letting them rest thus in the house of the body, that this season asks of me, and so I am doing my best to listen, and taste, and smell, and feel, and behold. Most of all, to behold. John O'Donohue talks about beholding—how each day we have the opportunity to behold great and simple beauty. It doesn't matter where you are, there is always some beauty to see; it's just a matter of taking the time to see it. I like the world behold, because it is tactile, because it is about holding things inside of ourselves with our eyes. In the Old English and Old Anglo Saxon sense, bihealdan means not only to "hold in view" but to "belong to." I love this—that we can belong to the beauty we take the time to behold. I find that having something belong to me matters far less than belonging to something bigger than me.

Like the winter sun rising low and iridescent across the ocean. 

Like the vulture under a changing sky, riding thermals of rising heat. 

Like the scarlet intoxication of the ancient and magical fly agaric mushroom, keeper of primordial and dangerous wisdom. 

Like the sanddunes under the hands of late afternoon light. 

Once, the vast expanse of western San Francisco looked like this: covered in vast and blowing dunes, some one hundred feet high, where rare blue butterflies lived on the fragrant yellow lupines. Now, the dunes are all a memory, save the brief spit of sand at Ocean Beach; they are entirely flattened and forgotten. This puts sorrow in my heart, to think of the sand and the unhatched chrysalises there under the cement blocks of that place; but it also gives me a bittersweet seed to hold close; that by learning, and remembering, we keep the sand under the city alive. 

Out at Abbott's Lagoon, where the sand dunes still thrive, the coyotes are courting, dancing across the vast expanses side by side, paw prints tripping close but never quite overlapping, one coyote sometimes veering off in a giddy loop, flirtatious and full of the joy of fresh autumnal air, the gentle light, a beautiful pair of canine eyes...

The bobcats, meanwhile, are hunting the edge of the lagoon for the hapless and plump black coots, a favorite wintertime meal.

Newts are out in merry droves, making their annual pilgrimages from their summer estivation burrows to the creeks of their birth to mate. They walk slow and steady, so deliberate, so unswayed, their bellies and feet flashing an orange warning (they are highly toxic to everyone save the garter snake) that is the same color as the satsuma oranges whose flavor is the flavor of this time of year (and my childhood), and same as the bright skin of persimmons, whose fruit I crave throughout the summer, anticipating their arrival in fall. 

Under my hands there is knitting for various little nieces and nephews. Between my teeth are the roasted nuts of the bay laurel tree, which taste of the land I gathered them from, and of cacao and coffee and popcorn all at once. They are oily, and rich, and bitter, and give you a little zing right to the brain, like you are out walking in a wet forest with cold hands and a bright heart. These, too, I wait all year to cure, and roast, and savor. When the days grow darker, I start to crave them, like the persimmons, as if my body knows just what minerals it needs. The minerals of the dark season, its sweet, its strong, its smolder. 

And in my soul (the food it craves) these days are the words of poets—Dylan Thomas and Robinson Jeffers, Alan Garner (poetry written in prose form) and Ursula Le Guin (the same). And also the brilliant words of hedge-speaking poet Tom Hirons in his poem Sometimes A Wild God, illustrated by the wonderful Rima Staines. 

I had the pleasure and honor of visiting them at the beginning of fall—and there are some very exciting things (in Book Form) afoot, and close to fruiting, but these I cannot share quite yet for reasons you will soon see. Suffice it to say that the story of my adventures on Dartmoor, and this Wonderful Surprise, will be coming to you soon, but not just now... like the very earliest trillium wildflowers of January, waiting to bloom when the time is right.

This darkest time of year is the time to court silence and candlelight. This, it seems to me, is its rhythm, and this is also the rhythm of poets, hence this hunger for their words, which are hospitable to silence, which are cloaked in silence and shadow, all that empty space on the page.

Near Samhain I made a pilgrimage with my aunt to Tor House, the hand-hewn granite home of the magnificent Californian poet Robinson Jeffers and his beloved wife Una. 

It was their hearths that struck me almost more than anything—one for each room in that low stone and ocean-blown home, places to gather when the dark was so great outside that it was its own wild being. Jeffers went out every night to read the stars, to watch their movements as the ocean pounded just beyond the back gate, while inside, Una tended the fire, and played the melodeon, and filled the vast dark with an embered sort of beauty. They made their dreams their own, reads a quote (in Latin) carved into one of their walls; they made their  life to the rhythms of their own souls, and their home too. They did it with their hands, and with their dreaming.

This, to me, seems the way to do it. In the gathering dark, as the solstice nears, truths like this stand out more clearly, like the flame of a candle, stark against the shadows. That which is truly bright shines only more fully when the world goes quiet, and dim. 

In my body, the rhythms of autumn and winter have drawn me closer to bedrock; to earth and mineral and stone. To clay, and the working of it, and the delight of watching animals unfurl beneath my hands, and the wonder of learning about glazes, and the transmutations which occur within the kiln. Really, it is pure alchemy. (As are the roses that bloom suddenly in the middle of December in my mother's garden.)

These dark evenings are good for sewing skirts, and burning frankincense, and peering at the tiny (in)consistencies of the moss stitch. (Not a stitch to knit by candlelight!)

And they are good for dreaming, for letting the mind roam to all manner of whimsical lands, where leverets are raised by Wild Folk in wheeled caravans (readers of the Leveret Letters, when I saw this caravan parked on the side of the road in Bolinas, it reminded me so much of the wagon of the Greentwins, or the Basket-witches!), where such wagons might carry a true wandering bard, or a woman who is part goose, or an old man who can mend anything brought to him, including a lost soul.  Or an even older woman with an apron-full of healing herbs, and eyes with the granite of moving fault lines in them.

Out in the hills and forests of beloved Point Reyes the land offers up a thousand cups of tea to heal both the body and the spirit. It seems to me that such cups of tea must be gathered spontaneously, without agenda, open to what offers itself, and just enough for one pot of tea to be shared between friends-- as my dear friend Nao and I did a fortnight past, while she was visiting from British Columbia (more about that beautiful time soon).  Pine needles and plantain, usnea, yerba santa and tiny new sprigs of yarrow, sipped at the hearth of good friendship-- now truly, what could be better? Beholding the forest and hills upon the tongue, inside the belly; an act of communion. (The pine trees dropped some chunks of resin as gifts for Nao to take back north, for muscle-warming oils and salves like the one below.)

Medicines are curing patiently in the apothecary's cabinet (including the first round of a Reishi tincture from the treasured Ganoderma tsugae I found in the Sierras in August), and hanging up through the house, both for the medicine of color and beauty, and to be used in tea when the mood strikes (the pine). 

Meanwhile, sweet Hawthorn is glorious in his full coat, a great satin cloud, lustrous but needing to be shorn. I feel bad, to leave him ragged and close-cut on the darkest days of the year, but a coat left unshorn is very dangerous for an angora (he can ingest too much, and starve), so I will have to snip away soon. Though a bit stressful when we reach the underparts, shearing Hawthorn has become its own rhythm of stillness and soft words and the sudden bounty of wool in my lap, to be spun, and spun, until I have enough for a shawl. How marvelous-- a shawl made by this kind and wise being, and therefore made in large part of the garden plants he eats copiously-- calendula and radish, nasturtium, borage, lavender, comfrey. What a world it is, that such things are possible! We do not need to look far for magic...

It is dark here now, and time, I say, to turn out the lights, shut the screens, and light the candles. May these darkest nights of the year be filled with tea, and time for reflection, and words that nourish your whole soul, that spark little fires in you made of embers the world has never before seen. I find that making time to cut the electric lights, and sit in the glow of fire or flame, is the surest way to hear the quiet but strong voice of the season, whispering its rhythms. 

May you be warmed, may you find the hearth that is always smoldering inside.

Mt. Vision

Photo by Kyle Lemle

The wind was so strong it was clarifying. It came through all cold and quartzite, a wind off northern seas or the tips of faraway mountains laced in ice, and Mt. Vision seemed to rise up inside it, recognizing something of its old and elemental making in such gusts, something from the beginning of time. It came through my knitted coat and woke up all my skin, and Point Reyes, from that vantage, was swept with it, the long ocean shore to the north one great seam of foam, the fingers of Drake's Estero a silver undulation, the hammerhead of the headlands splayed flat under its hands. 

Sometimes, a view is precious. Bird's-eye. To stand on a peak and look out over land you love so much (a love that sometimes hurts, inexplicably) it takes your breath and replaces it with wind; to stand and hold it all with your eyes, the valleys and ridges and curves and headlands and long shorelines and estuaries and forests all part of one creature which has come into your body through your eyes; this is holy. This must be why the mountain top is thought to be a holy place, why this one is called Vision. To sense that which is very ancient, older than this shape of Point Reyes, old as oceans; to sense the spread of bedrock, the shift of plates, the seethe and quilt of many different stones below, from the land's long nomad journeys, the way waves mold coasts. 

Photo by Kyle Lemle

There is another aspect to the perspective that high places give: inner vision. Not of the human psyche (though that may come incidentally, naturally, from these other Visions), but a sense of the innerness of the ridges and valleys themselves. A doubling of vision, holding the pine-skin over the ridges on one level, sensing an incandescence below, like the hills and slopes might be full of shards of light.

Maybe it was in part the wind that made me feel this way as I stood inside of it, taking the estuaries and fingers of land through my eyes into my bones. The way a wind that strong strips things down. The way the world started: before anything, some howling weather, some vast winds whose gases could kill us, searing across stone, whittling it. Maybe these memories are held under the fur the pine trees make, under the topsoil, the rootplace, the tunnels of moles and gophers and shrews, inside the rocks of Point Reyes, and the hum in wind.

This place steps me sidelong into a different kind of time. 

Much of Mt. Vision burned in the 1995 fire; you can track the places fire touched by the thickness and age of the bishop pines, which are all twenty years old now, a young eager forest so dense that to pass through it is to enter a dense hush, tunneled, strewn with golden meteors of resin and the ch-ch-ch of ruby-crowned kinglets, foraging tiny spiders. 

Bishop pines are dependent on fire to pop open their hard-sealed cones. The fire, though devastating by human terms, was one great cacophony of pine seeds, burning like fireworks, bursting free, nestling into ash to be reborn. There is fire under the surface here. Bishop pines don't live much longer than a century; they expect a rhythm of flame to come through and give them rebirth, a hundred thousand phoenixes from the ash. 

Photo by Kyle Lemle

So in the tunnels of Mt. Vision, time is made of fire, and though the trees are small and young, this rhythm of burn to ash and regrowth is as old as the trees themselves, which are a very, very ancient species, endemic to particular granitic soils in coastal California which bear remnants of the island chain that was the First California millions and millions of years ago. 

On Point Reyes, they grow where the soil is thick with granite and the air is thick with fog, drinking up that mica below and that drip above through the long dry summer, growing shaggy coats of lichen and moss in the clean, clean wind. 

Usnea, an abundant lichen bearding these pines, is a beautiful and potent medicine (for pneumonia, for strep, for virtually any infection in the body, topically and internally), and if you look sidelong, it grows in tiny microcosmic thickets: wee pine trees, girding the pine bark. 

I love this mirroring; how the form of forest is held in the eager lichen; how the seethe of foam on the shore is sometimes exactly the same as the seethe of cloud; how one pine seed is also a great red star, Betelgeuse or Aldebaran.

How the pine sap, dripping, is a liquid fire, stalactites, beaded constellations that catch light, bits of pure quartz from the inside of Mt. Vision. 

How the woodrat builds its nest like a small mountain, a personal Mt. Vision of tunnels and chambers, some full of obviously useful stashes of seeds and nuts and bits of mushroom, or bay leaves for pest fumigation, others used exclusively for shiny treasures--dropped pennies bright as resin or quartz, silver-capped pens, fallen earrings and bits of necklace; and from older generations

(nests are passed on in families, sometimes for thousands of years), gleaming black arrowheads, lost abalone-shell beads, polished bits of soapstone.

I've never seen a woodrat nest made of bark like this before-- a resourceful fellow (who I left a shiny new penny for, my usual woodrat protocol when passing their castles), who clearly gathered up all the ember-bellied bark from this old bishop pine snag (a fire victim, likely the mother-father of all the surrounding youths) and used it to build his own mountain. Woodrats are known to adorn their nests with all manner of unusual items, apparently for looks alone, such as lost CD's or bones-- so perhaps the pine bark is all turned orange-belly out for a mysterious but important decorative purpose.

There are days when I burn with curiosity at the foot of a woodrat nest-- what is it like inside, when you are a woodrat? With lizards and tiny mice lodging in abandoned wings. With treasuries of penny and bead. What is it like when the coyote comes sniffing, comes pawing like a terrible wind, and you must dash into an underground redoubt and stay very still until the worst is over?

((AN ASIDE: I am suddenly wondering, as I write this, if the mystery paw I found in what I think was coyote scat on the trail belongs to an unlucky woodrat. It definitely belongs to a rodent, with the several distinct metacarpal pads, and not a digger—the claws are too small, unless it's a gopher's back foot— nor a mouse, as this paw was pretty big, about the size of a penny. A ragged little mystery, there, gone through the underworld bowels of Coyote.))

The old fire-seared pine is full of constellations where small woodpeckers once tapped, and one big dark moon, where a pileated came long ago, flashing her red crown, and hollowed a home (which after a season became home to others, one by one—maybe a gray squirrel, maybe a long-tailed weasel, maybe a mouse, an owl, a bat). 

How many homes there are tucked deep in the brush, or up in the pine branches, or under the duff-rich soil, of these hills; when I stop and sense and wonder—how many eyes are on me now? how many brush rabbits, bobcats, lizards, foxes, spiders, tucked just out of sight?— the land takes on another layer of luminosity, not the inner kind of fire and quartz, but the outer kind, of warm-blooded life, homing and bright. 

The mycelia of it, spreading everywhere, a web of lives— both the literal kind that fruits as rich wet mushrooms, and the metaphoric kind, of the net of relationships between beings, one life folded into another and another via hunger, the hunt, the slow transmutations of decay, the quick fires of love and newborns and feasts on fallen pinecones. 

I have returned to reading a lot of Robinson Jeffers recently (after a pilgrimage to his Tor House on the Monterey Coast, a sacred story for another day, connected to another pilgrimage, to England and Dartmoor, also for another day). He is an old inspiration of mine, one of the very first poets who inspired me to tuck my word-seeds into the land, and he is partly to blame for the sudden hold that the "transhuman" has upon my heart these days—the grand scale of things, of stars and cells and mountains and the bright eyes of hawks, the way all life is mirrored within itself, from the tiny cell to the sun, and how it was always so, even when the bishop pine and her resin were only a dream in the belly of a primordial algae.

"I believe the first living cell

Had echoes of the future in it, and felt

Direction and great animals, the deep green forest

And whales' track sea; I believe this globed earth

Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods

but feels and chooses."

- from the poem "De Rerum Virtute," in the collection Hungerfield. 

In this autumn blaze of sunset on the wind-seared Mt. Vision I watched a red-tail soaring, buffeted, star on his wings. I saw three kestrels, shards of arrowed light, tossing and veering and crying out, chasing him, and for a moment I was their feathers, scrimmed with wind; I could feel their lightness of being, the ferocious and radiant purpose of wings and beak, the absolute joy of such soar. Then the feeling was gone, and I was myself again, below, watching the kestrels, the hawk, the sun on old pines, the land reaching out its hands to the ocean, shaken. 

But is there anything sweeter to the tongue of the mind than for a moment to be lost in kestrel-flight?

There is no one to say it better, so I will leave you in Jeffers' hands:

"One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men;

The immense beauty of the world, not the human world. 

Look—and without imagination, desire nor dream—directly 

At the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful?

These plunging promontories and flame-shaped peaks

Stopping the sombre stupendous glory, the storm-fed ocean? Look at the Lobos Rocks off the shore,

With foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions

Couching on them. Look at the gulls on the cliff-wind, 

And the soaring hawk under the cloud-stream—

But in the sage-brush desert, all one sun-stricken 

Color of dust, or in the reeking tropical rain-forest,

Or in the intolerant north and high thrones of ice—is the earth not beautiful?

Nor the great skies over the earth?

The beauty of things means virtue and value in them.

It is in the beholder's eye, not the world? Certainly.

It is the human mind's translation of the transhuman 

Intrinsic glory. It means that the world is sound,

Whatever the sick microbe does.* But he too is part of it."

- the last verse of "De Rerum Virtute," in the collection Hungerfield. 

* the "sick microbe" is us, for those not versed in Robinson Jeffers' worldview. Harsh it is, but I always have been greatly relieved by his great epochal, geological outlook, his hawk-sharp criticisms. He was, and is, controversial for it.