496 Steps with a Sapphire Butterfly

My feet know this path
My eyes, these woods
My way so familiar
My presence is hardly needed

I glance at you fleetingly
(because I am busy, thinking)
Only long enough to elide past you
With a half-formed ‘oh yes, that’ (thinking, busy)
Thinking we have only chanced together
(because I am busy, ‘ah, yes, this’)
But you would have us dance together

I am charmed at first
Then somewhat alarmed
You tangle me I fall
Out of rhythm with myself
I am out of step on my own path
Disjointed, fumbling, stumbling into
A new dance I don’t understand
The partnership of the half-formed
‘yes, oh yes, this is what I was made for
Why you are here with me and I with you’
You weave yourself around me, fleetingly,
Never quite with me never quite leaving me
At last I catch your rhythms
I fall into the slow . . . slow . . .
Quick-quick-slow sliding gliding tango
Down a path my feet once knew
My way, now remembered, so familiar
A presence fills the woods and I embrace
Without question the chances of my body
Though I am whole unto myself
Yet do I choose to open
My soul to you my heart
To your heart

Anyone walking toward me
On the path would see
Only a woman, so familiar
A woman hardly needed.
They do not see Psyche
And her sapphire butterfly
Dancing in the August woods.

Kukulkan

At the mouth of the well of Itza
I sing to Chac and dance alone
On Kukulkan face and arms and
Breasts upthrust as the feathers of
His fingers tease me I close my eyes
Against his groans filling the valley
Spilling beyond the little snakes of
My hair writhing as my jaguar feet
Seek their rhythms I am wet
My nipples pebbled against his breath
Spinning red to white to black to yellow
My skin slicked with his sighs my throat
Raw and open at the mouth of the well of Itza
I would follow him into the cenote
Become limestone for his quarrying hands
And the whispering frogs would
Slake their thirst in our puddles.

PRISM

I
was
whole
before
you
wore yourself
into me
before you
fractured my
seamless surfaces
before you
stained me
like cathedral glass
beautifully broken
with light
but now you
are gone I am
opaque and shattered
my pieces no longer fit
and I cannot put
myself back as
I
was
whole
before
you

Blue Triangle

I didn’t look.
Like you I didn’t look;
I turned my head,
Averted my eyes,
Plugged my ears,
Stilled my tongue,
Believing if I waited
Someone else would see
Someone else would hear
Someone else would speak
Because it all happened
To someone else
I never understood
I would be
Someone else someday
Because I didn’t
Look like you.


Posted by Madelyn Kelstein Campbell on Facebook: "On July 29, Arizona law S.B. 1070 is scheduled to go into effect, empowering local law enforcement agencies to ask people whom they think might be illegal immigrants for their papers (if they have been stopped for any other infraction). Being required to carry one's papers aroun...d is an early and common tactic used by totalitarian regimes to intimidate people and keep them in line.
This is not to say that the vast majority of people who supported this law did so out of malevolence, but make no mistake, this is not benign. This is not about the illegal immigrants. This is about legally intimidating people who look different (after all, who looks like an illegal immigrant? Will they be going after everyone who looks Canadian? Or Irish?).
When the Nazis first went into Denmark and announced that the Jews would all have to wear yellow Stars of David on their clothing, the story goes that the King of Denmark rode out the next morning wearing a yellow Star of David. The rest of the population then followed his example. Everyone stood in solidarity with their Jewish brothers and sisters. The Nazis had other markers, as well. They required foreign forced laborers to wear blue triangles. In that spirit, I invite you to Wear Your Papers on July 29th. You simply need to affix a blue inverted triangle to your clothing and stand in solidarity with your brothers and sisters in Arizona.
This isn't about immigration. It is about how we treat the people who are here. Let's take a stand."

woodpeckers echo
ice shimmers into currents
silent falls the snow

Midwest January

We are in the unlovely time of year
When there is only the sooty swabbing of skies
And grimy mounds of snow slump
Against the sandy salted streets
And old men murder their old wives
One smothers her in a sagging stained sofa
Another fills her with a twelve-gauge load
Of double-aught buckshot
And no one notices the shadowy trees
Trembling like Our Lady of Guadalupe
Coruscated in a pre-dawn frozen fog

midnight sequins
shimmer with
each breath
beckoning me
beaconing me
home my flame
quickens yearns
whispers return
for I too am
stardust



In the Tarantula Nebula lies a bright cluster of brilliant, massive stars, Hodge 301. The cluster, in the lower right-hand corner, is blasting material from supernovae into the surrounding nebula. Photo credit: The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScl/NASA)