Solstice
Published in Alaska Women Speak. Sanctuary, Fall 2020. Volume 29, Issue 3.
Boots float on the crunch of hoar frost. When you peek under that peeling, black felt back of Spring’s mirror, each leaf and tendril is silverspun. The soft, green edges, now crystalline. A gaping, yet needlepoint-sharp stillness of breath between the in and out, where it doesn’t exist and every potential is possible.
Amythestine chapel, arcing over feathered spruce, waxed in white plaster. Each foggy exhalation, a relic unto itself, rising over the riverbank’s altar. We would do well to worship our respiration. Hold in each breath as sacred and lift, in joy, our dancing corpses as sighs leave us. Interred in these skins, spirits yearn for home. Bounding from eyes, searching endless; lightly carrying their tombs dressed in wool socks and red faces.
A pause when the spirit sees its reflection. Here is where I stay? Royal sky, wide over red clay and sage. Gather a bindle, pack it up in a little heart valve so it sits warm and quiet, flickering. Glowing as a small place to rest, while we answer the glaciers’ ring. Is it here, then? Equilibrium adjusts to the sea, a tidepull on the fallow moss of our being. Two sides of home with a single mountain canopy. A yin bedroom of soft silt, sponged taiga bed, quilted in berries and bearskin. The yang ramada of scrub jay’s blue in heaven, impeccably dressed in dust, turquoise cactus pouring in.
