MEDITATION ROOM
My mother’s late twin watercolor
(Bardsey Island, 2002). Dark
room, light room. Look
through the window to the cemetery –
crumbled walls in Wales, a stony cross.
Pale green as early April
outside the infirmary – still,
fresh, frail. Her final brush with grass,
her hopeful air. The Boanerges
were the Sons of Thunder –
redheads, most likely – Dioscuri
in their scarlet robes – woodpeckers,
Thunderbirds (like my two redhead brothers).
Dakota found him on the earth
near Red Wing – red-feathered
Thunder-Birdman (portent for Little Crow).
Thunder-&-lightning were one mighty Bird –
a firebird, roaring crimson.
Fire-flinging wingèd one –
a Persian peacock (Rhody Red?)
or Phoenix, soaring like a rainbow
from gray winter ash.
Woodpecker, with his calabash
tap-tapping oaks for golden honey-glow
Morse codes the closing of an Iron Age
& restoration of that Paradise
the Son of Davy Jonah scries
from his doom-rood. Just turn the page,
*
he cries. Along this feathered spine
where all the leaves are bound,
your legend of Twin-Town –
refuge for sacred monsters (in a pine
grove, under Ariadne’s Crown,
northward of everywhere).
The holy child of Mary
is such a singularity. Scapegoat-twin,
divine-human, he will dethrone the kings
with goldenrod of charity;
rise from his bed of cruelty
with flames of sunflower – with Easter wings.
Just beyond my mother’s watercolor
David Jones grotto, I glimpse
tall flickering cave-nymphs…
a moonlit retina (of temple vault, pillar).
Twin rooms, of light & dark, enclosed
(like matryoshka dolls) inside
each other. Casket-scaffold
for a model ship, perhaps? Micòl's
canoe? A meditation room
for mourning Magdalen.
Through tears of rage… vision.
A ragged almond tree, coming to bloom;
immense pressure of gravity, around a shell;
the coracle of wounded heart
lifting as purple columbine – a spurt
from humming bird-nest (thunder-sky-well).
4.10.20
