Her astrology chart predicted that over the next twelve months her life would be like an episode on the Discovery Channel--watching an elephant give birth...slowly.
A marriage crashed and burned after sixteen years and two children. Two moths caught in a jar, set high on a shelf, with only pinpricks for air.
Careless children, no water, no leafy greens. Wordless mornings, cold sheets.
Hera wept--Hera a triple Goddess of maidens, wives, and crones, until Homer and his misogynist tribe, got a hold of her and she became Zeus's shrew wife--nothing more.
A role model for our time.
Morning sandwiches made for hungry girls to eat on black asphalt in four-square grids. Strawberry jelly dipped into peanut-butter comingling--tendrils that can never be severed again.
A marriage bed stained by broken vows
thou shall not commit adultery!
Plant spores in the desert can hunker down for years conserving their vital life force until the time is ripe for them to bloom again. Coyote, the trickster can show up. Love can wear many false faces. Rescuers don't always show up on white horses, but through kind words at vulnerable moments.
Uneasy bedfellows made.
Her therapist, a woman who dabbles in Shamanism, told her, "put your pussy to the ground and pay attention...your body won't lie to you if you listen--women are like tuning forks, for Christ sakes."
Women stop taking men into their bodies when love dies. Steel clamps. Crying in the night behind a bathroom door, towel between her legs mopping up the fluid. Fist stuffed in mouth, sobbing in silence. Asleep as soon as he turns over.
Children sleeping like bears in the next room, eyes fluttering behind soft lids, deep in dreams.
Listen to the heart beat of the mother. Wolves circle, they sniff, they nip, they loop back to their pack to check danger out. Societal duct tape, silver and thick, over her ears muffles the innate knowing.
Bare your teeth, yelp--run!
Her house is painted a cheery yellow. A emerald green door welcomes. The floor is honeyed oak, the walls are warm adobe white. A trap with no exit. Casserole meals--Cream of chicken soup magic. Laundry folded precise as military cots. Snotty noses and butts wiped. Monthly allowance doled out to good little girls who balance their check books.
Mary Magdalene kneeled and kissed the hem of his ragged robe. Jesus touched her sinful black hair--he blessed a street whore. Did this Mary have any children?
Immaculate conception...
Jesus, loves all the little children?
Every man owes his life to a woman for once his life was housed, cradled, rocked by rich amniotic fluid. His life sustained, connected, nourished by the umbilical cord. The rhythms of life given to him by the beating of his mothers heart. Then like locust--swarming they devour and destroy the very woman who they owe there lives to.
He will come like a thief in the night!
Her dreams are like private gardens that have gone untended. A strangler fig tree grows slowly, creeping, eventually subjugating their host trees. All that's left is the fig. Only if one looks close can one see the origins of the "other." Withered women behind clipped coupon smiles.
Fifty-cents saved.
A bargain at any price.
Female Bonobo monkeys control their groups by masturbating out in the open--soothing their aggressive males into submission.
Chrysanthemums are planted in the garden and stand for the light of hope in dark times. Peresphone tricked by Hades to eat the red blood pomegranate seeds--Forcing her to stay six months in the underworld. Demeter weeps and winter freezes. Death, rebirth--initiation. The Death card in the tarot deck teaches within the death spiral all new life emerges.
Death must be embraced.
Her mother drowns herself in amber liquid each night in front of the TV. Dewar's
scotch whiskey is a fine companion for cold nights and lost years. Mother will fall on her steep wooden stairs some night cracking her skull right open.
Diana Ross sings, "Oooh baby, Oooh baby, please don't leave me, don't leave me all by myself." The rose of a child's cheek can be stolen in the night. White linen gowns soiled. "A new moon teaches gradualness and deliberation...Patience with small details makes a large work, like the universe."
Like giving birth to an elephant.