Speaking with the Ancestors

I want to know if my great-great-

great-grandmother’s grandmother

liked the rain. If it reminded her

of something longer than blood.

If it made her feel like the earth

were calling an ancient lover.

If thunder made her shiver,

but the good kind of shiver, like when

a palm leaf brushes your shoulder

as you walk in the cold mud.

Did the rain clouds remind her

of the birth caul of her children,

did it seem like the sky was fertile

before each feral storm. If lightning

looked to her like cracks opening

to a new universe, one where rain

spoke backward and cried from time

to time. Did she name each sort of

heavy cloud. Were the huge ones

‘underwood at dusk’,

the accompanying wispy gray,

‘baby hair’. Were her favourite 

the clouds that arrive after

the storm, before the set sun,

when the whole world drips

with rose gold? ‘Cause that’s 

my favourite. Can you tell me, please?

Did I get that from her?

It reminds me of whitewater 

from within an eddy 

stuffed up a river’s sleeve –

both hands full of styrofoam and roses

embracing the paradoxes, 

years of shell compressed 

at the bottom of this mad time.

I dreamt it while sleeping 

in a tangle of cottonwood root 

on an eroded bank 

near the confluence of universes –

I thought the enemies were far away 

cold in the subway or

stuck behind desks and steering wheels.

When I woke it was written  

out on wasp paper with beet juice,

the enemy is not a person

the enemy is blindness, 

and lack of imagination.

One day there will be forests on Greenland

the land will have risen back up

fires will speckle the darkness 

and songs will return again, 

refuges will be replenished

the blues having transformed the distances 

back to running water,

the sun coming up over a hill

similar to a goddess moving like a grizzly bear, 

a dagger laced into her boot.