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Show Moon - 249 Where the Three Sisters rise in their perpetual robes of snow, where home is, the women wait for me with their easels and eager upraised sticks of charcoal. These students wait for me to tell them it's all right to risk committing themselves to the blank page. It's all right to make mistakes, to fail sometimes. It's all right that your children leave and that you grow older and wake up to the heat and the dark rain against the window. Who am I to understand these patterns? Stories are too large to tell, too full of mystery to be completely true. You can't hold it all in your head at the same time. You can't decide what's important, what isn't. I forgot, for example, that my mother once told me of the fun she'd had as a child climbing the big elm and swinging down across the lawn on a long rope tied to a branch. What if I'd started with that? The story might have come out differently. Forgive me, Mother, if I got the whole thing wrong. You could go crazy trying to catch up to yourself from behind to find out how it really was, or to see how things are- really are-now. Td like to stay here for a while and catch my breath, see what is waiting to be born . Td like to stay alive. This is a truth I can stand on now. You reach around the moon's belly, prod the secret places where a woman's silence waits like dark water in a cave, like the blind crawfish, the soundless crickets, whose stirrings translate into patterns: a kind of music, incremental shapes, a sense of color, and a few stories come to light, which are actually the story of a whole world that tries to live by its own frail power, cuts off the electric possibilities of love. And then there's an even bigger story, which is that some of us get to try to reconnect, and the current starts to flow again. |
