659: soiree
659: soiree
Transcript
I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.
I’m not sure if I believe in aloneness. As I say this, I have been alone quite a bit. But still, it’s not like we’re ever really alone, not if there’s some nature around us, some ghosts, a few plants inside, and in the backyard. Those root systems are connected to me now. The purple-black starling making his way through the rain soaked purple dead nettle on the back lawn, isn’t he a part of my community?
If I don’t believe in aloneness, I do believe in distance. The distance between us can create a tension, a longing, and become an almost palpable rope that tugs at those of us who are connected but separated by time or space. Still, the earth is between us, the physical distance is made up by the earth. And through all that green and rivers and oceans and living things, even distance is alive somehow.
How odd that we think it’s roads and wires that connect us. When really, it is the earth itself.
Today’s poem is an honoring of the earth and its abundance. I love how this poem is not only about the living things that surround us but the ancestors who are with us even if they are no longer physically here.
soiree
by caroline sinavaiana-gabbard
for J.J. Wilson & Mama Day an alchemy of distance: your absence, sisters, stirs longing your telephone talk/ raking embers from the muses’s fire. the spirit rises to the task, & I from the couch/ awake now to take up the story where the last daughter left off/ giving voice to the silence/ inside green mountains looming/ from a warm sea & voice/ to the insides of calderas/ cooled volcano’s tilted cup half-sunken to carve harbor from expanse of ocean giving witness to the chatter of fruit-bats sucking papaya seeds from their teeth in the tree outside my door to amorous geckoes flapping splayed toes across window glass louvers/ out on roach patrol together? grabbing some gecko nookie in the odd moment? (but oh, I forget my manners!) to the sound of waves soughing behind drunken guitars down by the store/ an occasional taxi rattling its hubcaps over the roadway between here & the sea. tutuila island, saturday night, alone at my desk & the party’s in full swing, ceiling fan whistling lightly/ & round muffled barking from dogs in the next village east. a solitude redolent of women’s spiraling talk & deepening mysteries/ your sweet voices blaze from the pages of books/ & the hand-written lines of letters/ our conversation burns its winding way/ over miles of ocean & aeons of yellow hills & rocky ledges/ that arabesque of hearts & joined limbs of spirit. consorts revel in the glowing quiet of the solitary study & draw me out again/ into the wide air/ the opening dark to mingle w/ ancestors & the scent of wild plumeria to cut a rug in the tropical december night to sip ginger tea/ & toast our starry confluence across the galaxy of this moment.
"soiree" by caroline sinavaiana-gabbard from ALCHEMIES OF DISTANCE © 2002 caroline sinavaiana-gabbard. Used by permission of caroline sinavaiana-gabbard.