i believe those Magickal and proper names
to be equally wondrous and profound.
but all good things elemental,
all things strange in nature
resist classification.
They move with the flitting light of Faeries
and fireflies,
here —
— now there.
Give them a name and they change it,
ask for one and they riddle you.
Sometimes a word must be invented
conjured from the nothing
taken from the foundry
where they,
the collection of fragrant and heady muses,
are able to describe the anatomy of a feather
and drop the understanding into your head.
To see in this raw
depends on which eyes you use,
which frame you have,
what mystery you know,
and which name you own.
More, which name you are accustomed to.
And the skill begins to evade us.
We are complicated by deeper things,
coiling black tree bark
growing red rotted roots,
that snake in like cellophane tubes
that used to be sharp fingers,
that used to be vines,
that used to be ruby kernels
stuffed with the ghostmeat of life.
What thoughts were made of,
what devices we allowed them
by calling them out
now pushes our insides apart,
dividing the sense so we are unable to remember
the first seeds of sorrow,
until it blossoms into revulsion.
We cannot come by those names easily now,
the sickness has progressed
to a renaming of our injuries
and insides.
Longer epithets,
chewing on taxonomy until it stretches out
like green-gray taffy.
Coaxing the pedigree from an otherwise
lovely mongrel
until we no longer recognize the ‘dog’
as pet, companion,
and friend.
We cannot help but respond to mythic patterns,
we have archetypes, we have Faerie Tales,
we have tomes of prose and religious books of writ.
It is all the same story and we
are curiously busying ourselves over the centuries
to tell it and deliver it in new ways,
new/old ways of healing the void and sickness
like medicine in variant doses.
We build tolerance in linear progressions:
we try debunking the old.
With great strides of scientific progress
we are fueling inbred science projects of spirituality
always looking for a more efficient way to be sold.
We forget how good it is to be ethereal,
how wondrous is an ancient thought,
how gorgeous it is
to be simple.
The stain of pomegranate under her nails
says she’s been digging again.
i worry . . .
I wonder if she will know what it is
by what it was.
i wonder if she will find her name.
~ Andrea E. Janda
