Shaman
Written by Sarah Ives Taylor on Saturday the 24th of November 2012
I am a shaman.
The light turns blue in this
hue of morning and morning-
wanderings.
There was a manner of reaching
to touch your hands and grasp
your face
but it has fallen away
like Eurydice
into the dank and mouldering foliage like intrepid vines,
not a heaven, or a hell, it is
something more
elemental.
You are elemental.
Your shoulders like gnarled cat's paws
clawing up towards heaven, or the cosmos,
or the blank, dead-eyed sky
like seething wounds.
Your wounds are impressed upon this tattoo,
which is still bleeding
weeping its yellow and green, a
cacophony
of affect that was mine, was your's, is now
mine and finds its end here.
This tattoo is the imprint of you,
your shoulders, your face, the love that hangs there, impotent,
ill-tuned instrument,
and the curse I have placed on you.
If I could make a trail
of words into the deep heart
of your continent,
it would never
not resound.
It would never not sound
its warnings, its brightness,
and its klaxon-beat in
a world where there are not
so many continents:
just you and you and I.
It just makes three, but there is only one
spell that I can cast and the remainder
must remain that way:
all sad echoes and faint
frictions that I, a shaman, must
bring into my orbit, though
I have no other spell, nothing else
in my repertoire.
There is not enough of this potency to go round. The
blue hue of the morning does not
contain it, and the Cadillacs all pull
out of the driveway, leaving traces of their
gaudy glamour, and the reek of you,
your wallet,
your wing-tipped shoes, and your funny ideas.
....
If I could step behind your torn curtain,
would there be anything to find?
Would you lead me down more entangled paths and treacherous lairs,
or would it be your face
there,
in my field of vision, shot through with glittering stars?