Author: Kitty Yanson

Caduceus

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I will call my own name, sing my own song,
each half of me declares, both Dragon and Worm,
when I reach into my wound to awaken
the blazing fire and thin ice sleeping there.

Dragon challenges the sunset knights to find
its soft belly in its thunder voice and fire-fed
melody of steel against stone teeth and lightning
breath: I challenge you to slay me, outdo me,
or shut up and listen to my cacophony
amid refrains of my captive virgins
chanting their anthems of loneliness.

But rain calls Worm from the morning mud
to sing canticles of pebbles and sand,
to burrow beneath the earth, to spin,
unnoticed, the silken chord that binds
the stars together in the woven universe
of quiet, as violin slim as the rain or
the yawn of rosebuds pulling toward
bloom or the song of cracking cocoons
hatching butterflies into eternities.

This is harmony, this epithalamium of steel
and silk, this song of Dragon and Worm climbing
tandem in a healing duet up the wand of life.

-Kitty Yanson

Tin Foil Thanksgiving

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Pegeen brings me dinner,
chicken salad wraps and chocolate brownies
and conversation feathered deep with affection.
I sit in my recliner, my shoulder firmly trussed,
my pain firmly entrusted to post-op oxy.
She tells me of the Thanksgiving dinner brought
in aluminum trays by the caring staff
where her father died
(Her girls even now call it
the Tin-Foil Thanksgiving.)
She speaks of telling
her mother that her husband had gone:
the family standing in the room, “Where’s Ed?”
then silence, the others stepping back,
and Peg, by standing still
pushed forward to the podium of mourning,
to speak the deep truth of death. 

I think of how waiters sometime wrap uneaten
dinners in tin foil, shaping them into swans.
But swans, in their reality, make lie our eyes’ repast:
we do not see the urgent churning below,
the power of those thighs in continuous
travail that feeds our dreams of unending ease.

We throw away the cellophane and cardboard.
My shoulder begins again to throb.
“You’ll be ok?” she asks as she gets up to leave.
I nod, as does she, in unsaid thanksgiving,
turning and returning to each other grace
that endures beneath tenebrous waters
as we paddle, serene on the surface,
across the holy sea of loss.

-Kitty Yanson

The Mud and the Lotos

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A father, teaching his son to be less afraid,
on steps, each higher, bade him jump. Again
and again, his father catches him, and trades
the risk for open arms, for love unfeigned.

But he steps aside. The boy then falls, face pale
against the floor. His father tells him: trust
completely none, not even me. This tale
is brutal. Betrayal always is. Unjust

it is but mires us nonetheless: the frost
that early comes, the love unhinged, the knees
that buckle climbing up a curb, the lost
belief that living comes with skeleton keys.

Betrayals seed hard hopes a soul might live:
Mud-buried hearts can bloom when they forgive.

-Kitty Yanson

Arc of the Covenant

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Above, the forsythia arced, its vigil done,
its yellow childhood yielded. Green held all
in a network snood: July’s blue air, the calls
of yesterday’s friends. I lay on my back; above
me branched a basket; the alleyway a Nile.
I waited, a female Moses-child among
the reeds for Pharaoh’s daughter. My people must
go free from this fertile land, this silent mind.

Above, the forsythia arced.  In that tunnel that smelled
of tomcat and earthwork trenches freshly dug
for plastic Cossacks, stalls for the horses of Tsars
of Russia, their forelegs insouciant, ever-enthralled
in prance—and never did they sleep—in that cave
I hid to practice different voices as boys
would load and cock toy rifles, I said the name
of God: as the groan of a glacier’s thaw; as the melt
of cherry ice on a picnic bench in June;
as the cube that rings against the glass; as the sear
of snow in winter, hot upon my cheek;
as a sudden snow hoards first things in its heart.
My finger drew an ache around my breast.
A ladybug crawled from beneath my hiked-up shirt,
unshelled her wings in a fizz, was born to air.


My childhood lives eternal, an always still
an always moving promise silent and said,
a covenant that lets me ride
toy horses into psychic darkness, calling me
to say the name of God: as the squirrel’s plea
for longer summers; as the revel of gnats around
the kitchen sink; as the certainty of death;
as the failure of words. My hand against my thigh
supports my aging bones upstairs to sleep.
Again a child, and borne by breath, to dream
that when I die, I write again each time
some soul exploring reads this paper scrap,
I’ll meet with them, recalling meaning shared
in God’s forever, past the arc of time.

-Kitty Yanson

Floribunda

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A young father takes his small daughter’s picture
against a bank of floribunda roses that lines
the labyrinth called Thanksgiving Place.
Portrait done, she grabs handfuls of petals
to form balls of floral snow that promptly
fall apart; they will not stick as she wishes,
falling to the ground, an apricot carpet.

Her father walks away, calling her to follow.
She refuses, grabbing another then another
handful of petals, squeezing, dropping them,
thickening the blanket’s loft, leaving
not an inch of ground uncovered.

I walk this circle as my morning prayer along
its switchback path to my center, turning, and moving
outward from my beginning. I imagine this child
walking the labyrinth of life many years hence.

I want to be her and stamp my foot, ignoring again
my father’s call as he stands just beyond the vanishing
point at the end of my breathing’s path. Stubbornly
planted near a bank of flowers, first, I demand,
first, this rough earth made deep with beauty.

-Kitty Yanson

Musings

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When Mnemosyne and Zeus got it on,
they made daughters who played
along edges of streams. Muses.
Memory mixed with majesty.
From the clear water currents that bubble up
through layers of leaf mold, through rocks,
through muddy soil and sand, the girls
splashed art and science and a soul’s hunger
for a glimpse of god in its singular self.
Creation rises through the grime
of experience and the rot of time,
like groundwater for richness of soul.

But I wonder now: will the currents that drive
an AI world run electric, the strike of lightning
alone from a sky ungrounded in mud, fortify
an imitation soul? Will it live in its machine mind
ever impatient of contemplation, its pleasure
a conflagration that burns a forest down?

Today, my words outdate before they dry
upon the page. An eagle shrieks and dives
to talon a white perch in a Choptank creek.
It will shred this fish into bleeding ribbons
to feed its young in the wide nest I cannot see
high up in some loblolly pine. This cry is my cry,
as is the beauty of the lightning dive,
as is the bloody feeding of my gape-beaked longing.

-Kitty Yanson

The Dalai Lama’s Cat

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When the Dalai Lama sits in meditation
opening his inward eye to blue-sky mind,
does a trap door swing open in the clouds
for his green-eyed kitty to butt his head
through blankness, insisting on being fed?
Each passing present brings louder meows:
he is, after all, the true ruler of Tibet,
refusing exile.

I wonder: for a moment, does the Dalai Lama
think about turning this cat into feline art
against the purified white of temple walls?
Strangely beautiful. Strangely satisfying!

But then, there’s that bodhisattva vow:
compassion to all the sentient beings
trapped in the stuck door of existence,
soothing the bottomless hunger
that comes with breathing.

(Even those whom you’ve just fed
before you sat to meditate. Always
for them who bust the bounds of heaven
ever crying more.)

-Kitty Yanson

Manifesto

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The morning calls,
the star, smack dab in my face.
Yellow and wide,
it drips across the sky
like my deepest wound
or a broken yolk
on a pink china plate.
I break my dark fast from joy
today.

Today
I have no mind for philosophy
for dasein or ontology,
interstitial sentences,
prohibitory fences
set up against the sun.
I’d rather play with angels
AWOL from their allotted choirs.
They show me
squirrels on the backyard electric wires,
their rodent toes embracing the hum,
outrunning death.
Today.
They show me
the front-yard oak trees,
fast toward
and slow from
acorns.
They show me
the counterclockwise
morning glory turning
in quarter circles
toward the sun.
One day,
its bloom will bond
with August light
releasing all the hoarded
hopes of its assent
in one audacious boom of blue.

But today,
I live at the center of this same sun:
there is nothing I can do to make God love me more;
there is nothing I can do to make God love me less.

-Kitty Yanson

Looking for God

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I imagine
because you walked in here
through this title,
because you are reading this,
that even though you don’t know me,
you know me.
We meet in this place of words
of shared longing
for something
we can’t quite name.

Let the finger that touches this pencil
touch the eyes
that read these words,
gently salving your eyelids
with their meanings
freed and liquid.
We’ll crack open the O
of wonder and let the air escape
for both of us to breathe.
I am reaching out to you right now:
can you feel me touching the face
that no one knows (even you)
in this bright
right now?

Together we can enter through
the door of our yearning
the endless room of love
that is built by God,
the room of humanhood pooled,
so frail and so full of might.
Here we might embrace the world
and together
hold it close
as one would to calm
an agitated child
whose limbs thrash out
against fear-of-many-names
like the sudden arms of lightning
in an April storm.

If you do not want this, stop reading now.

But if you do,
follow this line of words
into silence,
into the stillness
of the space
of our sameness.
(Even though I do not know you/I do.
And even though you do not know me/you do.)
We live in the might
of our longing
and hang curtains red
in open windows
to dance like flames
in the wind that fills our room
with All
with flashing wings or fire
or in a quiet sun.

-Kitty Yanson

Immortality

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My mother would have been 100 today.
Two, two two two two two she tittered
when asked her birthday. Back then,
all eight of us misbehaved in all directions:
Peter tortured Claudia’s hair with scissors;
Frogs from the creek found their way into bedsheets;
Strangers, reading dog tags momma
made Jack wear, returned our wanderer
from the last remaining barn In Northwood.
Sometimes, strap in hand, face pink as
our backyard peonies, she’d grab the nearest,
perhaps one with fanny prophylactically
padded with philosophy books from
the living room shelves. She laughed,
trying not to, yet sometimes happy thunder
struck, and she could not stop,
her laughter winding up
like an outboard motor, round and round
the circular pond of threadbare chairs
until no voice remained, only her breath,
like Precious Pup the cartoon dog
we watched on Saturday mornings,
her laugh went round and round until
we were all whirled up in a tornado of mirth,
all of us thrown to the floor and holding bellies
aching with joy, my brothers rolling around
like pups in their punishment of glee.

I got that way too, caught by fun,
laughing so hard I lost the sound
or, worse yet, sent out waves
of cackle that pulled my students
into a merry whirlwind. Out of control,
I imagined the other teachers said of my class,
out of control, such a frivolous fit.
I know mom sat with me then,
her laughing ghost in my teachers’ chair,
as close to me as breathing.

I like to think that some child
I taught grows up and laughs so hard
that she, in turn, catches her children
in a lasso of merriment and all
fall out of control for the good of joy.

And in the years ahead,
another all-grown-up child releases her
always-ready laughter two hundred years after
my mother’s two two two two two birth.

She will be there, and I with her,
in our legacy of laughter,
now nameless and faceless,
moving through the years
like love.