Category: Poetry

The Black Madonna Series

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Dark Madonna

She knows in whose boredom the sun sleeps.
She studies space, fixes images in their absence,
hangs portraits the masters never saw
in their crafty light. Interrupts the talk
of dragonflies attending all creation.
She is the holder of pain, the unmoved target.

I wonder who this woman is
who moves as separately as silence,
who pauses to applaud a renegade dogwood,
red in still-green autumn, understands
the bloody revolution of ticking clocks,
the second-hand arrows that pierce
the flesh but leave it whole.

I hear her coming. She whispers between
the folds
of perception:
you will believe:
there is nothing left

but love.
-Kitty Yanson

I first became acquainted with the Black Madonna sometime in the early 1980s after getting sober, after my divorce, when I was trying to get through depressive episodes without the liquid medication I had used to try to treat them. First, it was a picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa in my ancestral Poland which drew me toward her, then I searched out others, the Dark Madonnas of Spain, and the one enthroned in Chartres Cathedral. Eventually, I found that she was indeed an archetypal presence in the psyche, a sister of the Hindu Kali, the apocryphal Lilith, and the Egyptian Isis. In all of these forms, she embodies the union of opposites: life and death, spirit and matter, the conscious and the unconscious, body and soul. For me back then, she was the hope I had for healing and wholeness, and so she remains with me today, as I continue to find new ways to create while my body, beginning its 77th year this week, reminds me with a new ache every morning that mortality is destiny, a part of life. This image of this Great Mother, both womb and tomb, comforts me, sings me awake and to sleep in endless cycle of God. These three paintings are my way of exploring her great truth without words.

Kairos

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It swells like a bubble blown by breathing time:
You are stroking the cat on your lap
and suddenly know that this is Love
and together you are in a boundless world
the confines of the clock had kept you from.
The cat gets up and stretches.
You eat your breakfast.

Or you are on your morning walk,
and Eddie’s dark face illuminates your route
with “good morning” from his wheelchair
where he sits cheering on the accelerating sun.
You say good morning back,
and check the heart rate on your watch.

Or you see the image of Our Lady on the wall,
standing on a crescent moon with stars
around her head. She becomes a doorway
that opens just a crack to flash the glint
of God. Then a draft of time slams it shut,
leaving longing to stand eloquent
as an angel with a flaming sword
barring the entrance to Eden.

The decision now is yours:
Believe each moment is a hiccup,
hallucination, or errant imagining that
has nothing to do with the redundant daily?
Or maybe it is the Life living in life:
an invitation to Truth
that you never but always knew.

 The Small of Big

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There is a big God out there
counting the stars as they pass
through the gate to universal pastures,
feeding each its eon-ration of cloudy nebulae.

I am, I am told, a distant relative of stars,
a supernova memory
in its death-belch of hydrogen and dust,
heaven’s indigestion hardened into clay.

I am a quantum in creation,
a second in divine expression,
as brief as the urge to blink,
wee as a fruit-fly’s toe,
smaller than just a thought
and justly as large.

There is a little God too
(the same one, actually)
who dances with mockingbirds
on the hot asphalt lots,
who summons tiny suns from mosses
growing between paving stones,
who dares into play the stuttering desires
for rebirth and destruction.

This little God has a big job too
shepherding stars and children,
small in stature, large in being,
across the quadrants of our park
constructing the contagion of laughter
under our earth-shining moon,
to entangle us with hope.

-Kitty Yanson

Ritual

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When I was a child, I used to dress
and redress the body of the baby God,
Infant of Prague, with satin clothes
tailored to liturgical rhymes,
running my fingers across the hemline
rows of sequins, struggling to pull
the ruched armholes around the orb
of power his innocence cradled
in one tiny hand. I love you, Jesus,
I prayed as I returned his plaster vulnerability
to the altar atop my Uma’s chest of drawers.

In the afternoon after school, I met my friends
and a drafted brother or two to play Communion
in the basement, bribing my bros with chocolate
Jesus Necco Wafers giving the licorice ones
that nobody wanted to my ex-bestie Gerry
for some unremembered grievance,               
grabbing a bed-sheet from the laundry pile
as vestment across my outlawed priestly shoulders
to dole out sugar in lieu of transcendent mystery
around the sweet table of childhood.

But these were stories of another time
when I played with God, splashing
in the shallow waters of rituals’ river,
too young to swim in the deep end of faith.
Now I finger the decades,
counting faults and graces
bead upon bead, blurring
into wholeness in the rosary of my years.
I dress and redress again
that child of Prague, swaddling
his naked holiness in satin comfort
with sequins I have poorly sewn upon it,
now a broken princess playing with God
in second innocence repeating
and repeating the ongoing ceremony
of the all-along truth of love.
-Kitty Yanson

Turning

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The starlings in the dying oak,
loud as children in a schoolyard,
gather force for an evening murmuration
that will clot the sky with commas.
I pause to wonder at and wonder again,
(though I have seen many times)
this turning and turning of the dusk
like the turning of the soil in spring, 
like the turning circles of life
in this chittering world seen once,
seen always, ever-changing, ever-same.

Wisdom is a pattern-finder
seeing circles in straightforward time.
She lives behind a veil that sometimes stirs
in dark breezes to unmask our shared laughter
in a sudden, spectacular sun
much like when a sinner squints
through the confessional grate to find
a person breathing the equal air
of absolution in reciprocal eclipse.

So I look for circles in these ever-turns:
the world cracking open like an eggshell
pouring its gold into a pink china bowl,
like the empty vase’s round absence
that promises tomorrow’s rose,
like the eye in the great storm in the Gulf
churning up our broken trust,
like the unwinding white of the moonflowers
dilating silence in the eyes of night.

-Kitty Yanson

I Love This Getting Old

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I forget a lot of what I read.
Some days I’ll fall madly for a moment, a phrase,
a word, then I’ll scuttle with compulsive curiosity
to find more meaning in all this. I’ll swat at a life-changing
articulation (I got you, you elusive bugger!),
then smoosh it like a drain fly smacked
against a kitchen wall to keep it, black and white, forever.
It is usually gone by bedtime.

Where do all these things go? Into unconscious
trash bins to hang out with used-up TV tropes
and winged horses and my flesh ballooning
like yeast dough rising, pressing against the
walls of dreams? Or do they just hide to jump
out dressed in white sheets and shouting BOO
in the middle of a conversation about which
is better with pan-fried, crispy gnocchi,
garlic spinach or roasted brussels sprouts?
I remember once (I think) that I woke up from sleep
in the middle of the night to scratch life’s meaning
onto the pad I kept at my bedside. In the morning
I looked: “Airedale.”

But maybe all the forgotten words are really seeds
that germinate in the dark to sprout one day
as a glorious dahlia or noxious weed in the garden of my being.
Or maybe they will one day gather with the quiet drones
of departed declensions of Latin nouns and (what?)
I ate for Tuesday’s dinner. Together we will stand around
the altar of my heart in the sanctuary of silence,
counting breaths and waiting for an Easter meaning to arrive.

                  -Kitty Yanson

Fall Apart

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“Our undoing is also our becoming.”  
-Terry Tempest Williams

Fall apart.
Let yourself crash to the floor and come apart.
Pick up the pieces and see an iris of an eye,
a tree twig on another, a sliver of sky,
a letter that looks like it could be Q: 
a Question, a Quandary? a Quiet?
You are a puzzle you did not know you were.
Find the edges first then work inward from there.

When finished, fall apart again.
Pour yourself into the box of God. Shake.
Slide yourself out on the ground of being.
You are now a shattered crystal vase
to superglue with sunsets.
It will hold the roses you have just brought in
from your garden overgrown with excuses.
One hides a spotted lantern fly the experts say that you must kill.
You smash it. It becomes the pattern of your dying–
red and black scraped across the concrete pathway
you no longer walk that is still cemented in your heart.

Fall apart again

You are not just a puzzle to be solved
or something unwhole to be heroically healed:  
You are all of these and none:
your breath in continuing circle:
unknown to known: known to forgotten:
back again repeating: always new, always old:
your heart broken open to a begging world.

Once more, fall apart.

You are now a billion stars.
Orion and the Pleiades have left;
Wanda the Story Weaver is waiting
in the wings of your experience.

Find her.

-Kitty Yanson

What a Person Is

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These two are you,
the label that is you and its referent
like apple and what it stands for,
its consonants and vowels aiming
to cram essence into fact
but miss the tightness of the skin
before surrendering to tooth,
the sweet flesh, the ping in the air
beneath the nose, the punctuation
of seeds as tongue and bite
circumlocute to center.

You are so much more than name
and occupation, marital status, and yearly income,
all words spilled like coffee grounds
on the counter of your days that turns you
into a measly datum excelling in surface
to scrawl across a spreadsheet.

But you, brought up from the root cellar of time
to dwell in that bowlful of harvest we share,
you are a sweetness in manner, a tartness
in sorrow, so full of flavor,
an open-ended richness like the exhalation
of mystery that escapes when you pierce
the skin of an O or an A,
liberating the breathing hidden in a word,
as together we swallow to our core
the hushed longing that lives there
with its seeds of unsayable truth.

-Kitty Yanson

Ecce Ancilla Domini

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(After the painting of the same name by Dante Gabriel Rossetti–Behold the Handmaid of the Lord)

This girl cringes on her pallet
from the sight of an angel
standing in her bedroom
with fire at his feet.

She draws back against the wall
as if it were a blanket she wraps
around her thin body to hide.
She does not meet this angel’s eyes.
Instead, she cowers from the lily stalk
he holds before him like a stick
as if to beat her down with purity.

Or is she drawing back in thought
against this wall in her house of self
to recite the words, lovingly stroking
the iambs and anapests of heartbeat
cadencing in her belly as she waits upon
the language that will enflesh the wind?

Or is she distracted by the flames
this angel seems to tread
from far-off hope to promise,
a path of fire that leads
through gateways of dream  
past synapses of mind
to a conception of hearts?

Perhaps, she is not trying
at all to articulate the ineffable.
I think this Mary will practice
practical mystery as, half-asleep,
she rummages through her mother’s
store of medicines for salve to ease
the burning mission in Gabriel’s toes.
She’ll move to sooth the pain of angels first
before she folds that baby’s wails in her arms,
and, to make the world all better,
kisses the boo-boo’d finger of God.

-Kitty Yanson

Dancing Whole

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When I was seven, thinking I was pleasing
my mother and God (in that order), I danced
at the communion rail, fingerpainting air,
my kid knees composing primordial poems
against the kneeling bench.

In the parking lot after Mass, she stopped me with a slap:
never embarrass me like that again, she said.
Of course, she was right, and I had been wrong
(which was usually the case),
so I folded my stinging face
into the envelope of my body, posted the pain
with a forever stamp, mailed it to forgotten.

Past seventy now with arthritic joints and neuralgia
in my face, I tell my analyst about that long-ago ballet
for which my mother clapped against my cheek
a hapless applause.

The undelivered letter opens;
story mixes again with unsealed pain, jolting,
like old lavender blended with blood’s steely tinge,
filling the vast space between us, me at home,
my analyst in Zurich, sitting across a virtual table.

Healing rarely comes alone. It needs a hand to hold,
someone to hear the cry that was uncried,
to say the name with love once unsaid with love,
to breathe in my pain, breathe out abiding presence.

Today, as I run my thoughts along the polished scar
that marks the knit of memory and hurt,
my girl voice calls me again to come
before a beaming God who cocks one
eyebrow and asks me ever,
Dance?

-Kitty Yanson