Category: Art

Ritual

Kitty Yanson1 Comment

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

Fall Apart

Kitty Yanson3 Comments

“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