Page 165 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

Nora Jamieson

I am Nothing Without My Dead

We become the stories we tell, that’s why I tell certain stories again and again.
Thomas King

I put out apples for the dead last morning. Cut in half, two rounds of sweet flesh, twin
star-wombs nestling tiny brown seeds. The rounds were uneaten this morning. I guess

they haven’t come by yet, unless they’ve grown finicky basking in my attentions. Unless I
have not yet found a way to feed them well. I’ve prayed, sung, pleaded, offered and

even made my case as I’ve heard the indigenous sometimes do, yet of late they’re not

speaking to me and I miss them.

Unless the wind just now is their answer to my call, the wind that swirls down dead
leaves in a rattle of descent against a grey, storm portent of a sky. Unless the

scavenging of the squirrels in the same dry leaves, nosing into cold earth for acorns is

an answer. Unless the thin tissue voice of the corn stalks is them whispering, we’re here.
And now the late-day sun finds its way through the dark clouds. The wind has stilled. Is

that you?

The world speaks to us in a language I long to know, to hear. It’s a good thing the dead

love our longing for them. It would be a good thing, too, if the living kept the gate
cracked.

Why? And by what authority do you say that? Someone asks, someone who lives in my

mind, Why carry the dead? What on earth for? She is persistent and I suspect she too is

my inheritance.

Because, I say to her again, if I am the sprout of their planting, how can I not carry
them?

How can I forget them?

At any rate, I cannot help myself. I cannot help the persistent call to the web of my

origins. I want to know who and what I belong to. And who belongs to me. And besides,
if you cut a piece of the web, without repair, it falls apart. Until I make that repair, I am a

clanless, tribeless woman and I know it. This is a dangerous condition, afflicting many,

cut loose from any obligation to carry the past, to ensure a future. A world gone rogue.

I have always known that something is inside of me, someone lives in this skin house,
someone calls to me in these bones. But it is dark in here and the voices far away

through time. I hear weeping. I see grey granite sheared and plunging down, a steep

chasm, a mountain? I hear weeping. Is it my own? Is it my dead come in the night?

I dream of an old woman with white and luminous hair. She is surrounded by young
people who attend the feast of her dying, the rhythm of her breath straining through

cheesecloth lungs. This is the instruction to me – attend to the oracle of her breath –

keep my finger on the red circle inscribed before me until she releases her last breath. I
do. She does. I leave.

I dream an old woman who tells me my unacknowledged grief is terrible.

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