Page 167 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

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

purging it with catharsis, and boring it to death with analytic repetition – all in the name

of healing. But grief’s faithfulness was carried on the back of my necessary failure.

Grief is meant to grow something, it seems.

Yet, the seed has taken this many years to root. It is fragile. Will there be time? It is a
calling no one has asked me to take up. Except, perhaps, my dead? It is, by necessity,

in these times, a solitary work. It is lonely. And I don’t know how.

I search in the old way. I circumambulate. I circle around.

I take the light and move from room to room in this haunted house that I am, tracking my

own dusty footprints looking for signs of them. The light reaches deep in the corners,

shadows loom and I wait.

She shows herself in a dream.

There is a wolf, who is a woman, who is a wolf. She lives behind a wall in my mind. She

steps out, she looks at me and in her fierce gaze she tells me to knock it off, this doubt,
this worry. She has come a long way. She has been waiting for me and my lantern.

There is work to take up.

When she arrived I do not know, perhaps she was a seed, a dream, a song carried in

the egg basket of my mother, that tiny pocket woven with flesh and blood, filled by other-
worldly hands, the midwives of fate, with oracles. With me.

I am coming to know her, the one with a name only known to the spirits. How did they

know that she, the one who lives behind the wall in my mind, would be needed. Now. At

just this time. For these times.

She follows the tracks of the disappeared stories, the exiled names, the stolen children,
she laments the lost heart, she might even return it to you. I see her. Her throat is open,

there is a rope, a thread, an umbilicus, twisted by the spindle of stories we do not want

to hear, but must. She is the throat woman, the spinning song woman, she wraps the
lost, the missing, the forgotten in the silk of her spinning lament and brings them to the

living.

The pitted earth is the throat of the keening woman: the test pits, the uranium pit, the

mined earth gouged with our longing. Out of the throat of the keening woman comes
everything you did not know you longed for. Out of the throat of the keening woman

comes everything we destroyed in our innocent desire for a good life.

She is the throat woman, the spinning song woman, she wraps the lost, the missing, the

forgotten, in the silk of her spinning lament and carries them home. But first we must
hear her cry, be shattered by the ululation of her grief. Then maybe all will be whole.

She is faithful, she has called to me through death, the flood of my own longing, the

floating wreckage of history. Like luminous moths battering against the light in soul

darkness, she is faithful. She is wolf, she is woman, howling. She spins the thread of
return; her throat is a whirlpool, her voice keening, wild.

I see now, she rocked with me when my beloveds died. She lamented. Oh, do not pity

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