April 2015, Issue #2
FRAGILE ONGOING
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial
I. OPENING REMARKS
Jan Clausen
“This Moment the World Continues”: Writing under the Sign of Species Suicide
Robin W. Kimmerer
When Earth Becomes an ‘It’
Kathleen Dean Moore
The Rules of Rivers
II. GRIEVING
Cynthia Travis
The Music of Grief
Megan Hollingsworth
Pacific
Ruth Wallen
Cascading Memorials: Public Places to Mourn
Joan Kresich
Letter to a Yellowstone Wolf
Susan Marsh
Elegy for the Cranes
The Hunters
Karla Linn Merrifield
William Bartram Triptych
Dana Anastasia
trinkets
Gillian Goslinga
To Witness
III. GUIDED
Deena Metzger
Dreaming Another Language: She Will Not Kill
Alexandra Merrill
Homage to Bees
Sheila Murray
Infiltration
Prey
Judy Grahn
Dragonfly Dances
Laura D. Bellmay
A Call from the Edge
Carolyn Brigit Flynn
Grandmother Squirrel
Nora Jamieson
Fleshing the Hide
Sara Wright
Cardinals at the Crossroads
Valerie Wolf
Dreaming the Future
Sheila Murray
Infiltration
I invite the river to pray itself inside me
into the flow of my bones
through the spiraled chambers of my perception
I want my bed lined with moss and stones tonight
my dreams drenched in the wet reflection of stars
so that when I rise in the morning
the river has re-membered me
Before I dress myself for clock time
I press wet black feathers and sticky golden catkins
against my torso to encircle me
The slim ungulate pelvis rising from the mud
becomes my own
I move into the right angles of the workplace
with the grace of insistent leisure
my breathing an eddy of quiet revolution
As I tap the keyboard
tiny pinhead violets from the water’s edge
blossom under my wrists
My fingers smear silt on the medical records
as vagabond seeds fall from my cuffs
into manila folders
to incubate in the intermittent midnight
of file cabinets
My night-damp foot prints sprout mushrooms
in the pale carpet of the dayroom
I speak in birdsong and confuse the program
Notes:
Each evening I walk next to the river in order to ground and nourish myself. I sense the healing presence of this wild strip of land that holds the water, and want to carry that presence within me, onto the locked psychiatric unit where I work. My desire is to sow seeds of wildness in a setting that often equates conformity and compliance with healing. This piece arrived through allowing the myriad voices of the river corridor to speak through my imagination. It is equal parts waking dream and manifesto.
Prey
There is a silent music
A thrumming twine
of fear and desire
that calls the hunter
to stalk the wolf
To eclipse her body
with the moon of his scope
Unaware
That he will stitch himself
to her with his bullet
Pull her red voice
into the story of his dreams
where she will unearth him
from himself
Reverse the hunt
to let him be the prey
and follow his own
blood trail
Over new snow
deeper into woods
that are the winter
of his rib cage
His frozen house
of breath and bones
that aches with the thaw
And beats with the furnace
of a four-chambered drum
A red ocean music
rising up
from the underground root
of his own howl.
Notes:
This piece arose as a response to the news that the alpha female of Teanaway Washington’s federally protected wolf pack was shot and killed. Her death occurred during hunting season, and at the time I began writing, a suspect had been identified.
Each gesture, creative or destructive, is communication, an opening into conversation with the living world. In indigenous cultures the hunt has been a conscious conversation of sacred reciprocity, the prey animals dreamed, honored and thanked. In this piece I imagine the wolf’s response to being shot at a distance, with a high-powered rifle, without meeting the eyes of the hunter. Perhaps beneath the projections and mistaken beliefs, the killer unconsciously seeks connection, with the wild, with an exiled part of himself. Yet, to claim full kinship with the nonhuman others would be to open himself to the grief and vulnerability of living in an animal body, to being prey, to being poisoned, marginalized, cast out and attacked. So he reaches out through the wounded language of violence, fearful of giving up the false security of his stance of separation. As one who has hunted, killed, and listened closely to the non- human others, I know in my bones that the living world desires intimacy with humans, that it responds to our clumsy and mistaken attempts at conversation with grace and power. This poem is an offering to the clawed, feathered, scaled and human others who are hungry for connection.
Sheila Murray grew up in New England and New Jersey, and was called to the west by the twin sirens of imagination and desire. She earned a master’s degree in depth psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and recently completed a yearlong Soulcraft intensive with Animas Valley Institute. Sheila continues to explore the mysteries of nature and psyche from her home in the Flathead Valley of Montana.
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