Page 140 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

Notes:

Salamander appeared to me in both physical reality and dream around 2006, several

years after I was diagnosed and treated for cancer. Initially, I was startled and baffled by

these visitations. I knew nothing about salamanders and had no idea of their history as

potent symbols of transformation. Yet at the time, my entire life was about

transformation. I was engaged in the long process of recovering my health, which

included a lifestyle centered on quiet, yoga, and meditation—along with a return to

writing poetry. I also visited Little Petroglyph Canyon in the Coso Range of the Mojave

Desert, which brought forth memories of a past life among native people thousands of

years ago. These elements are intertwined in the poem, as they continue to be in my life.

The epigraph by Yves Bonnefoy is from On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, a book-

length poem whose central figure is a woman who dies and then rises—or

simultaneously, does not rise—from the dead. “Each instant I see you being born,

Douve, each instant dying.” This female figure is highly symbolic; in French, her name

means “moat.” For me, she is an archetype synonymous with the Divine Feminine—“I

will name wilderness the castle which you were...”—a wilderness that is lost and found

and lost again, though we continually seek connection.

The tiny salamander in my house brought the wilderness to me. I have no way of

knowing whether it was male or female, though my intuition says male. The great white

salamander of my dream felt androgynous. A telling aspect of salamanders is that some

have the ability to change their sex. They unite both aspects of creation, challenging us

to be reborn in the fires of body and spirit.