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"I've loved within the shadow
Of what I am, and in that love I burn."
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IIIby Beth E. McDonald
Where sand track
curves
through marsh grass
sea lavender
silver leaved purslane
to become shore
I whisper
ocean
and she rises to meet me
pale
shiver
slithering
out of her
cold skin. Her nakedness
is the face
in my mirror. There is nothing
she does not know.
The sun buries himself
in her. His gaze
burns the air
between us.
I can not turn away.
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Going Native
by Beth E. McDonald
When your foot finds, finally,
the track hidden
among moss and scrub brush
among crimson lipped monkeyflowers,
or makes a path
of its own choosing,
and you cross this river
stone by slick cold stone
to stumble upward over
its graveled edge
and enter welcome shade,
when your shadow slips out before you
along the ravine
to where it deepens into
yellow columbined canyons
you have found quite by accident,
when you reach this corner of mossy walls
and low hung willow branches
in a sudden scramble,
there will no longer be
a way back for you --
the time will have come
to breed an amphibious nature
and learn to live alone.
Above aspen forest
snow melt white water
drops
in stone carved flumes
to mist clouded pools.
Here among angelica, delicate
fern winged archangels in wild heaven,
and waterpennies scattered like lost change
in quiet backwaters at the torrent's edge,
a body shrinks from itself.
Solid weight turns air light
skeleton combed with hollows.
Arms, wrists and fingers fuse,
marrow, bone and flesh
into muscular wings
shaped to swim against either air
or water. Pale skin sprouts a mantle
of feathers hanging to strong flanks.
Legs thin to tendon only;
toes lengthen into claws,
while a new throat sings
old songs of desired solitude.
Now you dip and rise
on smooth stone
slippery with spray
dip to rise again, bob
and weave and bend deep
shifting with shadows
in the dappled light
before plunging into the white
wet heart of existence.
Creature of dark smoke,
of soot that clings
like memories of that first fire,
you have changed your life.
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Manannán's Daughters
by Beth E. McDonald
Young women ripe
as full moons
close their bright eyes
and dream earth
dreams of jasmine scented
days. Nights alone
are furrowed in deep rows.
Pale daughters of the sea
owning nothing but time
and a small hope
strip to their hearts
and give themselves to winter.
Above the burren’s rocky shore,
shadow wives keen for dead lovers,
the rise and ebb of their cries
is a Janus wind, coming and going
on dark air. The sound gathers
strength in well-worn bars drawn
like whalebone ramparts against sky.
Sooner or later, dark water
gives up everything to land
and the unerring sea
comes always home
to kiss with cold dead lips.
Young women ripe
as full moons
close their bright eyes
and sing earth
songs. What music they make
tastes of tears
and falls onto barren ground.
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The Morrigan sisters
by Beth E. McDonald
black rocks turn
rooks turn
raven women
three sisters
caught
between silence
sound
one speaks in couplets
working out her days
as long caesuras
cased in feathered lines
another shrieks
in strident consonants
and pulls her
vowels after
like creaking doors
to lock the darkness in
the last cries
terror
in red syllables
her moans are wings above
the bloodied field
all live a shadow life
black rocks
black rooks
black ravens
women with raven hair
night wander in a place
where sound
or none
hangs equally on still air
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Dreams of the Macha
by Beth E. McDonald
Sleek sided soft bellied
horse bodied women
turn in their sleep
and stretch long limbs. In dreams
they run wild
churn ground into patterns
of earthbound sorrow. Sharp hooves
scatter placid pools
into pockets of foam.
Sleek sided soft bellied
horse bodied women
toss manes unplaited
strong and fine
and insubstantial
as webbed threads of moon
to draw men to them. Their laughter
calls in nightmare tremolos. In their eyes
ocean is cold memory warm promise.
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Pygmalion’s pup
by Beth E. McDonald
What might he have seen,
if he had been alert --
a seasoned watchdog
instead of untrained pup,
if he had shaken himself awake
at the right moment,
roused from a comfortable slee
in front of the workroom fire,
pulled himself up into consciousness
from his bright dream
of never-ending bones
of squirrels without numbe
and cats incarcerated?
If he had opened his drowsy eyes--
even one eye-- just a crack,
he might have seen
that first taking in of life,
the smoothness of her bosom
rise and fall like a ship at mooring
moves gently on the tide;
he might have seen the sculpted
hardness tense as she stretched
and flexed her new found power.
But when he woke from his dreams
of canine splendor,
the girl with the granite heart
was mistress of his house.
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Sacrifice to Fire
"And her pale fire she snatches from the sun." Timon of Athens
by Beth E. McDonald
Distant halo of fire
at crater’s edge where
sun descends like a lover
to meet the volcano’s burning kiss.
Here among dark cold stones
wind speaks only
in old tongues, calling
the sacrifice to feel the flames.
I hear my name,
feel Pele's warm breath
as it rises to meet me
when I step into air.
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Kali’s Sisters
by Beth E. McDonald
Like Kali, the women of my family
have a taste for blood. The young ones
take to it like milk from their mother’s breasts
and go on craving it into their whiskey years
ready to sacrifice any to their need.
I have been gone too long to consider
the role of priestess they have set for me.
Though they recruit me vigorously,
there is no going home. Still, their words
have long arms that wave like sea grasses,
undulating in the tide or whatever wind
that blows; long arms that can reach you
if you let them, if you stray too close
to the water; long arms that wait for you
in the dark, like the tentacles
of some invisible sea monster,
drawing blood when you least expect it.
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The Tenth Muse
by Beth E. McDonald
1. Sappho
Sappho knew what it was to be a woman.
At once young wife, mother, daughter of Lesbos,
Helen who might forfeit all for a love gone
but not forgotten.
Roman Catullus knew her sweet verses well.
He gave her voice his tongue and made his stanzas
mirrors of her own to write his passionate
poems to Lesbia.
Her slender fire burned its way into the hearts
of all men and women. In turn, her words burned,
effigial words, consumed in raging flames, lit
by a Roman hand,
their charred remains blown on an uncaring wind.
For a long time she spoke nothing more; her voice
was fragmented and more than half-forgotten:
mutilated, mute.
2. Emily Dickinson
She knew what it was to be a woman--
The putting Love away --
The hell of parting with the one you love
Until eternity.
The soul selects her own Society --
She said -- and chose her own --
Then, like the towered lady of Shalott,
She wove her poems alone.
Unlucky in love -- our Emily wrote
Of all that Nature told --
Asking us only to tenderly judge
Her letters to the world --
3. Anna Akhmatova
Anna knew what it was to be a woman.
Named both nun and whore by many
men who knew her, and immortalized
by Modigliani's hand, yet like Lot's wife
always looking back in sorrow. Her poems
stand like pillars of salt, stinging monuments
to pain, to wounds that can not heal,
to suffering of prison camp, of sickness,
loneliness, death. Always death!
Her son imprisoned, her own tongue silenced
for a time, she growing sick herself,
sick of it all in her deepest heart, alone,
her husband, gone, dead, and she finally seduced
by a kind of madness, her soul already half-drawn
under its dark wing, waiting in vain
for the balm of memories to heal, the comfort
of last words, the peaceful smile of death.
4. The Tenth Muse
Somewhere the tenth muse
lives in all of us,
singing our happiness when it can,
crying our pain,
more often than not,
to a world seemingly gone mad
and we with it.
Somewhere in each of us
the poem waits
like a stalking cat, like a revelation,
like a revolution of soul,
sneaking up on us
with quiet discipline,
biding its time until the world
is ready and so are we.
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Second Hand Story:
Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.
by Beth E. McDonald
Nightmare images, black on white,
blur with seeing history second hand,
but eyes do not deceive. There
can be no revision of this
story. Curses and blessings fall
with sudden tears, deep ache for death,
joy of survival. Past reconstructed
in pain full word and terror ridden sound
in bins of lonely shoes and photographs
that haunt even where understanding
lacks experience. I am so far from this,
conceiving is hard birth, labored at
with the heart and mind's imagined
eye, while over my shoulder
a million barefoot angels gasp for air.
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