In the mostly-Germanic-tongued woman with a father who left question marks and needles and pieces of genetic puzzles scattered across the west, I found some sisterhood.
She and I stand in the epic west, everyone should hear Sherman Alexie’s speech about fathers at the end of his movie, Smoke Signals. She and I could stand on the bridge shouting, too, voiced over salmon-shapes.
She and I stand under the wide epic sky making half knock knock jokes. Knock knock. Who’s there? Did you know there are different kinds of ski toboggans that ski patrols use and it can be a heated topic? Knock knock. Who’s there? My mother put up with a lot, too. Knock knock. Who’s there? I’m thrilled we both grew up fatherless. We were so much better off.
There are shapes and words-shaped around us: roundness, sky, 180 degree vistas, mesas, plateaus, dirt, body parts, shards, plastic wrap, augur. Shorter paragraphs, poetic lines here and there. Deeper short paragraphs with scenes inside them punctuated by more poetry. Philosophy. Questions. Mostly short-syllabled words. B’s, S’s, T’s, round vowel tones.
My mother and I and my brother found a lot of shards in the same dirt the other fatherless woman and I walked around in. Red dust.
I’ve had shame shards drop down and puncture me.
I thought an augur was an aul. A drill. Archimedes built one, is credited with the first one in 250 B.C., a water screw that moved water uphill. I’m thinking about leather work, too, when we were in shop class and we made all those wallets and belts.
Augurs are other things, too, in the stories I collect in the clouds and scoop into stories in my leather notebook that someone else made it.
Augurs, priests and priesthoods.
I met a woman who said, “If you go back far enough, we’re all from ceremonial cultures,” which we talked about because even our Nordic ancestors were once closer to things on the ground and in the sky. Like that.
Seems super appropriate that a drill and a priest are the same thing as a sound in my mouth.
Inspired by the prompt given by Mairead Case after reading Eleni Sikelianos’ The Book of Jon.