riveroracle

[riveroracle]

Lie Down in the Evening

By Christina, River.Oracle

Some days I wake up like an ox

I earned these stout stone shoulders

I learned to carry her

In the vast empty cold, alone

I marvel at my strength like the rock wall reaching heaven

This cliff is where the angels jump.

Some days I only carry my feet.

If it's a cloud or only the snow in the wind, I can't tell the difference.

I haven't seen a green thing for so long I tried to grow leaves inside of me

There's too much stone in my soil,

Like the land where I was born

Some days I am the bison

Unyielding under the weight of a million carcasses who came before me

I try to paint their bones but there are so so many

Instead they carve into my skin and bones and remind me of the grassland my mother once knew

The earth combs her hair

And stillness falls away, a petal in the wind

Some days I am only dust.

Peace looks like surrender to the wind.

Her tears sting my face as they crash down from heaven,

I think clouds are another world.

If I could just reach my hands into her nothingness and draw them out like something new and unborn

If I could be the seed, reaching, still blind under the soil

The sun has yet to hit my face

I am cold and some days I'm comfortable that way

It's the moon who has seen me, shedding, writhing

A dance that no man would recognize

Her gentle kiss is the key to my stuck ribs

Some days I am the black walnut tree

I mark black every finger print that ever touched me

Sometimes it's love, but you'd never know if it wasn't.

When the night falls in like leaping into the abyss,

The stars are easy for my tired eyes.

They paint me in colors I could only hope to learn.

The dark settling under the trees like so many ravens, beckons me away from the fire.

Lifeless, still, I collapse

My bones tumble in a hollow clatter

In the dirt, I lie, jumbled, unafraid of the dead things

Sometimes I think I'm one of them

Or I wish to be, I feel my skin

Piece by piece, opening to let the earth in

The earth opens and lets me in too.

When the dawn strikes me I will remember the lightning

It struck me like I've never been struck

But I have.

I've only forgotten the embrace of the thunder.

I rise again on feeble legs

And there lies the ox, the bison

I wonder if I am one of them.

Their pelt stripped away, their hearts and kidneys and so much blood exposed.

I think I remember the seed I was

I try to imagine it, before the wind kissed me

Before the moon became my lover

Before I needed the ox's shoulders.

I wonder if bison ever kneel before the sunset

If they bow their horns to kiss the beloved earth

I wonder if the ox ever lies down in the evening.

I wonder if they miss the sun.

If the rain on their face looks like so many tears.