[No. 4 Contents | JAST Homepage]

					for Savannah

I see my babes in simple colors: blue sky,
green sea, and red, red, the red that returns
and washes their faces like killing coals, hot
as Hades. But now I see my babes cool
and pure as spring snow, I walking my boy
to the corner stall for a pink sweet he adores,
a point of joy he must remember, he must,
somewhere beyond this red world. My little girl
running away to me
from a boar I hexed into a frog at her feet,
her screams stopping, puzzled silence, and the bell
of her laugh as I pulled off its legs
and heaved the soft rock-shaped body hard
against a wall. She ate the legs with me,
but by then, dinner time, she had forgotten
her point of fear. To be a woman is to know
all the points of fear and joy, not as a man knows
only in the mind. A woman's body by her fortieth year
is a cauldron of wound and kisses, bubbling blue
and green and a deep, deep red. The moment
of their death was a point of joy and pain
no worse than the day of their birth,
less blood perhaps than when I squeezed them
into this world of colors out of the soft dark,
my body that knew how to make lives, my body
that is empty as a cloud I walk through,
a merely local mountain, godless, dead fog.
I am a goddess, prophetess and demon witch
now to the people who survived my husband's hate
and my love, his love and my vengeance.
Soon I will ride the paired dragons from the sky.
I am full of empty knowledge: Jason and the kids
I killed because he abandoned me, his new bride
I poisoned, my cool days as a pining queen. Winter
is spring, I know so much. I'm ready for the shedding
and new chances, but I've been waiting for the dragons
so long. The snow, so sweet. Perhaps they came
and brought me here, no people and no avenging Jason,
and little to do. This could be a solitary isle
of exile, I haven't seen a soul in years,
I think, except the children. They visit me,
faces twisted in seaweed, their broken teeth strung
along the sea's shore, washing hands
of the land's ache, pushing as a woman
pushes to give birth.		The dragons, where?
Perhaps they are calling me like Sirens, somewhere
in the solid green sea. I have sought them on clouds,
in the low mountains' peaks. I am empty,
and I must go on. I love you Jason, Jason come
make love and murder me, I'm alone,
we are still married in the eyes of the gods,
if there are gods, if there are dragons,
if there is a chariot, riding on the wave tips,
wheel of foam backed by the sea.