It was early. Sometime around 5am. And I did the thing that someone in between worlds should only do if they wish to speed the transition between the liminal and the concrete; I reached my hand from underneath the covers, grabbed my phone and turned it on.
Ping.
A text from my friend Kathy.
Ronnie has sent you a message on Facebook, she said. She’s worried you might not see it. Please read it, it’s important.
I felt my stomach do a flip.
Don’t worry, another message followed, as though to read my mind. It’s nothing bad.
The luminous and light-footed Ronnie is someone I’ve never met in person and yet am fortunate to be friends with through the threads of conversation that weave us all online.
How to describe Ronnie? The perfect words have yet to come. So, let’s say she has skills of communication beyond the ordinary. A person whose mind traverses the thin places that some of us near the edge of, but never step right through.
Her message arrived by audio:
‘Hey Jane, it’s Ronnie. It’s 10:18am here, a beautiful frosty morning. I’m just driving to work. I hope you can hear this. You popped into my thoughts. This felt like a grandmother, or a great grandmother. She wanted to pass on how proud she is of you, but also for showing another side of you, another part of your passion. Cliché, but true. Your true self.
And I want to say that some of this comes from your lineage- and I think this is part of her essence- the words. The poetry. This could be recent- actually wait, I’m just going to have to pull over now- but it seems it goes back through generations. So, the words, your words coming through, are those of the generations also, as much as they are your own being, your own essence, your own self. The generations coming through you.
It’s like the Russian dolls, you are part of the Russian doll set. They are adamant with what they’re saying.
The female aspect is coming through strongly because it wasn’t always allowed. Their voices weren’t allowed. So, this is healing. It’s old things, old wanting’s that are coming through you. Their desires, their strengths. A strength they are also sending you.
I hope this makes sense and I hope you get this. Let me know if it resonates. My voice is standfast firm as I’m speaking. It’s a surety, it’s a strength, also softness. But they tell me this is not a time for that. It is a time for strength.’
The message hit me with a certain bittersweetness. My family line is not one with which I am familiar, a broken chain of falling outs and separations that occurred long before my physical form landed on this earth.
I cannot give you names, much less know the faces of anyone even two steps down my line. I have never been told them and for some reason it’s never felt appropriate to ask.
I miss people that I’ve never even known.
I ring my friend Kathy.
When you think of connecting with your ancestors, I asked her, what does that mean to you?
I continued on.
For me, I never think of anyone in my direct line. Connection to the ancestors for me skips beyond anyone of concrete form. It’s an energetic, even spiritual, conversation.
For someone to mention a connection to a great-grandmother brought a strange comfort. I opened my computer, clicked on the file of a poem I wrote a year ago, called The Stories We Arrived With.
The poem that reminded me I want to write.
Some lines for you now.
***
Sometimes I wonder
what stories I arrived with
what whispers
and unrequited lusts
dance in my blood
unfinished
or perhaps the line of beings
that came before me
knew
that I had to arrive for the
book to find its ending
the chapter to continue
or the sentence to find the word it needed
but couldn’t quite remember.
I feel…
the unspoken words
the frustration of intelligence and desire
trapped within walls that lacked freedom
whose conversations only made calls for obedience.
***
I’ve already written about this, I think to myself. I already know this to be true.
The women of my line, talking through the black ink of my pen.
I was going to share with you the full version of the snippet of the poem I shared above, but I decided to write something quite different. I wondered, what really lies behind the constrained voices of the women in my line?
What unrequited lusts do dance in my blood, unfinished? What words have I not been brave enough to write?
I considered as I sat, pen in one hand, paper in another.
I thought about where I draw inspiration from. From nature.
I thought about feminine representations of the sensual and seductive, how they express in the world around us.
I thought about the strength that Ronnie had mentioned. How the female force, the expressive, the courageous, and even the erotic is something that has been censored, suppressed, and not allowed.
What would the women choose to write through me today?
The poem that came together for you now.
Because Evening Primrose Sweetens Her Nectar When She Senses The Buzzing Of The Bee
Because Evening Primrose sweetens her nectar when she senses the buzzing of a bee, we know that blood becomes syrup with the steady vibration of desire, a skin that’s toffee to the tongue.
And when I say sweetness, I mean sweet like Cobra Lily, the siren song scent consuming, enclosing, knees folded, wrapped round, arms reached, enticing, at the same time allowing no escape.
And when I say sweetness, I mean like Portuguese Sundew, seductive and sticky, heated, adhesive, digesting, engulfing, dissolving, inevitable decimation, desecration, the necessary dance for future blooms.
And when I say Primrose, I mean a namesake disclosing a life short lived in the dark. While some say the bloom of the primrose is wasted on the night,
others slowly lick the spoon in reply,
saying to no one in particular out loud,
if we’re to risk the sting of the bee,
let us do so in the presence of honey.
Because the Sperm Whale uses sonic sound waves to create aesthetic maps of sounded out sight, we know we can dance and swirl, circle, encircle, sing to life the fragments of lust existing right now, in this moment as unseen song lines in our mind.
And when I say sing to life, I mean how notes swooned their way to the lips of Nina Simone, breeze drifting on by, you know how I feel, sent out as sounds that reached the ear as a kiss, that’s deliberate, good and slow, the rally call for a swaying body seeking only the movement of another to together make its own.
And when I say lust, I mean, the way a finger traces ribs of bone and skin and bone and skin and bone and skin down to the soft space before the hips to rest, or perhaps not.
And when I say dance, I mean the way sea dragons swim side by side through the water, mirroring each other’s body, a slow dance taking place as evening light begins to fade.
While some may say it’s impossible to sound a vision to life,
others continue to trace the outline of notes in the sky,
saying to no one in particular out loud,
if desire starts as thought vibration in the cells
let it be the insistence of our song that calls it into sight.
***
This poem draws on real behaviours in nature and weaves them into imagined understandings of how they might express in human form.
The nectar of the evening primrose does sweeten with the presence of a bee. Hers is a flower that only blooms at night, found wilted in the morning by the sun.
The Cobra Lily and the Portuguese Sundew are both carnivorous plants. The Cobra Lily releasing a sweet scent to draw its prey.
The Sundews skin stick and tacky to the touch, trapping those who seek to touch, the enzymes produced between the plant and the catch creating a production of enzymes that are necessary for the flower of the plant to be able to bloom.
The sperm whale send out beams of sound to create a mental image of that which she seeks to know, a literal soundscape that allows her to see without the use of sharp enough eyes.
Sea dragons, they do dance, in the same way I described.
And Nina Simone, just because. Hot chocolate to the ears, birds flying high, you know how I feel.
An earth, a landscape swathed in strength and flirtation and survival and thriving and seduction and ever seeking blooms that can never truly be silenced.
After all, such is the way of life. Such is the way of generations. Those before. Those in living now. And those still yet to come.
