« loss of life | main | whopperettes »

April 18, 2006

All the colors there to gather you up, and carry you up

My Kentucky grandmother gave me many secrets.

"Don't tell your momma, Daffodil," she laughed as she lifted sage embers toward the ceiling of her dirty house. The smoke swirled a silent cry toward some unknown place, some silent entity. "And Lord, child, don't tell your pop."

My younger sisters were oblivious to Gramma Aggie's instruction, or maybe they were just too small. They didn't know that sacred smoke carried intention, that the square tin under the sink held ceremonial herbs, held three carved figures.

"Here. Breathe it in, breathe the spirit of the owl."

Gramma Aggie handed me a tiny cedar owl. I held his beak to my mouth, sucked the air around him, around us, around the whole damn yard, felt all of Kentucky's bluegrass rise in my lungs until the owl's spirit lifted invisible wings along the ridges of my back.

"Gramma! I am an owl!" I spoke the truth, knew how to whistle, to warn others of impending prey, knew how to swoop from here to eternity, how to bless the earth with one dropped feather.

One afternoon we built a totem, just me and Gramma Aggie, while my sisters blew dishsoap bubbles from a broken plastic ring. My mom and dad sat in some local church, waited for salvation, my dad from poverty, my mom from her mixed up native heritage. I was an owl. I knew this even then.

"Daffodil, a totem is built from the sky down, not from the earth up. What can the earth offer the sky? The sky blankets us. She knows all our secrets. Nothing we can tell her but our thanks."

I straddled a hunk of cedar, started at the top, painted a cloud with a face, a turtle below it, an eagle's scowl, the crooked antlers of imaginary antelope, drew a mouth, a paw, a tail. I painted with cheap primary colors my gramma bought at the K-Mart. Gramma Aggie stood on the back porch chain smoking cheap generic cigarettes, a chipped mug full of Schlitz always in one hand.

"Daffodil! Remember to give them life. I'm too old. Only a young person can give them life. That's why I taught you this." I nodded, slid along my horizontal totem, kissed each animal awake. Bubbles floated above me. My sisters laughed. My gramma hoisted the totem with a rope and a prayer, cigarette anchored in her mouth, and my painted beauties took flight.

I remembered all of this many years later, the day I sat shotgun through Oklahoma, my left hand in Matt Frito's hair. It seems like a lifetime ago, another existence, though it happened last November. Seems like another person saw the sign for the World's Largest Totem Pole, yet another read it out loud, and those two unknown fools turned around, followed a dust-covered Oklahoma promise into the darkness.

A man named Ed Galloway built a totem that touched the sky, built it the way I did, by words from outside sources, by youthful ignorance, built it with primary colors torn from his bastard imagination. He built it between the years of 1937 and 1948. He planted it in Oklahoma, on the back of a tired concrete turtle. Matt Frito and I saw his totem in the dark, in the dark night of dark thoughts on a lonely Oklahoma road, the night before we entered the underworld part of our journey.

We captured Ed's totem in a camera, caught it murky, soft and delicate, as if it would crush to forgotten dust. I stood in the cold, my green skirt swirling around me, Matt Frito on my left, offering protection from the quiet road. I couldn't see the animals. I tried. I couldn't see the colors, either, only the height of the damn thing transcended the night. I tried to tell Matt Frito about my Gramma Aggie, about my own totem, but the words disappeared between my heart and my open mouth. We were too young then, too new, and I worried he wouldn't see the world through my eyes. I think I should have been an owl that day, held his hand tight, let him fly above Oklahoma for hours, let him see the painted farmlands below us. We slammed the doors of the car, let the wheels point us toward Texas.

Life is hard, tall, like a totem. It's full of mysterious animals, beings ready to eat your soul, beings ready to accept your kiss of life. I want to be an owl again, to feel Kentucky soil in my line of sight, to run my fingers through an architect's hair. I want to build another totem.

posted by daffodil at 09:23 PM

posted by: Anonymous on April 18, 2006 10:00 PM