Silhouettes
---Baja, California


On the bus back from Mexico to Los Angeles, you have to go through Baja, through its harsh desert. Here, surreal cacti with their backs bent over lean toward the south. They are dark sillhouettes as the fog rolls in. The air is heavy, and the clouds are those of an approaching storm.

In this desert the cacti are so profuse. Curled over from age and contact with the elements, they seem a vast hoard walking toward the tip of Baja, toward the sea. These ancient cacti have memories in their cells of the unchanging land. Like multitudes of people who are connected to the earth, they are stabilized by it, rooted strong, shaped by the climate and the hot blue sky.

This desert is so subtle, both lovely and harsh. When I woke up this morning, the sunrise was iridescent, the Saguaro cacti dark at first in silhouette against it. As I watched, part of the sky became a robin's egg blue against the orange luminescence. Here there are also bushes which have delicate pink blossoms on them. As we pass by, the flowers are tinted blurs upon the brush.

On this, our final day, we have come to a place where hawks constantly circle in the sky overhead. One flew in front of our windshield and was killed. Passing over large boulder formations, the hawks now seem the only life in this part of the desert. It is very stark and without plants, and the boulders are a smooth and monotonous gray.

Mexican music plays as we travel along in the bus. Our driver is a romantic, I believe, from his choice of groups. He plays slow ballads and the old New Wave group "The Police".

Looking up, in the distance I see that the hills are becoming obscured by fog. There are no other cars here, and we are totally alone. Crowded together, we chat and sleep while the music plays.

Breaking the immense silence of the landscape, it is the only sound.

.....


Copyright(c) Velene Campbell, 2006. All rights reserved.

The Moon Does Not Regret Her Winter


The moon does not regret her winter
Or the torn strands of gray chiffon
That cover her face tonight.

As this dew shelters the dry grass like tears
And shadows of dark leaves
Wait to wither into morning
The moon fades,
A goddess,
Empty of desire or light.

No, the moon does not regret
This burial of love.
In the coldness of her solitude
She will not weep tears of rust
Or betray herself with petty despair.

She has her own time and place;
that which is eternal surrounds her.

The moon does not regret dust
Or the accumulation of her years,
Or this sadness beneath salt, beneath bone.

When full she is round and cold,
and then she narrows, changes into perfect crescent.

You were like the moon; I never understood
the subtle ways in which you changed.
I only know that like the moon at crescent
I, too, have lost three-quarters of myself.

.......


Copyright (c)Velene Campbell, 2006. All rights reserved.

Gates

In the runic tradition
There is a stone for gates,
In the Chinese, the gate of the Tao,
In the Hindu, behind the gate of closed eyes,
The universe hums in song;

There is the gate into life, which is breath,
Where light first shines its presence,
And upon entering the gates of hell
The hair becomes flame.

When passing through the gates of love,
The heart turns to flowers,
But when entering the gate of death,
Stars become dimmed, the moon
And sight disappear, and it is through this gate

That the world goes, that the breath exits,
that we enter, finally, into that place before birth.

.....


Copyright(c)Velene Campbell, 2006. All rights reserved.

--Written after visiting Los Encinos Park, the last Spanish rancho in California, and the San Gabriel Mission. Los Encinos was passed down through the family until the 1980's, when the land then remaining was broken up into lots, and sold. At the rancho there is the main house, a blacksmith's shed, and another two story structure which housed the workmen, and was used for storage. There is also a cistern, and a small pond with geese and ducks, which is fed by an underwater stream. While visiting there I felt the existence of the past, as if it were separated from the present by a thin membrane of time--these shifts in time occur in the poem below.

With Stone Wings

--"The bones of the earthgods shake, and planets
come to a halt when they sight the king in all of his power,
The god who feeds on his father and eats his mother....
the stars die and fall."
--------From The Cannibal Hymn, (c. 2180 B.C.) Egypt, Anonymous


Only in the mind can we fly with stone wings, where the sun
is a light defined behind the eyes; the sculptor's chisel finds
those musical indentations, those invisible supple curves
where journeys in the heart of stone take place,
where air is light, brilliant, and Isis' alabaster wings
blow breaths of wind and cloud;

Time, like flecks of silver dust,
compresses from coal into miniscule diamonds,
sculptors' hands turn to ash, and the idea
of warm mortality is shaped from stone.
Death passes through the years, a wind
of white bone dust bequeathed from generation
to generation, a stone-winged angel
standing forever in shadow. In silence
tears are burned dry by fires in the heart,
are turned to ash in hands raised in prayer;

stone remains, shadow remains,
time is everywhere, like breath;

From a large clam shell water pours into a fountain,
clear water ripples in the sun. Ghosts move about,
their footsteps ring on stone paths. Here, the grass
remembers itself long and green
where padres in hooded cowls
gathered the animals, and Indians in the garden
weed vegetables;

"The past walks inside of us",
thinks the woman with the long silken hair
who loves a man oblivious to her. As invisible
as the Indians who work for her in the kitchen,
she embroiders a shawl with red and green flowers,
its fringe falling over her lap.

I dream of the continuous presence
of those who lived before me,
of a chain broken in my life.
When did cruelty first raise itself like a cut,
as a red wound not yet become a thick scar of skin.
It must be the way of God to erase memory,
that becoming which erases the past.

Like sheets of waves, years empty and sad unfold
before the woman who watches at the edge of the room.
Like a fog sadness covers things, covers the world like a shawl
worn to a fiesta, where a beautiful dance takes place amid candles,
and colors flow like the wings of butterflies across the night.
It is a dance a woman watches from the edge of a room, solitary,
apart, from someplace inside herself, that place
where connections have been broken,
and all is becoming undone.

Ghost Dancers step on air
which has since become the color
of leaves in the fall. In Alaska white bear
walk on snow, strange animal dancers, like phantoms,
step on traces of smog embedded in crystal, and on snow
where salt is the crystal
embedded in tears.

We are losing everything, like those before us
who have lost their worlds. On a journey
where everything is disappearing,
as pieces of clouds weave themselves across the sky,
footprints become fossils the color of blood,
time is winding down, running out of room,
and the world is becoming a memory.

The light of the sunset is brilliant across the sky.
Horses begin to return.
The rancho becomes quiet,
and as the man reads in the study,
the woman, her embroidery in hand,
looks out the window, remembers her childhood,
a ribbon she once wore in her hair.

Now her ghost moves along the corridors of the walls
a moth brushing against the soft
veils of my breath.

Four thousand years ago raw stone pulled from the earth
by a stone-cutter's hands became a goddess carved,
entombed, returned to dry earth, shrouded in time,
this small delicate statue now standing in the shadow
of a museum's muted light.

"The bones of the earthgods shake,
and planets come to a halt
When they sight the king in all of his power,
The god who feeds on his father and eats his mother."

And we eat the earth, are the kings of the earth,
those who throw trees into death's darkness,
radiation into rivers, who turn the earth into sun,
and war thunders across the ages, disembowled,
burned into shadow,
small pox blankets given to Indians,
children murdered in their sleep,
and we sleep the sleep of the blind.

This is a statement of loss, a statement of grief,
it speaks of your life and mine, of our children frozen
in their feelings,
embedded in anger, without recourse, and we have become
only that which we sought to become.

Written four thousand years ago,
words, stone, shadow remain.
“the stars die and fall.”

Tonight the moon crescent is a thread of light,
it is autumn, and sixty thousand years ago
Mars journeyed this close to the earth.
I walk bare-foot in the grass with my daughter's dog
in the quiet of midnight, thinking of those who stepped before me,
watched red Mars light the sky;
Mars the color of cinnebar,
of red ochre blown onto a dark cave wall;

Thirty-six thousand years ago
in light dancing with shadow, earth was blown
between the fingers of a hand; in that act,
a prayer, a hope, a beginning,
in that breath, the mind shaping light.

.....


Copyright(c)Velene Campbell, 2006. All rights reserved.