June 20, 2019
Mother,
I’m brought close tonight by the spirits to your voice, as my machine cycles through sounds and soundtracks, beats, and melodies, and lands on a recording: us in a restaurant, seaside, 2011, talking family and farms, two heart attacks for grandpa, too much fish, and the legacies of sons. I have no memory of setting my phone to record that moment—dad and you and I declining dessert from our waitress, rising at the tail-end to catch the sunset.
Where were we?
You are here with me, though I’m two states east, in an artist’s outpost in the highland desert, tracing a history that was not the history of your mother and father, but has become one of the stories at the center of our lives. Today I found a photo in Densho’s Gila River archives of a man—a farmer?—keeping watch over new blooms in a flower nursery, where “much experimentation is being done to develop strains of flowers which will thrive in hot, dry climate.” I think of your father, farmer of grapes, in that tiny town outside of Fresno, striving to bring the land to life, tying the vines, pruning, spraying, digging water trenches with a crew—sometimes—but often alone.
You survived him. You and your two brothers—three chased and chasing tumbleweeds—making your way while your mother worked and fog unlaced the winter orchards.
What goes underground when the earth shakes? When the farm fails, and the father, lost at the bar, goes absent; what went quiet in you?
Some rivers aren’t visible to us; their waters rush beneath soil.
Some spaces exist between letters and words, awaiting ignition.
I think of our rage. I think of Leigh’s tenderness and the lungs of grief, joy anthems, the dead’s desire, and the saguaro storing all that water and bloating because of it. I think of the illusion of silence, the illusion of stillness, and this spinning rock, spinning within and beyond our bodies.
In the recording, I hear: clinking glasses, pauses for chewing, us conjuring the people that will haunt us forever through story-talk.
Now I understand, mother: You came across twice to us in different forms: Eight-armed protector and strumming, humming songstress; flame and holly field; the goddess of water and the Korean Shaman, healing our vision by first blinding the third eye—that power and mercy, laced like snakes in you.
“She was now the center of what surrounded her,” writes John Berger. “All that was not her made a space for her.”
All that was not her made a space for her.
You return me to the axial age and the dignity of consequences, mother.
You re-mother.
Song is your name, and the oh of awe, and the promise of time-space expanding.
Love, always,
Brynn