Celia Sigmon (1)



Painted Ladies
                in memory of S. Derrick

Across the road they move
in their mass migration,
splashing color on windshields
and grills like papier-mâché.
The water in Kitchen Creek
pools their split chrysalides,
bursting by the thousands
like blood through weakened flesh.
And falling, flesh from bone,
you from me, I feel you dance
on painted wings in this space
where you dwell but do not touch.
So that what is left behind
in that hushed and holy room
   (your bloated boxed body
    that I would know anywhere
    even by feel in any other darkness)
now harbors a guarded cold.
And what is tangent and real
   (butterflies drawn to the wet hills
    by mountain lilac and wild rose)
eludes my grasp as water and air
and rises to the clouds like mist.

Cathexis

Why is it not enough
   to feel strength in want
   the way flowers track the light
   the way redtails need
                the hot updrafts of air?
Why stay steady on the mark
   a hard lean, fingers extended
   to hook each cold brass ring?

As a child I longed to be primary
   some intricate stuff of life
                to beat the air with feathered arms
                to run on all fours, two at a time
                to move like water
                   down the furrows of the garden.
I even ate dirt to fill that belly
                licked the salt from my summer skin.
I gave up nothing
   in that perpetual state of ready
                collected the potent images
                   of stone and talismans
                invested them with age and myth
   yet a sense of absence
                tagged the years like thirst.

Today, as the hawk crossed me
   I felt unbraced against the weight of time
                as thin as lettuce curled in noon heat.
I can say this now:  I am empty.
                Magic no longer spins
                   from the center, the broad band
                   of red only feathers, and rain
                   is just water released.
It is touch, a carnal desire to know a mind
                that moves my blood
                uncurls these clenched fists
   and the press of fingers
                against skin... profound.

Stitch
   with Sabrina Youmans

Butterflies, what the Jews call
yodes, symbols of the soul,
they hold me together.
Like tattoos, the stitches
picket-fence across my chest.
Underneath,  I see
striations of muscle, bone
tendons strung like mist nets
to catch my beating wings.
Like D.H. Lawrence, who thought
the soul resided in the blood,
I sew gristle to raw edges,
imagine a web of red
twisting toward its source.
And in the morphine dark
I marry bedpost, ballcap,
bottles of wine with
the E-oil I rub into
the spines of pain, frozen
like china in my skin.



1. Celia Sigmon teaches in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies Department at San Diego State University. Her email is: csigmon@mail.sdsu.edu