A Time and A Season

(c) 1997 Dominique Millette

Days of the Trickster

Here, in the place of my birth, where ancestral ghosts stay visible:
I grasp a soil not all my own
Its more ancient people once a warrior kind.
I know myself a barbaros: not the same -
Yet, tied to this land and its spirits born of rock and wind and tree
Spirits truer, here, than other, borrowed ones.

A sacrificial dance:
A time to chase away collective demons of remembrance.
The people of this place, remaining themselves, give me sanctuary:
I, foundling one, come ancestrally from across the waters of shifting seas
Belonging nowhere - and therefore, left by a god of tricks and other truths.

I set up camp with another mestizo foundling.
Look - a perfect fire-pit, right over here. Let's roast some hot-dogs...
Mistake!
No hot-dogs! This is the Place of the Sacred Flame!
We are would-be holy fools of otherness, such as the Trickster loves:
The Trickster, I learn, is like an Anishnaabe Mercury: a mischief-loving spirit, whose name must not be spoken until snow falls on the ground.

Together we all raise the pine logs: women's work, long ago.
I must rope the logs, though I am barbaros.
I am a woman with earth energy. Ah!
Mistake. The teepee faces in the wrong direction.
Laughter from the worker-men:
- The Trickster teaches us.
We drink some water from the cistern. We share tobacco: now a sacred thing.

The people of the Sundance go off in search of the sacred pine.
I stay behind in the arbour, feeling visible. Thinking: I am barbaros.
They come back with the tree. It looks about thirty feet high.
The Dance begins.
I don't know where to sit. I ask an elder. She shrugs.
I can sit where I like, I suppose.
Ah - here: some logs placed on the grass.
Mistake!
This is the seat of those who play the Sacred Drums!

The Trickster likes me today. A lot.

I think it's time to go now.
Before I accidentally pull down the sacred pine.

---

Days of Not Seal Hunting

I-Like-You-Very-Much-But-I-Would-Not-Want-To-Go-Seal-Hunting-With-You. A useful expression from the Inuit.

Let's not go seal hunting.
Let's have a smoke.
Let's talk awhile.
I'll be decorative - you can be critical.
Tell me again how you can't stand the purple edge on the café wall:
What nonsense, how bourgeois.
Tell me how so many artists practice the cult of complacent mediocrity:
How inexcusable.

I'll wink at you and smile
Tell a joke
Make a clever observation.

I could even dance awhile
In gold lamé or silver sequins from a second-hand store.

This just in:
The seal hunt is tomorrow.
Wait for me: I shall return!
Or will I wait for you?
Nonsense.
You would simply criticize the ice and then get a polar bear to hunt for you in any case.

---

Days of Many Spirits

Today
To speak of fools and rogues:

The Holy Fool:
A mirror to absurdities
Unknowing, yet sublime in transcendental wisdom of the heart
Child of Mercury -
Here, god of contradictions
To yearn and dream and love.

The Jesting Fool:
A rogue!
A stumbling breath of welcome, knowing ridicule
Deadpan wit
Preposterous! Touché!
Child of Mercury -
Here, god of tricks
To laugh and wink and dance.

The Magician:
Yet another rogue
Ruthless in manipulation of the mind and soul
A Machiavellian shadow on the walls of sacred places
Child of Mercury -
Here, god of lies, of other truths, of quickened silver tongues
To get and bring and do.

The Seer:
At once both fool and rogue
Rapt in contemplation metaphysical
Tiresias, blind to all known practicalities of life
Yet with a wise and knowing heart, both of itself and others
With truth beyond the shadow-prison walls of all divided minds
Child of Mercury -
Here, god of messages
To see
To speak
At last, to heal.

---

Days of Flotsam

Rock logic. Water logic.
Water logic flows like a river.
Rivers swell and flow into lakes.
Lakes flow into oceans.

I close my eyes. Concentrate!
Flow, flow, flow...

I'm no river.
I won't get to the ocean.
I smash against the logic of rocks.

I must be a boat.

I close my eyes again.
I see the boat on the river, struggling.

The boat scrapes against the rocks and overturns.
Its exclaiming occupants struggle to shore.
Destruction. Loss. A shake of the head.

Around a fire, wrapped in blankets, the capsized tell their tale: a song, a story, a picture.

The song becomes a hit. The story wins a prize in a short story contest. The picture becomes a joke postcard.

The exclaiming occupants become rich and buy cottages on lakes.
Now they can go boating without any rapids.
They buy boats made of fiberglass.
Now the boats won't smash against anything.

The wood of the original boat, caught in the river, washes up to distant shores.

A woman and a man walk on a stretch of deserted beach.

They spy a piece of broken wood. They stop to reflect on its shape:
- It's like a whale; no, a guitar; or rather, a bust of Socrates!

In a gallery, the work appears:
A bust of Socrates, deserted on the shore, surrounded by the flotsam of modernity.

- The bust is a distorted, faded image of great thought in human History, the artists say.
- How clever, the gallery goers declare.

Newspapers hail the work of art:
- Don't miss this!

A man walks into the gallery.
He peers at the bust of Socrates.
He can only think of one thing to say:
- Hey! That's my boat!

---

Days of Stillness

Today, I am weary
Let us therefore speak of restful things :
Like the sun which dances laughing on a waterfall
Neither to build, nor to avenge some unknown deities and wrongs.

Come -
Rest with me.
Cast down your restless eyes, to stay upon my shoulder
Still and quiet as a breath.

Today, no talk of greater things
No arguments concerning some impending doom :
Let us be unsuspecting in the fall.
And that worry which so creases both you brow and mine
Can slip into the door again
Tomorrow.
Today
Let your compassion forth, so long buried by the haste of all that must and can be done.
Tell me your deepest sorrow
Better still - your greatest joy.

Today
Tell me your heart
Its weight and steady, pulsing work
How it pumps without your will or mine to drive it.
Show me your hands
There - so large and warm, so capable
Your palms speak out to touch an aching breast and soothe unending days
That Lethe may so cradle me to smile.

I long to touch your face.
Your soul leaps from your eyes and hungers yet again for absolutes.

Here is an absolute:
Of nothing.

Should you speak to me of plans and great ambitions
I will answer you -
Tomorrow.

Great ! Very cool. Now let's go someplace else...

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