Intercalary Day #5

Nepthys:
There are no cheap resin statues of her.
Last year I was so urgent when I found the other
Four children of Nut and Geb at
Talaria Enterprises,
I tried to place a rush order.
Museum replicas,
They were powdered stone mixed with resin
For a pleasant weight and feel.
I was at a loss for an icon of Nepthys.
I used the
Head of a Greek woman in sandstone
For a candle-holder.

I layered dried leaves of
Fragrant pitcher sage
On the altar.
I lit the gummy rose incense from the
Greek monastery - Byzantium,
I believe it was,
And put out a little plate
Piled high with the
Pear-shaped tomatoes
From our garden.

It is now some weeks from this day
And I remember only the
Blur of activity from the
Morning’s ritual to the
Evening’s romance.
Tonight it chanced that someone
Raised the specter of an Iris perfume,
And that more than anything describes the
Shape of her face.

Nepthys,
Lady of the Temple Enclosure,
Is a vaporous shade of a Goddess.
I see her as a fading powder-blue
Visible against the night with her orange
Kite eye.
Once I tore white linen into long, jagged strips
And painted each one gray
For the grave cerements, her hair.
I coated them with glue so they would
Rustle and rasp on my
Devotional mask.

In 1912, Jacques Guerlain made a perfume called
Blue Hour, Iris the dominant note.
It’s the smell of melancholy, longing, and regret.
Nepthys, the shadow of her more popular
Solar sister.
Nepthys filled with regret for her
Betrayal of Isis.
Nepthys, friend of the dead,
Sweet with the melancholy of the embalming room and
Longing for life beyond the underworld.

Blue Hour is very elegant and very somber.
Legions of Iris fragrances follow in its footsteps.
Irisqué, a recent creation by a small indie house,
Does not.
It is five types of Iris and Orris blended bewilderingly with
Carrot seed and Ambrette for a
Root-forward-effect.
It breaks the Iris mold.
It has the scent of a bulb freshly ripped from the ground,
The wet soil clinging and tumaceous.
I haven’t known how to appreciate it.
Now I do.

Nepthys, the twilight-blue solemnity of
Blended Iris notes,
Hidden goddess,
An elusive, fleeting mood.
Nepthys, musty dirt and sweet rot,
Goddess of the charnel house,
The earth that recycles us all.

Intercalary Day #4

For Isis I put out the hand-dipped
Rainbow candle made by the
Mother of my son’s friend, as well as
Pink roses from the front yard.

I burn the last of the
Four-roses incense procured from the
Rosicrucian Museum in
San Jose.

So much money rained down today,
Replenishing my bank account after
A long dry summer.
Venus Friday.

I was Isis on my wedding day:
Blue eyes and black hair enhanced with a
Clip-on ponytail, a steal
At twenty-seven dollars.

We made it look rich
Because we gave the photographer
The biggest share of our small fund.
He was a true artist.

Isis, all-purpose goddess
Of 10,000 names,
Syncretized with everyone in range.
To me she is the seventeen-year-old’s
Awakening.

The fertile field I found after
A lifetime of bitter atheism.
An oasis in Northern California.
Cleopatra wigs and kohl.

Isis the naked female form,
Mother Nature to the male brotherhoods,
So powerful you must only see her veiled.
Hen Kai Pan.

Isis, Auset, is
Easy for me.
Easier than the Iseum I joined
And abandoned.

Venus in Libra the
Strongest planet in my chart.
Pleasing is easy,
Beauty is my religion.

Venus the ruler of my South Node.
Another woman with the identical placement
Teaches body positivity by flaunting her
Zaftig ass on Instagram.

Easy, easy.
The reminder I need.
Auset, Auset,
It rained on her golden body all night.

Intercalary Day #3

The Sun appeared this morning for Seth, Great of Strength.
This is the first year in six that we’ve been overrun with grasshoppers.
What I can’t fathom is the variety of shades -
Tiny electric green ones,
Odious orange and yellow-bodied ones,
Sturdy brown and blackish ones that look
Too comfortable sunning themselves in the jade.
Are they all the same one?
Do they have the power of camouflage?
Brian's theory is that it's a
Cicada year and they’re running the same program.

The reason we do ritual is that I can remember
Last August and my
Shiver of surprise that
Seth gave me a direct invitation.
I turned it down, I think.
Afraid.
Because he is the Lord of Chaos and Destruction.

Why am I ever the chosen of the destroyer gods?
I will always remember the
High Priestess mocking me
After ordination:
“Sekhmet Sekhmet Kali Kali,”
She sneered,
Her face twisted in derision.
Some Priestess.
I knew that she simply did not see
The beauty I see
In the scourge.

But Seth is the very Devil!
A face like a hammer and ears so long and thin
They look like chopsticks poked straight up in rice,
A faux pas everyone in Asia cautioned me against
Lest I curse myself.
Seth, the red-haired, red-skinned god of the foreigners.
I love him.
Oh, why do I always love the Devil!

Have you seen the Egyptian aardvark?
Cute as hell,
Snorting up ants like they’re
Lines of cocaine and chewing them
With its stomach.
The best smellers in the animal kingdom,
That narrow snout is lined with
Olfactory epithelium.
So much, so much I love the Devil.

I burned Dragon’s Blood and
Arrayed Seth with
Yarrow, Tarweed.
I drank too much coffee and had a
Very productive day.
I pressed my agenda on
Everybody.

I clipped out half the overgrown dwarf
Of a Lemon tree.
I was overzealous and accidentally
Cut into the sage.
That hurts to recount.
Chaos, destruction.
The NPR piece
About the climate gap
Made me feel hopeless about
These my small efforts.

My son is learning about the climate business in school.
His behavior this week has been especially awful.
I say to him, “No matter what they tell you,
You have to have HOPE!”
We reference previous extinction events.
Something always survives the scourge.

Intercalary Day #2

Horus the elder.
Haroeris.
The wrongest kind of Southern California day.
Rain! No Sun in the sunrise.
No Sun for his right eye.
No Sun for the Lord of the Horizon.

Today, a Celtic-seeming land enshrouded in mist and fog
In August.

Did I do this?
Is this because I refuse to get up to
Greet the dawn?
I put out my statues the night before so they will
Catch the morning rays that I miss.
I burn Copal and offer honey and nuts.

A couple days before
I traveled to Egypt,
I injured my
Left eye so badly that I was
Temporarily blinded and had to walk around with an
Eye patch.
Does this mean I’m more of a Set person?
Or a Horus redeemed?

A weird, family battle sort of a day.
I try to make it up with my son.
His hair is so blond, so golden.
A white owl flies silently
Into the Moon as I
Argue outside with my husband.

Horus is to me the hawk that flew just over my shoulder,
Grazing me with feather-tips in
Griffith Park that time I was
Spontaneously awakened.

Horus was that downed hawk
I pulled off the freeway with the utmost calm.
I severed the wings from the body and
Buried the rest.
A friend coached me on nailing the wings to a board
To hold the shape
(This was in Oregon).
And I salted and salted my prize all Winter
In a dark, damp shed.

Horus is, perhaps, the unofficial deity of
This California scrub.
Hawks are ubiquitous here.
There’s nowhere they are not.
I’m never not aware of them.

I haven’t seen one lately though.
They say these Intercalary days are unlucky.

Intercalary Day #1

A barn owl perched on an old tire in the alley
Arrests my vision as I pull up with the ice cream.
I park and then run to face the chain-link.
It wobbles and extends its wings, showing no obvious injuries
Or missing feathers.

Defeated, it hangs its head low and shakes it, ponderously
Back and forth, as if in mourning.
“Oh no, oh no, oh no.”
I get a creepy feeling and run to get my husband.
The barn owl dives, awkwardly and pathetically,
Into the cover of a stand of weeds.

Nature.
Best to just let it do what it will do.
The Internet says it could be an adolescent
Pushed out of the nest by its parents
In order to force it to fly.
I try to withdraw my creepy feeling that this is
All My Fault, attributable to my agreement with the
Brown air and horrible concrete and non-native trees.

As much as I attempt to love
This anthropocene,
It’s hard to see a pretty barn owl suffering in
Such an eyesore of a landscape.
A dead owl in a primeval forest,
Now that would have the touch of the mythic,
That experience could be something enriching and cathartic.
But a sad owl in this weedy wasteland hurts the soul.

“Who am I kidding?”
I tell my creepy feeling.
“That owl probably eats like a king, the alley is full of rats!
And who’s going to bother a grounded owl?
A coyote?”
But still I wait for some light to break in to tell what this
Barn owl has to do with me.

At night I notice that the Bird of Paradise is touching me
With its leaves.
It feels just like a familiar friend has
Rested a hand upon my shoulder.
I peep through the telephone vines,
Lush with green hearts, that frame
The statue of Osiris.
I put out a plate of
Cucumbers and cut green things.
The scent of Sandarac drifts on the air.

The god that lives inside the little statue
Smiles on our offering.
Osiris always makes me think of
Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo,
And the dance craze Jes Grew,
The virus that makes everyone jive and fuck.

I apologize to Osiris
In my mind,
For always getting to these holidays on the wrong day.
He laughs (also in my mind) and says
Being in my body is honoring him,
Taking time out for sex is honoring him.
The yoga teacher is saying, “It’s time to
Remember the intention you sent out
At the beginning of the class.”
I’m lying in savasana and Osiris is
Opening his big green heart to me.

Barn owls were temple birds in ancient Egypt.
You can see their outline on the hieroglyph for the
Letter M.
Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm.

Non-natives

The first thing I wanted to plant was a Frangipani.
They make the most perfect, white-floral candies,
Like the frosted flowers on a cake.
I encountered one in bloom in a
Trashy Thai restaurant parking lot, and it
Transported me to the realm of the gods.
Urban plants, they are always
Better than their surroundings, and
That honey-ginger whiteness is a vehicle to the divine.

I thought that “Frangipani” should be the
Ace of Cups in the perfume Tarot deck
In my mind, because its impish fruity whiteness
Opens your heart quicker than you can say
“Hawaiian vacation.”
The card would show a woman sunbathing in a
White bikini, on a bed of printer-paper petals,
The tips radiating from
Delicious yellow hearts that
Taste like the sun.

(“White” is the name of a fragrance category in the
Perfume world, to describe the narcotic pull of such divas as
Jasmine, Tuberose, and Orange Blossom.
I can’t explain this other than to say that it
Makes sense to my nose.
Frangipani is white floral’s “tropical” flavor.
And yes, other color flowers smell like other colors.
Lavender is lavender, while
Violet leaf smells as dark and mechanical as those
Blossoms touched with motor oil.
Rose always smells pink to me, and Mimosa has the
Yellow smell of children frolicking outside.
“White” is considered
Classical, traditional, and refined.)

Frangipani are not native to Hawaii nor to Asia and
Trust me, I’m as
Shocked as you.
Try to discover their indigenous lore, and you’ll run into
Beautiful Buddhist and Hindu associations, and the
Ubiquity of the Hawaiian lei.
But Frangipani-Plumeria with its several names
Derived from European men is an
American export.

I like this sort of flower, that can
Go everywhere and so charm the
Native people that it becomes to them
Like a God.
A transnational sort of flower.
A citizen of the world.

Frangipani was the first tree to go into
My Goddess Garden.
Wikipedia says “they have carried
Complex symbolic significance for over two millennia”
In Mesoamerica.
The Maya connected them with female sexuality.
The least I could do is learn their native name:
Nikte.

Blue Crown Passionflower

The first time I saw one I was on the other side of a golf course,
The fertile part of the path before the dirt widens into the
Barren expanse of a homeless encampment.

I was stopped in my tracks, as they say.
Passionflowers look like alien beings, or
Mechanical gizmos, with so much
Delicate circuitry that they don’t bear
Touching, or breathing on.

To the Spaniards the three stamen antennae were the
Nails in the wounds of Christ.
The corona of blue filaments
Our Savior’s Halo.

I remember breathing in the early morning mist
That cascaded from the sprinklers,
My athletic shoes sinking into the mud,
And thinking simply,
“I wish I knew what these were called.”

When we discovered the secret garden,
It looked like a jungle,
A surprising pocket of sinuous life
In the arid desert of Southern California.

The twisted ropes were everywhere,
Dragging all the trees into relationship and forcing
Shaded bowers by stringing tendrils from every toehold,
Criss-crossing the whole yard like a
Green and pleasant booby trap.

The vines were almost trees themselves, several inches
Across, and we hacked into those
Snaky things day after day until
We could walk without being snared.

Only later did I realize these vines were Passionflower,
When the aureole space-ships opened their eyes en masse
And the flying beetles and giant bees
Came to eat.

I dug up all the new shoots and
Replanted them at intervals along the chain-link
Facing the trash-strewn alley.
In a few years they’ll make a living wall of green.

The psychic channeling my dead friend said these
Passionflowers have something special for me.
I won’t make a perfume or flower essence;
I prefer to leave the blossoms for the bees.

The Aztecs called it “serpent's tongue” and
Made medicine out of the roots and leaves.
One thing I've learned, the action is not
Confined to the blooms.

The Reconstructionist

She was there when I died
To birth me into the next world.
I recognized her form and the peculiar slick leather of her skin.
Taweret.
The hippopotamus god of ancient Egypt.

The man doing the
Past life regression
Was nice,
So nice that I felt (mostly) comfortable lying down in his house with my eyes closed.

The secret garden opened up to us a year ago.
A neglected triangle of land shooting an arrow
Into an alley managed by a railroad easement.

It was awful when we got it.
We had to pull out the trash
And fill the pits and
Cut down the tangle of invasive trees.
Bags and bags and bags of
Dead grass went out every week, and the
Wood pile grew higher and higher.

I miss the Skinks who lived in that wealth of leaf litter.
I haven’t seen them since we cleared.
Probably they moved into the alley, its own
Transient ecosystem with four-foot-high grass and more of those
Damned poison trees.
The railroad bulldozes this ad-hoc strip of life
Only once every couple years,
The Fire Department told me.

When I sat down in the
Newly naked triangle
To learn about the quality of the place,
The energy was all jagged and threatening,
Presenting knives and glass shards.
Only later did I realize that some of that resonance of chaos was
OUR legacy,
Our clippers and chainsaws and merciless weed levers,
And the strangely quiet machine that pulverized the stumps.

But beyond that noise was old noise, the likelihood that none of this land
Existed when my mother was born.
Long Beach was originally a marsh.
The elevated rail line which halves the neighborhood rests on a
Manmade, reinforced hill, now both the entirety of my
Southern horizon and a refuge for the
Homeless.

The dirt in this place came from elsewhere, trucked in and not alive,
Hard-packed to hold a shape in a bog.
The arterial spring on Jackson Street is now managed by a humming box
Behind chain-link.
(I left some flowers there years ago when trying to
Reach the local devas.)

Narrow concrete channels slice through the overgrowth of houses,
An ugly Amsterdam, a sluice for slime.
A gesture at the memory of water.

I feel that this tiny three-pointed plot is confused
Because it used to be water.
The energy tastes of earth dug up and transported, of screaming engines and
Dissociated laborers,
Of place profoundly disrupted.

The message is that
This place is no place
But I have a choice.
I can become a steward,
I can make it a some place.

I wonder if Taweret could, or would, bring her river knowledge,
Her thick, archaic knowingness of the fecund depths
And the loamy blackness I am missing.

The same day, my husband asks me if we can put in a fountain.

This Pumpkin is a Reproach

This pumpkin is a reproach.
It came fat and round and perfect -
In July!

My little one sowed the seeds
In the side yard
Near where my husband dumps motor oil
On the dirt.

We didn’t water.
It never rained.
And yet the vines grew thick and ropey
And spilled onto the cement path.
The shade-giving leaves reached
Monstrous proportions.

Its fecundity is obscene.
This pumpkin didn’t even need one thing from us.
How did it mine such flagrant life
From this poor dead patch of earth?

This pumpkin is a reproach.
It knows I don’t know what to do with it.
It knows what a sorry husbandwoman I am.

If we carve it, it will rot in the heat.
I don’t want to eat it
(It grew where the cats pee.
Possibly it absorbed transmission fluid
From the dumping ground.)

The acid will hurt my hands
If I penetrate its orange cavity.
The worms will die if we throw it
In the compost.

This pumpkin is a miracle,
A food staple that thrived
Untended in the polluted ground.
It is the Platonic ideal of a pumpkin,
Sassy and plump and assured of its
Halloween cuteness.

It has now begun its tenure on a little-used lawn table.
When it turns it will go in the trash can.

Another Manzanita

Another Manzanita.
One California native Wild Strawberry.
Two plump juicy Hummingbird Sages,
The flowers so pink the hummers twerrred over
Within moments of me placing the pots in the garden.

All dead.
I leave their corpses.
The first Sage was in too sunny a place and I watered so much that mushrooms grew out of the heart of the plant.
The other Sage declined to death for undisclosed reasons.
I gave the Manzanita its preferred summer dryness and it withered and browned.
Did water sneak over from the Buckwheat, my own failure to plane the ground?
The Strawberry simply incinerated in the blazing backyard sun.
I gave it a shade.
It didn't matter.

It's always too easy to focus on what has died.
The Toyonberry bush, the one that will draw the special brown bird, is doing fine.
The Milkweed went crazy this year, but no Monarchs came,
No eggs hatched into yellow and white and black-striped caterpillars.
Why?
The feast of leaves sits uneaten.
But back to my successes.

An insect gobbled up the Yerba Mansa!
Is he a desirable fellow?
I don't know.
At least I fed somebody, and the plant is hanging on.
Both Sticky Monkeys are looking good.
The Ceanothus lived because I ignored the garden lady's die warning, and let it drink in moderation.
The Fragrant Pitcher Sage is exploding with life outside my office window.

The Datura has a crinkly leaf problem which is caused by both too much water and not enough.
The Datura in the alley twenty feet beyond the garden is lush and perfect, and it hasn't rained all year.
These plants are perverse.
Sometimes I think I should listen to them, and other times I think that's silly;
They can't tell me they need a soil amendment.