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.