Tortoise Highway

By Teresa Williams

In the darkness
of this winter morning
I think of those
tortoises
on Santa Cruz island,
walking
their invisible pace
up from the grassy plains
thousands of feet
to the high meadows
and forests,
their ritual escape
from the dry heat
below.

They have travelled
these well worn paths
each season,
for centuries and
this pilgrimage, imperceptibly
moves
slower than the speed
of any dawn
they may wait for.
When you pass them by
these ancient living stones
from the sea,
you can almost hear
Time
laughing at you
and your rush
to arrive
at the top of a hill.
Once there, however,
you will believe
again
in miracles,
when you see
those tortoises
resting
in small pools
of water.

And there is a sense
of deep satisfaction
watching
those giant beings
as they rest in water,
as if everyone
has found
exactly
what they were
looking for.

It is still dark
and winter here;
I do not find
a well worn path
in front of me
nor a place of return
where
each year
I can find
a second home
high above the sea.
No, from this place
only a tangle
of paths
where
these animals
called humans
are moving
in all directions
at once.
Concealed
in this frenzy
of movement
is thirst,
looking moving looking
for higher ground
for a quiet place
to relax
and drink in
something clear
and
true, an element
of coolness.

So, for the moment
while the darkness
lasts
and the thirst
intensifies,
I will crawl away
from the tangle,
go deeper
inside this haven
I have found
of hexagons and
slowness,
and here, I will wait
for a light
for a path
for the place this
shell of waiting
may take me.

_________________________

About Teresa: Teresa Williams is a psychotherapist, poet and translator in Seattle, Washington. She has been writing and trying to live poetry for as long as she can remember. Her love for travel and the Spanish language has called her into translation work. She is also an active member of Grupo Cervantes, a bilingual writer’s group and literary community in Seattle.

Teresa’s poetry has been featured at births, weddings, funerals and several talent shows held by the closest of friends. Her first piece on red Ravine, Sound Falling From One World Into Another, was published in August 2010 and featured the poems: Swans, Two Coyotes at Dawn, and Tarot. Her last piece, The Devil’s Bridge, speaks to the legends and mythology surrounding bridges throughout the British Isles, Scandinavia, and continental Europe.

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The Uses of Sorrow – What Is It About Obituaries?

I’m thinking about poetry.  Our topic this week is to write a poem for Slam-o-rama.

Poetry came easy to me last year. It poured out of me. I’m not saying it was good. Just that it poured. Like Morton salt. It seems tougher to write now. I have to slow down to write poetry.

I am going to hear Mary Oliver read her poetry in May. Her partner of over 40 years, Molly Malone Cook, died in 2005. Thirst is dedicated to Cook. The pages are full of sorrow, quiet longing, and a search for faith.

I wanted to know more about Molly Malone Cook, so I looked up her obituary. What is it about obituaries?

There is a certain fascination with death. It’s the 2nd thing we all have in common, regardless of race, religion, or creed. (Why did those words come out of my mouth? And what in the world is creed?)

The first is that we are born. And we shall die. When our time will come, we do not know.

The Independent’s obituary was illuminating. I found Malone Cook’s life to be even more fascinating than Mary Oliver’s. She’s the Oliver fire to Stein’s Toklas. I’m ashamed to admit, I had no idea Molly Malone Cook was a photographer with Southern roots who once photographed Eleanor Roosevelt:

Cook continued to work as a professional photographer, making portraits of such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt, Walker Evans, Robert Motherwell and Adlai Stevenson, but her career was cut short by the breathing problems which were later to curtail her life: her lungs were unable to cope with the chemicals of the darkroom.

Meanwhile, her relationship with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry – author of To Be Young, Gifted and Black and A Raisin in the Sun, the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway (in 1959) – ended with Hansberry’s early death from cancer, aged 34, in 1965.

Cook had met Mary Oliver in 1958, at the former home of the poet Edna St Vincent Millay in upstate New York – the two women having come to visit Millay’s sister Norma. Six years later Cook and Oliver moved into a Provincetown boathouse owned by one of the port’s Portuguese families, the Seguras.

They travelled together on Oliver’s trips to give readings or classes, and spent several years visiting Virginia in search of Cook’s Southern roots – she was delighted to discover that her ancestry stretched back to Judith Jefferson, aunt of President Thomas Jefferson.

– from the Independent Obituary, Molly Malone Cook, by Philip Hoare, September 7th, 2005

That’s why we read obituaries. I wonder what mine will say? And who the writer will be.

                               

The Uses of Sorrow

(In my sleep, I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

 –Mary Oliver from Thirst, Poems by Mary Oliver
Beacon Press, 2006, copyright Mary Oliver

-posted on red Ravine, Monday, April 9th, 2007

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