Yin Chain

When I was barely out

With a mother shattered by birthing

A sister treated me like her own baby

Cooed and oohed and aahed me

Held me when being held was

All that could have mattered –

With eyes to look up into,

warmth to ease upon,

and she barely twelve

And later, while my mother worked

A crucial, sweet old crone read endlessly to me

on the porch of an old house,

making up stories

during the long meadowlark

& grasshopper days

those summers before school closed in:

Mother Goose – Adventures of Robin Hood – Uncle Remus –

her love of story

shaping my young heart & brain

for a lifelong love of words and tales

one woman after another,

this one or that one, one or another

-- crucially timed – ringing down

through the points of my time

careful, loving, aiding me,

seeking my eyes with their own,

a linking circle of receptive strength,

strong hands holding

The aunt, born without ovaries

who worked at the local radio station

six days a week – to her I must have been

her only child, and she spoiled me with

baseball gloves, footballs, cameras, clothes –

the translucent crimson 45 lp of Bob Dylan

singing “Like A Rolling Stone” –

one after another

nurturing, helping,

instructresses – guides –

pointing the way and providing

that boon sustenance of love:

a chain of yin

a high-school English teacher who told me

I should write, “You have a gift”

– the poetess/professor who

weaseled freshman me a spot in the

“graduate students only” writing workshop

& that cousin who listened to my moans

of lost love, laughed at my jokes and

urged me to sing Christmas songs in my

Donald Duck voice, talking me down

after mescalero adventures

patient older lovers

pre-wives

teaching me things I had

no way of knowing,

smiling and patting my long hair

in the sweaty night

enduring my hebephrenic immaturity

the bad love of a moderate poverty

sister-friends who sang with me

in distant places, travel-companions,

drinking buddies in the Dark Wood Taverns

who read my stories and giggled

said: “What next – where to? Let’s go – ”

Lying flat on my back

in a corpse-like pose

I saw it so clearly the other night:

that chain of loving-kindness,

raw feminine power,

igneous magna mater,

it kept me somehow from harm,

encircled me magically,

-- teasing out the worst of male madness

leaving crucial areas undomesticated

Shakti visiting Shiva

-- a hieros gamos --

opposites coinciding

down through decades

leaving me grateful

and so much less blind

aware of my slumber

“when you awake

you will remember

everything”

© 2003, 2004 Thomas N. Dennis

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