Hibernation
Every winter she remembers how the ice
came down out of the north,
locking the land in creaking sheets
of weighted white. Bears froze
in their dens. Ptarmigan and hares
stayed white all year round.
The big animals, the mastodon
and dire wolf, even saber-toothed cat
stayed south of the Big Ice, obeying
that single law: Eat or Die.
She lived those ages out in a high cave
on the Prince of Wales Island looking south.
She scambled together a denning nest
of dry seaweed, lichen and moss,
living on mussels and crab and finally,
gone into that hibernating sleep,
on her own fat reservoirs.
Last November, she left me, traveling
back in time and north to that cave
where now she sleeps the long north nights
dreaming perhaps of our life together
or perhaps she dreams of her glory days
with The People.
But I am abandoned here in the rainy green,
her pale girl, flap-armed marionette
with nothing real to say.
How long before a lengthening sun
sends puffins to the cave to wake
the sleeping Giantess? There will be
spring-run salmon to fuel
her waking blood. When, oh when,
will she remember me and follow
the line of the warming sun south?
In my cold garden, the apple boughs
are still bare, but I have built
a fire circle of green sea agates
and a red carnelian to call her home.
Peter and I had a fabulous day at the beach last Sunday. I’ve posted a couple of poems and a short video here to celebrate.
Surf at Bob Creek
About a million seagulls in hover-hold
over Bob Creek; about a million more
duck-diving salt water out of wings
down in fast-moving fresh water creek.
Sun beating down on high, turbulent
surf throwing its waves back like
about a million wild colts
in the spring when you’re up there
in the Kiger Range and you see them
running in a herd of young’uns, five
colors of blowing, tangled mane,
tails flying like spindrift blown
back off the big surf at Bob Creek.
Fish crows bucking winter wind like
Steens Mountain ravens riding
hot summer thermals down Big Indian Gorge.
–Sandy Jensen
Jan. 24, 2010
Dream Animals
Sunset over Baker Beach
where the protected plover
hides its spotted eggs in the sand;
where on my fiftieth birthday we rode
stable horses on the beach
and I gave my black horse his head
and he charged the in-coming waves.
I still feel the lift of the sea
as we rose up
on the incoming wave.
One night at Baker Beach
a black bear
came down out of the hills
and crossed the road
like a dream animal,
giving us fair warning of the wild,
which is all around and never further
away than the clack of claws
on asphalt.
The shuddering mist claims
what once was a fair day,
and all the light is falling
into the golden sink of the West.
–Sandy Jensen
Jan. 24, 2010
When I was a child, the Giantess lived in the woods beside our house for a while. She was raising her own girl at that time, and they were on a learning circuit from the north in the Queen Charlottes down the rocky coast in the Chief’s wolf-prowed canoe.
They had visited the Makah, the Queets, the Quilute, the Puyallaps and had heard of our small, displaced clan of Wenatchees in suburban Seattle. My parents were both Skagits, and our family life together as Wenatchees was still ahead of us, but the Dzonoquas are time travelers, and she knew who we were before we did.
The thicket by our house was small as the black tip of a Sitka deer’s tail, so they couldn’t stay long, but the little Giantess-in-training found me. She jumped out from behind a cedar stump and grabbed me. I screamed as children scream in play as she ran through my familiar woodland with me bouncing in her little burden basket.
I was not afraid until the old mother appeared, tall and dark-furred, her eyes upside down moons of leathery brown, those sunken cheeks and enormous hanging dugs. I was still in the basket when the girl was put to the breast. As she sucked, drops of milk flew about from her vigor, and I, being a hungry child myself, did not hesitate to put my finger in the frothy cream to taste.
The milk, bitter as nettles, sweet as roasted camas bulbs, moved through my body like a swooning narcotic. The big mother watched me closely through the sleepy slits of her eyes. She knew who I was, that her daughter had claimed me for her own. I was, as I said, only five or six years old at the time, but I remember clearly even now in my middling age, the twin streams of the familiar and the strange that flowed with the Giantess’s milk into my veins:
The landscapes, more ancient by far, but I knew them already, the coasts, rivers, mountains, forests of my Northwest home. I knew the spirit of the longhouse, the heart of the giveaway, but strange indeed was the land of myth where Dzonoqua and all her kind and kin live in a dreamscape. I saw how they traveled through time, how they moved between worlds by the power of the story, the mask, the dance, and the song.
In disorderly chaos it has taken me decades to sort, I saw the dancer leap with his strong legs in the firelight, the booming drum, the great lifted beaks of the beautiful Cannibal birds. I saw into the future then, as now I dream the past by the power of the milk of the Giantess.
Her daughter is the Old One now, and we are milk sisters through the peculiar interweavings of time, which is like the pattern of oak leaves in the canopy overhead—laced and layered, living, dying, green, gold, yellow, brown; shadowed by day; starry dark by night and swept by the owl’s wing; called again to day by the dawn whistle of Dzonoqua, the mythological Giantess, Wild Woman of the Woods, Guardian of the Chief’s Wealth, my red cedar blood and milk.
in the spirit of Emily Carr
I Asked the Giantess What She Likes
(for Charlie Two Legs)
and she said she liked the Cassiar
jade from Charlie Two Legs, rough and smooth.
“Only the Skeena River is that color,”
she said,” That glacial till,
reflected Red Cedar green, smoky
and rich.”
She said it reminded her
of Emily Carr painting in Haida G’waii
and over in the Git’san country,
all those greens on her palette,
the way she never felt
she could get the greens right
(leafy green, blue-green, emerald green, lavender,
greenish black, deep cedar/Big
Leaf Maple/Sitka Spruce/ Doug Fir green;
Devil’s Club, Stinging Nettle, Horsetail,
Vine Maple, tag alder green).
Emily Carr knew the secret
of Cassiar jade—how the north
forest cedars and Skeena green
got locked in the stone long before
even the Giantess was born, she
who lived out the Ice Ages
in a sunny cave facing south.
Before any of us, she had her
Cassiar jade, stones in a circle,
dreaming a land bridge,
dreaming a people,
dreaming her own totemic face
high over Alert Bay,
her own mask at the chief’s side,
cedar, jade and Skeena green
her oldest gifts
to the people she dreamed.
“And I also like,” she said,
but I said, “Hush.
I am silenced.
That’s enough
for now.”
I am slowly being changed
from the inside out by the giantess
who lives in my tree—we
have become an Oregon oak
struggling to connect
the sky to the pure agates
hidden in our roots.
I vote for acorns;
she votes for falling leaves,
for shrugging off all color.
She wants to brood,
wrapped in her thick wood
until not even the sharpest stars
can pierce her dream.
I grub for the lost agates with both hands.
Stuffing them into my apron
pockets, I climb up her
chest limbs to Raven’s
unruly nest. I can place
the round stones there where the moon
can imbue them
with milky light.
Still held tight
by her dry, mossy hands,
I can turn the cheek
she can’t see to a salt breeze
coming from a sea
not far from here—
over the hill by the river’s mouth
where my jade horse still stands,
bridled
and ready to run.
–Sandy Jensen
The painter, Renee, caught the Jaguar Shaman by surprise and in a private jungle moment. Quiet and intense, she had been working out the details of a composition involving butterflies, blue, and orchids of a speaking pink. She had been startled when her increasingly detailed vision added a hidden snake, green, then another, blue.
Then the eyes appeared and the hair on her sunburned arms flushed all goosebumps, for the cat’s eyes had clearly seen her long before she picked his jaguar shape out of the wilderness mass. Then with another jolt, the shaman herself resolved as a figure out of the ground. Her brown face was tattooed with gold cat stripes, her eyes and lips pale as an albino’s, yet vivid with soul life. She had not seen Renee, for she was hunting spirits in another world.
Renee captured the introspective face of the working shaman and her animal familiar even as they faded like green mist back into the jungle. The cat had seen her; the shaman had not. Her hands shook as she put her painting kit away and found her way back to the thin thread of a jungle pathway.
The artist continued walking until she came to a swirling green river with a mind of its own. Many people were gathered on the shore crying. Men were building a small byre, and as she approached, they lit a fire under it. The flames ate at the small figure of a child in angry orange gulps. A woman with a scarlet shawl thrown over her head knelt on the ground and keened.
A teenaged boy left the group of mourners as the smell of roasting flesh rose into the air. He politely greeted the strange woman and offered ferry service over the river. “But you must wait with us an hour,” he said, “For a jaguar has taken the life of my cousin.”
Renee sat under the shade of an enormous, twisting fig tree and unpacked her painting kit, which the boy studied with great interest. She opened her sketch book, and the boy yelled when he saw the Jaguar Shaman. He snatched the book out of her hands, held the image high and ran toward his relations, who in turn stared and shouted. One older man stuck his hand into the fire and bloodied his fingers on the child’s burning body. While the teenager held still, extending the sketchbook, the old man crouched down and like a cat stalked the painting. The young man moved cagily away, and they played predator and prey in an intricate dance in the dust. Then with a feline roar and rising scream, the old shaman put all ten fingers directly on the image of the Jaguar Woman, leaving bloody dots.
Renee jumped up and held both hands to her cheeks, for she felt the man’s red fingers on her own skin. Not far away in the bush, she heard another cry that repeated the man’s scream. A long, low wind sprang up and blew through the forest with a moan that ended in a shower of hot sparks. The byre collapsed with what remained of its tender burden, and the men pushed it with long poles into the river. The mother in the scarlet shawl fell silent and watched the burning brands consumed in the green rush of the river with a mind of its own.
The young man closed the sketch book and returned it with a little bow Renee remembered from another, more courtly world. She was almost afraid to receive it, but she took it from him as he said in her language, “We can cross now.” She clutched the sketchbook to her chest as she climbed into the sturdy dugout.
The young man accepted the two coins she pressed into his hand. He took great care to point out to her which path she must take to get to her destination before dark. Renee faced the jungle alone as the wind breathed its last and the leaves settled into a waiting calm.
I saw this young Mayan shaman in Tulum, Mexico, joining his friends for a few moments as dusk fell and the band played. Like any teenager, he hung out with his friends. I observed him, his parrot feathers making him beautiful, his bow and arrow making him seem powerful and dangerous to me. I observed him so briefly. He felt my eyes perhaps and he literally disappeared as I tried to keep him in view. Maybe he merged with the crowd or slipped into the night. The way I saw it, he vanished.
I think of him often-here in my suburban home, my cul-de-sac. Yes, I honor wildness in my gardens. It is represented as a house cat could be said to represent a jaguar. But I know there is knowledge and ways of being that I will never touch. There are landscapes more seductive than a lover. And so I draw, I paint. It is my way of extending my hand into the unknown. It is my call – and I wait.
