Divine stereo listening with my eyes Closed in the sweet spot under the patio Not far from the hanging seed The crows confabulate in a Narrowing circle above my head The orange-breasted robins on the left and Plain brown wrens quarrel in the dense Mock oranges the gardener recently chopped The tops of making less space and more rancor. From somewhere on the right a bossy bluejay gets Off his feathery duff and regulates—loudly.
I sit so still a fat white dove comes to the feeder within Two arms’ reach and clicks seeds into his beak The sound of raindrops spitting against glass. My eyes are closed but I know he is fat because I have been Feeding my backyard aviary heartily—because his wing beats are Heavy when he flies away—and because the plastic feeder swings And squeaks on its rusty hook in his absence.
I know he is pure white because My imagination tells me so.
A too-warm-for-early-March breeze sidles In from the East—the one wind whose name I don’t know—and plays a single note on the Copper wind chime to my right before touching My hand the way a virgin who wants A lover with his whole body is only brave enough To suggest hand-holding One soft pinky tip to another.
The no-name virgin god-wind and all the bawdy Many-named and sun-shining gods and all the white And black and blue and brown and orange birds
And the magenta hibiscus—the coral The gold, the scarlet
And the topaz pool The empty terracotta pots All the cement the color of cement
Nothing separate—color, sound, Birds, flesh, wind. One Pulsing lover and beloved
And gratitude—the snake Who worships and adores his own tail His eyes half bliss slits as he consumes it Whole—too sweet for venom or bite And ever expanding this tail as it moves Through his body passing each one of his Seven humming hearts, emerging from Him longer and more glorious than before Expanding the circle endlessly Scale by glistening scale.
Seed by seed Petal by petal Feather by feather Melody by melody Ear by ear Both eyes closed.
I am an essayist and poet. My work has been rejected by some of the finest journals in America. Fortunately, it also gets accepted from time to time and has appeared in equally fine journals such as Word Riot, Inlandia, Brew City Magazine, and SageWoman, among others.. In 2002, I won the Academy of American Poets Prize for Vanderbilt University.
For no good reason, I possess an unnecessarily dark humor which is why being third generation California Inland Empirian delights me so. My gods are weird. I once won $350 for writing a smartassed essay on “why the wise use of water is important in my daily life”. I am undoubtedly the Greek god Hermes’ special snowflake. I’m pretty sure I got into college via a series of fortuitous clerical errors.
When I had to grow up and get a real job, I decided against it and stayed a writer. I have worked many odd—and I mean odd—jobs to support my habit: PR writer for country music hopefuls, resume massager, WalMart fitting room attendant and switchboard operator, and telephone psychic, just to name a few.
I am also albino. That's why my psychic gifts are so strong. I traded in my pigment for magical foresight, because that's how it works. It gets all technical. Trust me. That's totally how it works.
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M. N. Ashley 