Before And Beyond Memory

My hands find the perfect form they know from before I was born.

            From the genes of the shipwrights and the days with the Beothuk;

            From the journeymen into the Ozarks, up from the Delta  on the

                        Buffalo Trace.

A thousand years I have carpentered, Mosedales the Welsh,

            Boyds the Scots, builders from wood, rooted with the trees,

What I know from before and beyond memory.

Chorus:

Stories, songs on my tongue, I taste them before I find the words and melodies,

            The spirits of generations, dead but not gone.

Wood shavings curl up from the blade of this ancient tool in my hands.

            To sharpen and set the iron true to a hair’s breadth, I hold the wisdom

                        of my origins in my eye and fingertips, my solace and joy

                        in being and doing from before and beyond memory.

Chorus:

Stories, songs on my tongue. I taste them before I find the words and melodies,

            The spirits of generations, dead but not gone .

Before and beyond memory is on a whisper and a wisp, a rhythm,

            A pulse that rises and falls on the summer night,

            From the throats of tiny frogs in deep forest,

            From the curl of a shaving from the edge of the iron, the  fair curve of the hull.

Chorus:

Stories, songs on my tongue, I taste them before I find the words and melodies,

            The spirits of generations, dead but not gone.

I am a vein in a north coast rock ledge, a reflection in black inky waters in a Bayou

            Bog.

And red too runs my blood, cross-bred carrying dreams of my tribes: Shawnee and

Potowatami, Creek and Sennaca; five-hundred tongues we spoke on Turtle

Island before the great sails rose up in the sunrise.

My turnings follow a rhythm from when I knew the moon by the signs,

            The molting of the geese, the ripening of the berries.

I put feathers in my hair, chant and dance in wild clover.

Chorus:

Stories, songs on my tongue, I taste them before I find the words and melodies,

            The spirits of generations dead but not gone.

Smoke rises from my ritual fires and I muse.

            Cloven tracks my mind leaves, going back, delving in.

            White, and red under my skin ,in my blood, down to my core.

I am rooted with the trees.

October, 2004, New Castle Street