Anyway, of course Baba Yaga in any incarnation never has & never will be canonized, but I still wish she was my patron. & so I imagine her as grandmother and protector, dispelling the myths spread to slander her, grinding the patriarchy to a pulp in that mortar & pestle.
i)
baba yaga is my grandmother,
baking bread by morning:
she kneads her mottled heart,
offers it to the oven: all day it rises,
each pulse powering
the bellows that set the forest
breathing, her avian hut
slowly stirring with the day.
she works, and works, arms a
a sinewy genealogy, layers of onion-skin
windowing over veins tracing paths,
remembering: a loaf for my mother,
and my mother’s mother, one for my
grandfather and another for the birds.
late afternoon, she shakes out her linens,
magpie wings as she flutters out, all
walnut-kneed and juniper-eyed,
from tree-tops she watches winter sun
soak the river fiery, turn the coals
in the dark furnace of her woods.
ii)
baba yaga is my grandmother,
even though she has no children.
those she shirked retort
that she’s just a spinster, a
dessicated pestle-pusher
but i have seen the red rider
leaving hoofprints in the yard
at dawn, & her corvid voice creaking
& lilting as she gathers herbs,
smirking:
don’t tell your mother
i’ve been teaching you bawdy songs!
iii)
baba yaga is my grandmother,
although no one believes it.
she’s not even a woman,
they scoff. village men say
she drinks the blood of livestock,
devours our children! robs
every nest, corrupts them, crazed
barren woman, bitter and unfed;
look at her fence! they cry,
(mistaking brambles for ribcages,
silver birches for weathered bones.)
they never remember
how all the women call for her,
have her cure their difficult infants,
coax them down that red-poppied
path, spin their linens, save their lives.
the men scorn, but she knows
their need, & how in times of
desperation they remember
that psha krev dog’s blood
is just a curse for a burned hand.
iv)
baba yaga is my grandmother
& also probably my great-grandmother.
those skeletons? she says,
those are my only relatives:
they said, bury me here, baba,
i will be fodder for your sunflowers,
i want asters & yarrow to blossom
from the hollows of my eyes!
baba shakes her head,
a handful of rich dark earth
in her fingers: everything we eat,
you know, is of the dead.
v)
baba yaga is my grandmother,
bright forest inside of me:
& they said she is death
but i know it’s more dangerous
to create
with a mortar with a spindle
with a sharp flint spark!
to crush harm like poppyseeds
into numb paste on your tongue –
forget the macabre lanterns,
she says, you won’t need them
in the dark:
every night she sends me off as
my own talisman,
my whole skull blazing with light.
fossil corals and other creatures, kananaskis, july 2010
When my grandmother was in the last years of her life, she often retreated into memories of her early years; she spoke of relatives and friends long since passed. English slipped away into the background, as her first language seemed more suitable for telling me about people like her grandmother whom she'd only ever known in that language. The present moments were a gauzy blur to her, and this frightened her; they were much less clear than the past times that had suddenly flooded into view, carrying her into a comforting future where she believed she would live amongst those personages again.
When my father found out he was dying, his interest in geology saw a striking resurgence. He studied it in university before becoming a teacher, and throughout my childhood we were always hunting fossils and inspecting outcroppings. However, a few years ago, he became immersed in tomes on stratigraphy and sedimentology again, and travelling in the mountains became a time for him to recite the epics of terrain formation. This past summer we drove southward through the mountains from Jasper to Kananaskis and I learned pretty much everything about how the middle Rockies formed. He reveled in telling me every detail, as he was parsing every pattern of thrust faults and reconstructing each shattered slope, reading the rocks, the story of their genesis. And it occured to me that this recounting of the story of creation, the slow transformations that made the world was a deep comfort to him; in this time of certain uncertainty, of living daily with an illness that will kill him, it calms him to dwell on understanding the story of the forces that move the earth beyond us.
* * *
when my father fell ill, he
starting reading the rocks:
in every surface crack he saw
the seismic shift in his own
marrow, a mirror of his slow decay:
it’s in the barest wavering of fingers,
pallid colour of the dry rock face.
in this sickness, he says, there’s
no great landslide: i erode.
it’s the slow slip in a steady
rainstorms, persistent wind
twinges, the shake of dead cells
rattling in a cave of riddled bone.
one by one those fragments gather:
infinitesimal ions seeking each other,
pushing through the cloudy morion,
migrations replacing the base.
my bones, he says, are no carbonate.
they’re quicker, like young clastics:
bodies of scrappy particles gathered
on land, wreathed & jointed by water.
we are all cobbled creatures, sedimentary.
clay in shale, siltstone, gritstone, gravel
and sand. smashed together by the whim
of the river & the wind.
& so he softens, despite himself. despite
the heart still quartzite, pulsing intrusion
into the limestone, those mountains of
small lost things:
crinoids and lilies and three-lobed water
insects, mollusc mantles and coral rings.
repetition after repetition in the strata,
an augury, a memory, of how
every tiny dying makes the earth.
