The Breath of Life
clay \’klā\ n 1: plastic
earthy material
used in making pottery which becomes
permanently hardened by firing 2: earth,
ground, mud 3: the
mortal human body
carved from a corpse, all curves and
cornices,
the universe was, for the Babylonians, bound
by
water, by woman, the Tigris and Euphrates.
The god of light made rivers from her eyes
in
Egypt where they understood that Earth crowned
bloody
and primeval from between her thighs,
Nut
was a warrior. Her glyph, two
crossed arrows
set
against skin. Later it would mean weaver
from
the Torah, from the first creation,
this:
“And God created man in his image…
male and female he created
them.” Even
Elohim. Plural. Curious
feminine ending
after the flood, after they emerged
alone
from their chest, Deucalion and Pyrrha heard
God’s
voice. It said, throw behind you
the bones
of your Mother. From stones, then, the rest of us
know
that in the Gnostic Gospels, God says, “I am
the
Womb to the All…the glory of the Mother.”
Later,
“I am the whore, and the holy one.
I
am the wife and the virgin…the daughter”
Spider
Woman, who made the sun from turquoise,
white shell, red and yellow rock, spun
the world
from a purple glow and us
from herself, a bit
of her own
being. Always a few more threads
to placate Pele—creatrix of sea
matrix, island
garlands, eruption itself, the cone called Mount
Kilauea—one sacrifices young.
Men licked clean
with her tongue, tossed back as black blood, healing
a
great clay griddle balanced on mountains.
This,
they say in Columbia, is what Romi Kumu
made. The sky. The Earth she shot forth in fire
from
her seething sex. Her orgasm,
us
another,
an Aztec, also made the ground
quake. Coatlicue fashioned the world, this primal
bauble, from her lava
altar. From Aztlan,
her seat on
that high peak, she sets us swaying
holding the multiverse in her womb,
her breasts—
the moon and sun, two parts only of that all
encompassing passion (procreation, the thousand-
petaled lotus)—are Devi-Shakti’s great gift
claiming
he too could make life, a man once
tried
to shame our mother, Mawu. Carving
a
person from a banyan tree, he breathed on it.
When
nothing happened, she planted him with death
what
some scientists believe our mother to be
is indeed dirt, the latter our ladder,
the true
rag and bone shop where the
heart starts. Clay.
Electrochemically alive, asleep and waiting
my touch. It awakened her, my daughter, my budding
godling. How? All I know
is the making
of my dearest dradle, my gorgeous
little golem,
took hands, a woman’s hands and
clay, clay
to carve each leg, each coltish curve,
the unopened
petals of her sex, her power, her
charms, ribs,
arms, the strong line along a
jaw. I ran my hands
over her, smoothing, worshipping
what began
raw only to become supple, fair,
then, everywhere,
skin. Skin the color of menses, the color of
pain
and
patience and pity. This is how one
shapes
the
world. Abstractions, Goddess, the
moon’s dark blood.
Until she breathed, the whole world
held its breath.
