White Horses

The world is a wedding.

MARCH

She didn’t want to wake me, but staccato breaths call me across the threshold. Time for a bath. Time for the kettle to boil. It’s warm for March, so we open the door. Robins sing and wrestle twine from garden stakes.

One March we made love in a pine grove. In the distance, church bells pealed, while above us a family of crows sang like gypsies, invisible in the dark canopy. Though it was cold, we slept on the ground. Pine needles clung to our hair, and all through the day I could smell the pleasant musk of woman.

Tonight I will dream. I will dream I lift a stone and find the heart of a tree. Within, a mouse-colored owl sleeps in a nest of feathers. I will take two feathers before I leave, their quills weighted with flesh.

This is a prose poem I wrote, somewhat elliptically, about the birth of our son, Tommy, now twenty-eight. I’m not sure when I wrote it, but it probably wasn’t long after he was born. I’m using it as the inaugural poem in my forthcoming collection, Mythologies of the Wild of God. I always liked this one, but it didn’t seem to fit in my last book of poetry, Meditations in Times of Wonder. Originally, it had a verse prelude which I eventually dropped. The prelude told the story of the dream my wife, Bonnie, had the night before Tommy was born: she was watching a herd of white horses who were directed (in the strange logic of dreams) by a woman in a blue cloak and mantle holding a staff, a kind of shepherdess of horses. The horses stampeded up and down the slopes of a valley, the thunder of their hooves crescendoing as they reached the bottom of the slopes and softening as they ascended the slopes. When Bonnie awoke, she was in labor. In the logic of the dreamworld, the sound of the hooves corresponded to the contractions that announced both her labor and the arrival of a child. He was born later that warm March afternoon in the living room with the front door open.

Sometime later, Bonnie adapted my verse prelude for a song she was writing about the event. The result was “White Horses.” We were asked to record the song for a compilation and the recording session was one of the quickest I’ve ever experienced. If memory serves, we recorded the vocal and two guitars live (Bonnie playing 12-string and singing with me on 6-string) and then I overdubbed a mandolin part. Yes, she sings like an angel. The whole thing took, maybe, an hour and a half. That was a good thing, because we had to finish before Bonnie started leaking milk in anticipation of breastfeeding our infant daughter Mae, now twenty-six, who was home with Grandma. You can listen to the song here:

I’m thinking about all this because it’s November and because Thanksgiving happens this week here in the (more-or-less) United States of America; it’s a time when we call to mind that for which we are thankful. It was also in November two years ago that Bonnie underwent a hysterectomy to rid her of the uterine cancer we discovered growing there earlier that year. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, we were all sitting at dinner when Bonnie received the call from her oncologist that she was free of cancer. Thanksgiving started two days early that year. And it’s never stopped.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, we suspect Bonnie’s cancer was due to shedding related to the rollout of the Covid vaccines earlier in 2021. A few days after a visit from some recently-vaccinated friends, Bonnie started to have some extraordinarily heavy periods with blood clots the size of her fist—symptoms recently vaccinated women were also experiencing. We put this together when The New York Times ran a piece “What Women Need to Know About the Covid Vaccine,” on 14 April 2021 (frankly, I’m surprised they haven’t changed the title to “What Birthing-People Need to Know About the Covid Vaccine”). The article described Bonnie’s symptoms exactly—but only in the context of vaccinated women. However, the kicker was in the comments section: comment after comment included both vaccinated and unvaccinated women reporting similar experiences. (The comments, I am not very surprised to report, have been scrubbed.) We also know that at that time recently-vaccinated post-menopausal women—even in their 80s in some cases!—were also reporting strange vaginal bleeding. If this is the “New Normal” (remember that piece of ill-conceived propaganda?), then to hell with it.

As can be expected, when we reported our suspicions to friends and family, many thought we had lost our minds and become complete conspiracy nuts. We got the same response from her doctors. (I won’t go into a whole thing here. I get too angry.) We may be crazy, but we’re not blind. And neither are we stupid. But you have to hand it to the Archons: they really know how to operate the engineering of consent. Seriously, how many times did you hear the slogan “Safe & Effective”? I bet it’s in the millions. This and others like it are examples of what Aldous Huxley calls “hypnopaedic proverbs” in Brave New World. Brave new world, indeed. Octogenarians suddenly having periods again, healthy women suddenly having irregular periods that can lead to cancer—hardly sounds like an endorsement of “Safe & Effective.” Rather, it sounds as if something is seriously wrong. This is not hard to figure out.

One of the things that kept me going spiritually during those dark days was the story of the woman with the issuance of blood found in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Matthew’s telling, as it happens, appeared this year in the traditional Roman Catholic cycle of the Sunday gospel readings earlier this month, just about the two-year anniversary of Bonnie’s surgery. Over the darkest period of Bonnie’s illness, this story gave me consolation. Here is Luke’s telling:

And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any, 
Came behind him, and touched the border of his garment: and immediately her issue of blood stanched.
And Jesus said, “Who touched me?” When all denied, Peter and they that were with him said, “Master, the multitude throng thee and press thee, and sayest thou, ‘Who touched me?’”
And Jesus said, “Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that power is gone out of me.”
And when the woman saw that she was not hid, she came trembling, and falling down before him, she declared unto him before all the people for what cause she had touched him, and how she was healed immediately.
And he said unto her, “Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.” (Luke 8: 43-48)

In both Matthew and Mark, shorter versions of the tale, this important detail is added: “For she said within herself, ‘If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole’” (Matt 9: 21).

In all three gospels, the story of the woman with the issuance of blood happens within the telling of another story—that of the raising of Jairus’s daughter. In that part of the wider context, this moment in Mark always destroys me, here in the KJV: “And he took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, ‘Talitha cumi’; which is, being interpreted, ‘Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.’” The word “damsel” and not “little girl” (as is often the case) seems to me a more accurate descriptor of a girl on the threshold of womanhood.

I was always, even as a kid in Catholic school, fascinated by the connection of the woman’s suffering and the girl’s age: twelve years. The connection to menstruation and fertility in this story should not be lost on anyone. The woman’s disease is an aberration of the fertility cycle (which would have made her “unclean” in her culture) while the little girl is just about to arrive at hers, but is prevented by death. Not one theologian or priest has been able to explain this connection to me. But it seems so obvious.

The connection between the woman and Jairus’s daughter and their cycles of fertility is what tied this story to Bonnie for me. This is a woman who has born eight babies to full-term and nursed each one at her breast. There was nothing wrong with her system and cancer does not run in her family. Like the woman with the issuance of blood and Jairus’s daughter, this shouldn’t have happened to her and it was abnormal. But her healing was on account of the same source as theirs: “Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole.” “Talitha cumi.”

Here in Michigan it’s deer-hunting season and for the last two weeks of November I spend most mornings and late-afternoons in my deer blind waiting for the deer to appear. Sometimes they do. I also spend a lot of time in contemplation, which often leads to the making of poems. All these realities coalesced in a poem I received last week as I meditate upon them:

A TALISMAN

The textures and colors of the forest
In the milky light of a warm late autumn day—

Bark of trees: some muscular, some grooved,
Twisted, some cracked and bent, some pocked by woodpeckers,

Some rotted yet stand, a valorization
Of the lost children; the stubborn and russeted

Oak leaves that hang from the branches tremble;
The fading hues of the understory: the first

To wear their green and the last to lose it.
The day the bees awakened before their second

Slumber they scavenged the empty honey
Supers in the barn, even the jar made sticky

With propolis resin I left on the rail	
Of the porch after I decanted its sharp tincture.

“Fly away, children, the dark is coming!
Fly away and form a circle around the Queen!”

Five crows violate the silence; they call
To each other as they soar and swoop from treetops,

Striking in their absolute black against
A sky of shimmering blue and billowing clouds.

And I find a single strand of Bonnie’s 
White hair on the field of my black wool coat—its curl

An undulating wave that I would know
Anywhere—and discover again where I am.

The world is a wedding.