Huddleston & Posey – Sum.10

Caity Huddleston and Rafe Posey traded art. Caity shared pictures and video of her book arts project with Rafe:

Rafe wrote this poem in response:

Gone

You are prairie
but I dream of you
and taste salt grasses.
Do you remember
last week, when you
touched me
til I cried?

The marsh reflects
your eyes, always
searching through
me for a cresting
inland surf.

You left your
self across me, marked
your path with bites
and so I wait
all open
for that crook of your finger

like the time in
your front seat
when you dared me not
to kiss you
and I didn’t know
that the same car that meant
finally
would a week later mean
gone.

* * * *

Rafe share his poem “Guzzle” with Caity:

Guzzle

What do you feed a trickster?
Do you invite Eshu
to your household,
offer him, or her, or them,
a bowl of soup, a sandwich,
the heart of a dove?

Nobody knows who the first one was: the patriarch
of tricksterfolk, or the matriarch (Mouse
Woman too is a trickster),

and now we come from everywhere
nowhere, both/and, never either/or,
dressing our backgrounds in shifting skins
and flying the tattered golden flag of trickster.

The motherfather spark of feather and fire
birthed Odysseus, dallying or captive
(depends: who did you ask?),
Lotus-eating, nymph-serving,

and me. I follow foxes through the cemetery, ink
pawprints on my hide, change my
shape and story,
recreate myself as Promethean man: trickster.

Scholars speak of shame (the loss thereof),
of lines drawn in sand or grass or garden
by cranky vengeful gods, wishing they had not made us,

had not unleashed chaos

Hermes

Bluejay

Coyote

Monkey

Loki

Me

but the world, despite five thousand years of hijinks,
is still not ready for trickster.

Caity made this collage in response:

Click to enlarge