J. R. Brady will present her poetry as part of the Petaluma Poetry Walk at the Aqus Café, Foundry Wharf, 189 H Street, Petaluma, on Sunday, September 20, 2016, 6:00 to 8:00 pm, on a program with Karen Melander-Magoon, Erica Goss, Leah Lubin and Susan Weinstein.
J. R. Brady is an award-winning playwright and poet. Her work has been produced/published in the U.S., Britain, Scotland and France. In 2012 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has performed at numerous venues including the 1996 Edinburgh Theatre Fringe Festival. A collection of her work, THE SPACE BETWEEN
was published by Beatitude in 2010 and a second collection, PERSONA, by Naiad in 2014. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
PEPIN
By J. R. Brady
Dance, dance, dance out of time...
There are no pictures of my great-grandfather.
He feared the camera would steal his soul, except
for the wedding tintype my great-grandmother
wanted so much, of them standing together against
a pastoral painted screen, she, almost sixteen, in
a borrowed white dress, he, stiffly suited, older
by ten years, black hair wild about his face, and
his eyes, the eyes that saw spirits, momentarily
blinded by a flash of light.
I saw it once before it was misplaced by someone,
long gone before me.
Dance, dance, dance out of time...
There are still fragments mentioned.
He was born mixed blood of French and Anishinnaabe
(Chippewa is a white name, a child divided between
two minds. one of worlds’ measured order, the other
of circles, circles of the sun, circles of the moon,
circles of the human heart, and which was which?
Mother? Father?
He must have told her back in the beginning, back
when they still loved each other, and she did love
him, the way an abandoned Irish orphan, raised by
nuns, can love the first feel of freedom, and flesh
and discovery of unimagined possibility.
Dance, dance, dance out of time...
The Anishinaabe say we possess two souls, one that
travels in shadows and dreams, and one that stays
deep inside the human heart, and if either is ever
lost, it leaves behind an emptiness, unendurable,
except when filled by wandering spirits who come
to warm themselves, then leave, without explanation,
and from the beginning there were spirits who came to
him and became him speaking an ancient language that
knew the cries of animals and of the earth and of
the wind.
And in the beginning she believed with him in
his voices of vanished worlds, for to her, Ireland
was a harsh distant word, and nuns knew nothing of
animals or the wind.
Dance, dance, dance out of time...
The Anishinaabe tell a story of how a coyote, once,
fell in love with a star...but because a star
can never leave the sky, the coyote had to climb to
the top of a mountain so they could grab hold of
each other and soar together high up into the
heavens, where forever they could dance circling
the earth in an endless night.
But the coyote, being a thing of flesh and blood,
grew tired and numb and longed for sleep, and for
the sun, and, finally, it had to beg the star to stop
awhile, but the star couldn’t because it was star,
and so the coyote decided to let go and fall back
to earth, alone.
Dance, dance, dance out of time...
And I have heard it said that people can stop
loving for the same reasons they began.
New Orleans, St Paul, San Francisco...in the cities
the spirits, they stayed with him, holding him safe
against sadness, but never her, until their son died
and times grew hard and she railed against him
demanding a silence of voices that refused to know
her, and with whisky there came silence ,and an illusion
of finding each other again...but then the space inside
him filled with such a darkness the silence became
all of him, and, even without whisky, there were no
spirits.
Dance, dance, dance out of time...
They say that when the coyote fell to earth it
lost its first life but found a second that it
lived less foolishly than before.
My great-grandmother remarried an Irish horse-collar
maker who drank as full a measure as her first husband
but, afterwards, would simply sing himself to sleep,
and that was enough,
And no one ever asks about the star.
When my great-grandfather is remembered, always he
is remembered for leaving.
It is supposed he died an alcoholic’s death, anonymous
in a Sacramento hotel room.
It is supposed but no on knows, and it is said that
spirits of the dead wander forever in the circling
winds looking for their own lost world, and it is said
that blood runs thin through silence, dissolving time,
dissolving memory, dissolving connection.
Dance, dance, dance out of time...
And always I have wondered about the star.
And when I look at our family album picture of
my great-grandmother with her horse-collar maker,
I feel their silences echoing inside me, and I
know I almost understand the language of animals,
and I know I am uncomfortable around cameras, and
I know my own sadness always softens whenever I
stop and listen to the wind.
