recording

“Blood runs thick and when it rains it pours down
On the family tree on the fields of war
I spend my time being broken hearted and grieving bound

I've had enough temporary acquisition
Building fences for no gain
Taking dead trees down before the winter freeze
I said let 'em rot and fall where they may”
- the Indigo Girls, “Devotion”

for Amy: sister, but fellow traveller, more important


Found one of your songs today
recorded at the end of an old cassette
like some unexpected conversation tangent
untouched for a decade or more

Maybe it was that odd juxtaposing
my indigenous-fusion-rock and
your heart-edgewise songwriters
that brought this clear: we tried for years
to have some kind of meaningful conversation
when we barely even shared a language
both choosing as we did to give up native tongue
and reinvent soul-vocabulary while confronting
or not confronting mutually exclusive suffering
the product of that long division process
known to us as “family”

One lasting gift of the family legacy:
how to keep your struggle to yourself
don't show pain, never have needs, stay really busy
and whatever you do don't dare to overcome
because what would we be, if not workers
and that work ethic was the family's other gift
(please conjugate this verb: have worked, are working,
must always be worked up about something)

But those fields of war were the only home we had
and we did work them, summer, winter persevering
cause what would we do with a whole lifetime if not
tough it out
and what would we do with a home if not
make more work of it
and what would we do with strength if not
use it to keep fighting
and what would we consume if
those precious crops didn't come in
but they always did: more battle, duty, blame,
and anger in abundance
and some shallow bitter roots to give the taste of home

really we were weary migrants laboring long years
just to leave the collapsing motherland
whose language is not spoken in the world of the living
whose traditions do not give any substance to life
or any continuity worth claiming
whose economy was based on codependence
whose currency was lies, mind-power, and obligation
and whose lexicon does not contain a word for “heart”

Well here is one thing I can offer
broke and broken as I still may be
I've had enough of that separation pain
and I don't want to build any more fences
even if the boundaries are still unclear
we can work our claims out over time
and we can let some past claims fall
we can work our new ground without overworking us
and we can use whatever language
and whatever music moves us up and outward

No idea how that song got onto my cassette
I wouldn't even have found the thing except
by cleaning out a box I wanted to use
to mail some gifts, some small efforts at kindness
to you and to the (other) grandmother who taught us
how to add “kindness” to our language in the first place