Little Red

Grandma's house held my otherness politely.  I could feel almost welcome there, if only they would ignore me.  Leave me to excavating boxes, sifting for clues.  There were photos of a stranger, her husband/my grandfather who was dead forty years before I came; but through the graceless patience of DNA, I was his replicant, a spitting, crying, laughing image of him made to living color.  I haunted her from where I sat, cross-legged looking at the Pyramids through the yellowing pastime of the stereoscope.  Here is the Ganges.  There is Brasil.  Here are black boys, naked, dancing at the edge of some nameless jungle.

Grandma's church judged all otherness as sin.  And we would sit, a row of us, cousins, with heads bobbling under the weight of the pastor's numbing terrorism, the stinging simplicity of his words.  Tired from our morning chores, hung over from the night before, we are susceptible to the mantra of self-loathing and the vibrating fears.  We are hypnotics, somnambulists; we will believe anything if only you will give us two flap jacks and a cot to sleep off these delusions.  The gold tray is passed and on top of the desert of coins are three green pyramids.

Grandma's land absorbed my otherness completely--inconsequential, easy.  The wind took the pieces of me (baked by the summer sun...but not cremated) and carried me aloft to oceans and to continents.  There is intrinsic honesty in the world, now that the maps have been made.  And spinning, aching like Icarus for the earth, I see something for everyone:  children fishing from a sacred stream, Tokyo at night, at old couple walking slowly on a remote beach, the Pyramids at sunset, singeing me with the trick of bi-ocular insight, the third dimension.