Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all.- Stephen King
The birds whispered my name,
As I fidgeted on a cold chair,
Learning of a god dressed in thorns.
As they talked in righteous dictation,
I would pull thorny brambles from dirty hands-
Finding god in the splinters.
I remember how the rain tasted-
Dry in safe beds made from synthetic fibers.
Yet I could hear the birds whisper my name,
Telling me stories,
We forgot to tell ourselves.
© Si Matta
Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves― Laura Esquivel
I use to dream,
but my well
has ran dry.
Like cottonmouth.
I often cough
on words and
pass the torch.
A flame.
© Si Matta
Never lost/ Fading slowly to Silence/ By infinite degrees”
― Ashim Shanker
The sinew of
the moment led
us to this
leather of silence.
Sometimes I forget
your name, but remember
the taste.
A distant drum-
Your heart.
© Si Matta
“His eyes were that colour you can’t see in the rainbow. Indigo.”
― Rainbow Rowell
I remember turquoise,
it tasted blue
in my mouth
as he shoved
it down my
throat.
He gushed in
my hands, unaware
of the water
I held.
© Si Matta
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.” – Emily Dickinson
~
There are numbers zipped up in code that distinguish a place. A place where the mailman sometimes drives a mile or more to the next box; markers upon a black sea of asphalt, gravel and rain. Toivo lived here, amongst the mapleway and dirt trails- snags of trees swaying in the wind. A psithurism cathedral, with halls that echoed Finnish Polkas in a land of make believe. My Grandfather came from an old world, yet made a new one in the mossy twigs of 98648.
I am the oldest of 10 grandchildren, and arrived into a world filled with imagination and music. My grandfather played the accordion, spoke Finnish when drinking with his brothers and sisters, and loved to tell good stories. My oldest memories are set to the soundtrack of joy, laughter, and the Chicken Dance. Gramps had instruments in every corner and nook- amongst the dusty wisps of paper scrolled upon with poems, music, and blueprints for building. His hands were always inventing something new. When I was 9, he invented Toivo Land.
Toivo was an imaginary friend he made out of sawdust flesh, dressed in cover-alls, and who wore a face of permanent marker drawn upon a milk jug. Toivo always sat on an old Ford tractor that was rusty and splintered (unless he was out and about with the Toivo Land Band.) Toivo was a Magician, and like the Wizard of Oz, Toivo plowed a yellow brick road dotted with hand painted signs, and paved with the falling leaves of Maples, Oak, and Fir. A network of discovery that spanned 3 acres, and a lifetime. Toivo was always busy- this was Toivo’s land.
Toivo: 1) Finnish toivo = ‘hope’, ‘wish’, ‘desire’ 1 a) … with an older meaning ‘faith’, ‘trust’, ‘promise’
(Photo of Toivo Land Band @ Skamania County Fair Parade, Stevenson, WA. 98648 , cir. 1984)
~~
The faint sound of Polka seeping from old cassettes keeps time with the machines monitoring his breathing. His heart beats sporadic metronomes to his Covid-19 fever dreams. His fingers fold in on themselves- clutched and cold. It has been awhile since he has held the weight of billows and keys strapped upon his stern shoulders. He is quiet and ready- ready to make music again.
“Thank you,” I sob a hard sentence, stuck in my throat made of his flesh, “thank you Grandpa for always being there, and making our lives magic, and filled with love.”
“Thank you Grandpa for Toivo!”- I strain the words between tears that fall upon my pandemic shield made of plastic.
We lock a gaze of Finnish silence, the kind of silence filled with the solidarity of *Sisu. A stoic tear moves its way down his ageless face of wisdom, and with a side quiet smile, he says:
“It is all I could have hoped for!”
“It is all I could have hoped for.”
———————————————————————————————————————
* Sisu is a Finnish concept described as stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness and is held by Finns themselves to express their national character. It is generally considered not to have a literal equivalent in English.
“Sleep apnea is a plague in the western world.”
― Steven Magee
She passed out in
a cacophony of memories.
All the pretty dreams,
Dissected and worn.
She fell asleep to
the sound of old records.
All the pretty covers,
Creased and torn.
She curls her lips
to the worlds she dreams.
All the murmured words,
Bathed with scorn.
She walks unaware of
the stilts of gravity.
All the heavy faces,
Draped and creased.
A mask now covers
her mouth, as her
eyes attempt the
words
of sleep.
Sometimes death sinks uneasy
in the appetite of the lost,
A ritual with
no rite.
It has been since time
that plagues feel the
urge to breath,
eyes blink uneasy
behind
concealed ironies.
© Si Matta
Beneath the securities of good nights and safe houses, lived fear. Fear dressed in Existential fangs always sat at the outside waiting to get in. The sweet smell of apple pie and coffee seemed a good enough shield to the elephant that sat in at the edge of the room, flicker of flame and wax. Shadows have always lurked beneath the savory light of ‘everything’s fine if you send hopes and prayers.’ Then one day, everything changed. Not the flash of atomic light we dreamt of in cold war beds, terrified with nightmare, and the comfort of mothers floor. No, it changed the way you would expect a tad pole to become a frog, unseen but heard for miles across platforms of social distancing. The veil became thin, and the emperor ran across abandoned golf courses, naked and scared.
Photo: Patricia Halleran
Pay attention to what the frogs have to say, they may have all the answers we need.
Be safe. Be kind. Be gentle.
‘The vision, however new and culturally unique, is translated back into a traditional oral format: the new within the old, reflecting the tenacity of oral tradition.’
“Magic in the Mountains: The Yakima Shaman: Power & Practice”, by Donald Hines, 1993
Grandma Shirley and the songs of forgotten dreams.
Laying down screams for my band, Cathartes Aura in 2019.
When I was young, my world seethed with the wonder of nature—the gilded peaks draped in mist, ancient trees resisting the chainsaw’s hum, rivers meandering in dramatic silence as forests fell like rain. These landscapes were soundtracked by stereo speakers blasting Black Sabbath, by motorcycles, Iron Maiden, skateboarding, and punk rock. I’d listen to quaking mountains scream like thunderbirds in 4/4 time and distortion, summoning visions through a haze of psychedelic experiments. (I believe my ancestors used mushrooms as a kind of message in a bottle—or, more accurately, a cap.)
I felt the anger and confusion of being cut off from my ancestors and the spirit of place, forced to bow to an anemic god who never had our Mother’s best intentions at heart, feeding us a diet of forgetting. Old stories would rise up, speaking of days lost to the corpses of progress and manifest destinies, as sweaty bodies slammed together in a prayerful trance. It was redemption from the plagues—at least for a little while.
Check out our band, Cathartes Aura.
The Cascade Range, where it crosses the Columbia River, exhibits enormous cross sections of lava, and at its base are petrified trunks of trees, which have been covered and hidden from view except where the wash of the mighty stream has exposed them. Indians have told me, of their knowledge, that, buried deep under the outpours of basalt, or volcanic tufa, are bones of animals of siah , or the long ago.
Where Gods live.
An excerpt from ‘The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee’, by James Mooney, Chapter VII, Smohalla and his Doctrine
“Mary was born at the Cascades in 1854, in the “Moon of the Falling Leaves”, October. Many Indians did not know what year they were born, much less the month and day.
Matriarch.
Mary was only eighteen months old at the time of the Battle of the Cascades, in March 1856. After her father was hanged by order of the U. S. Army, Mary went with her mother and other family members back to the Wishram village.
In the 1870′s, as the young widow of Henry Will-wy-ity, a Wishram Indian, she traded a team of horses to Kenzy Marr for 160 acres of his donation land claim at Marr’s Landing. Here, at the end of the present lndian Mary Road, her brother built for her a nice wooden cabin.”
Read more about our Grandmother, Kaliah Will-wy-ity, here at my Cousins webiste: https://chieftumulthtreatysigner.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/skamania-historical-society-pamphlet-on-indian-mary-written-by-ida-williams-altringer.pdf
Also, check out this site for more info pertaining to our heritage as Watɬlala Band of Chinuk (Cascade Indians): https://chieftumulthtreatysigner.wordpress.com/
Old photo shows “Indian Mary” Stooquin, right, with daughters and a friend. From left is Nellie Arquette Miller, 18, a friend; Amanda Williams, 14; Abbie Reynolds Estrabrook, 7; and Mary Will-wyity, 40. Photo taken at Moffett’s Hot Spring about 1894.