The Onion Farmer's Daughter

One Soul and Two Bellies

She is always coming back to me in dreams, the onion farmer's daughter with the dark hair like tangled reeds in a pond at dusk. She weaves in and out of my night-time wanderings, a shadow in white, her skin almost as pale, well, like an onion. She is beautiful in a gothic sort of way and always light on her feet. She must have been lovely when she was alive.

There is one soul that flits between Kathryn's and my belly all summer long – this onion farmer's daughter's soul, as if uncertain of where to land. It is not like that dove Noah sent out after the flood and there was one place to land. She has two peaks to choose between – two round white bellies, bursting with babies.

I sat eating my salad, grateful for the greens, as grateful had I been Rapunzel's mother. Shell was a Wiccan witch, but her greens held no charm. I was attracted by the skulls on the fencepost, an obvious reference to Baba Yaga. She was only ravenous in her lust for life – to rend things from the soil – to wrest babies from wombs and to twist people back into living, no matter how painful.

You see, I was not truly living when I encountered Shell, not living at all – merely ambulating through. It's damn painful to live and that's the truth, but the wild joy – like honeysuckle rambling up the fence is sure worth-it. The scratch of that metaphorical itch.

All summer, my husband and I would dig up change for the grocery store. At Shell's every week, I feasted on salad and good lean meat. She took me in and fed me and wrenched me toward living and out of the shadow-world I'd been inhabiting.

Percy's Mournful Banjo

His music has a way of creeping into the hollows like ivy with hands reaching. Percy makes banjo music sound mournful. He'd never play it too near the school, only in the wilds, a half-hour walk away on the narrow path. It is the saddest banjo I ever heard played.

His long white fingers move over the pearl inlaid arm, matte white on glossy white. It's a fine instrument fashioned by some country person with a bit of money, enough to have a son educated in the city. I wonder about the parents he never speaks of. I never talk of mother or Big Dad. There isn't much to say, except they live a hundred and seven miles to the north and west where the flat lands turn into hills that wear a sad blue cast in the evenings.

The girls say the woods are haunted, but it is probably the echo of Percy's Banjo. They would be horrified to see him now with his dark pants' legs rolled up and his pale tater feet in the water like some country man. They would be even more aghast to see him with me, who could never wash the stain of country life from her, having been brought to school by her mother in a simple rough-spun muslin dress, little better than a sack, save for a blue silk ribbon that was my mother's pride to have stitched to it.

No one saw Percy arrive at the school. He showed up one day in English class, a tall angular youth of twenty-five with fierce ringlets of red hair framing his Botticelli face. All the girls loved him and assumed him the son of some great Southern family, such a languid pale poetic man. I thought his face was rather too pinched, too infantile for a man, but still I fell in love with him.

He laid a white flower on my breast suddenly. So lost in thought was I, that I didn't hear his playing cease, nor notice that the light was failing in the east.

“ At one time, human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was Consciously aware." Julian Jaynes, The Bicameral Mind, 1976

The Bicameral Mind

She binds her hair with a bit of rabbit sinew

She walks near burning brush

A voice crackles from flickering tongues

She obeys the directive

Water rests over the hill

a pale land-eye

she has forgotten

She takes the thirsty baby

with its tongue pink

and wanting

She thanks her god

the more perfect reflection

punitive and saving

mother - father

II

Two hemispheres

one is dark and one light

One opens at night

and unleashes its dogs

of pearl milk white

One is closed upon its light

upon its well of reason

until the eyes open

Archimedes' Claw pulls up

the ship of dreams

and casts it down again

III

The deity is sinister

because no one else

has a god speaking

The sea-mist

of an eternal mother

at your shell ear

my dear

it is not normal

Two hemispheres

one shakes in terror

an earthquake

the bridge between them

pulsing nerves

IV

The brain is pink and coiled

a soft coral reef

with all the fish thoughts

It is all we have

identity, mother, father

god

Yes god is still there

swimming the waves

of our electric seas

old man

old mother

with long white sea-foam

If You are in my skull

become a whale

and swallow me whole

Birth me through your mouth

Lucy Simpson, 2/10/2009, revised 3/15/2009 Seattle

What Do You Do?

Well in the mornings I eat cereal

kids' cereal or my own

I sometimes crap afterwards

sometimes not

I tidy up the house

I nurse the younger child

I argue with the elder

I go to playgrounds

where the swings make odd shadows

I come home and make a dinner

I email friends

I write poems

I take photographs

I sometimes drink a glass of red wine

I often dream of flying

into snow banks

whatever that means

One dream I had was very strange

an albatross flies in and out

of an opening in the sky

an envelope, God's letter

a vagina made of paper

Lucy Simpson

Seattle

11/30/2008

Dear New Occupants,

I am writing to apologize

for my family's and my

whereabouts in our dreams

You hear our ghosts

trudging about past midnight

so I heard from Mrs. Parsons

who lives two doors down

My father’s peonies

predate upon your new tulips

a strangulation at the roots

The dun paint stubbornly cries out

through your fresher yellow’s cheer

no matter how many coats

On muggy days

you spot the lithe shadows

of my sister and I

cheeks pressed
into the window screens
seeking to smell the rain

On early mornings

the eldest daughter

seated at the piano

fills your house with Chopin

On Thanksgiving

the smells of onion and sage

waft through the house

waking you up at five am

My dog is still dying by your door

sad with waiting for touch

a shadow of paws and fur

In your son’s room

my father hovers above the bed

a reoccurring nightmare

My mother downs every drop of your liqueur

a dead spot in your kitchen

I apologize for the inconvenience

and assure you we are working to remedy the situation

Sincerely,

One Of The Former Occupants

Lucy Simpson

Seattle

written 1997

revised 1/2008