First, to all in the path of Sandy, my heartfelt sympathy and concern, and hopes that you will be digging your way out of the mess and back to some sort of normal life as soon as possible. I hope everyone, especially all our friends and poetic connections throughout the fine spun web of the internet blogging community, is safe and well tonight.
In honor of Samhain/All Hallows, etc, I am reposting a fanciful Halloween horror poem I wrote last year, and hope it will be diverting and distracting after all the real horrors and stress of the last few days for many.
The Cat in the Well
A Halloween Fantasia
My name is not Odin (I forget my name) but I’ve lived
in the well for a mad moon’s making, alone with the roots
the deep water oozing and lapping the bones’ sweet arch
that lifts my home, my tumulus a wet black mouth, alone
till the cat fell. My dying was long, my strength nearly gone
till the cat fell, till the cat came down the well.
Odin was a god, (so I heard before this spell) death gave him back,
yet a well took him in, his eye for a drink from the frost giant’s blood
below the world tree. I am not he, but a shrunken spriggan,
devil’s daughter, giants’ kin hung here stranded in small skin
to guard what I can't spend, when the faith gave way gave out gave in.
Even the dark forgets my names, forgets my games,
even the dark, till the one I played at with the fallen cat.
Because when the cat fell the light (so remote, so far above) blazed
sudden and sure it could end the dead dream that crawls
through my veins of a land where we once loomed large long gone,
because of that I let him live, alone of them all. He took my hands,
he took my tongue, he gave his eyes, I loth to stop what he’d begun.
He took my tongue the cat that fell, the cat that came down the well.
So we climbed mossy walls (my cat tail lashing) dank with the muck
of an ancient thralling, slippery with uneaten grief, treasure slid wry,
each stone a stele for a life thrown away, each drop in the bucket red
until we came to the rim, and his amber eyes set in mine
began to shine, began to glow so all should know
the spirit cat was up from the well, with many another tale to tell;
the spirit cat that fell, the cat that came up from the well.
October 26,2011
I've mingled (or perhaps mangled) several different archetypes here:
Odin, god of war, poetry,prophecy and magic in Norse myth traded his eye for a drink from Mimir's well, where the ancient wisdom of the frost giants was said to flow up from beneath the world tree Yygdrasil from the primordial void of Chaos.
A spriggan is a mostly malevolent spirit from Cornish folklore, generally found guarding treasure in burial mounds or the like, believed to be small ghosts of an earlier race of giants.
Cats, of course, were thought to be malignant, and often said to be familiars of witches or demons in medieval belief. Other cultures, such as the Ancient Egyptians, have held them sacred, and believed they possessed various magical qualities.
Special thanks to my son for the video he sent, which set me off on this particular trip, and to Brendan, wherever he has gone, for his past input on the one-eyed god of the hanged.
Image credits: Header, Lassie,Go Get Help, by Sean McTex, on flick'r
Photo of the Marilyn Collins sculpture in Parkland Walk, London, UK, by Nflook via wikipedia,
Both shared under a Creative Commons License.
