Erzulie's Protégé

Erzulie's Protégé

For Krista Lynn Brown

The ritual party tray is out for Dia de los Muertes
with love potion and heart opener cordials.
We drink some of both, and the rims of
our glasses pulse in the black light glow of the dance parlor.
Historians say that Marie Antoinette had a mold
of her breasts cast then made into wine cups.
The royal glass blower tonged them out of fire
then held the curved vessels up like a satisfied God
placing two moons in the pitch night.
My sister would take a lantern and find her way to the barn
to milk the goats before dawn arched across the horizon.
When she got high enough, Sally Ride could see meteorites
burning out below them and now there’s ninety percent proof
that once there were bayous on Mars, warm and moist.
Looking at her lunar paintings of jungles and the women
that dwell there, it seems that she has been a cosmonaut too.
Or has at least seen a crash site retrieval conference,
launching crafts from her drawing pad.
Whenever you are down she will morph into "Space Girl"
and hit you with a love ray.
It’s two a.m. and she sits at a black canvass, wells of paint
before her at the left hand, brush loaded with burnt sienna.
Earth opens to the ink of heaven pouring in.
This is the season when Persephone fell into the opening
to come up later, stealing away pomegranate
seeds from near the molten core.
Venus rises in the skylight of her studio,
illuminated too with candlelight from her altar where
photos of her grandfather, Frida Kahlo, & her outbound cat
open the gates and keep the pulse.
She leans in, unafraid to travel the trenches, the ruins,
to be there on location spelling out the names of the
beloved dead with a sparkler.
If you write it backwards it will come out forward
to the Heyokas galloping by on their dark horses.
All night she dips into the face of lunar deities, her eyes
searching the craters for the unseen ones.
What ferments in the caves can be good, and shows up at
the reception, a vision of Erzulie with a catfish,
wines from the Valley of The Moon, wheels of pungent cheese.
Whoever said white Russians, paint and magic
can’t issue from the same hand at once?

Thanks to Melissa Weaver for the sparklers.

Amy Trussell, November 2008

Photo par moi: Altar to Erzulie. French Quarter, New Orleans