After the Salt Marsh, the Sweet Grass Pulled, Plaited

After Gathering in the Salt Marsh, the Sweet Grass Pulled is Plaited

Show me a woman who does not dream

a double, heart’s twin, a sister

of the mind in whose ear she can whisper,

whose hair she can braid as her life

                                               

                                                from “The Book of Ruth and Naomi”

                                                                Marge Percy

One center reflects another center, base to lid.  But how many fibrils,

such braids?  And then, how many braids?  
Thirteen?  Thirty three?  And how many steps in the gather to the final

pleat?  Even though only one scalp cap throbs with blood it's her long

long memory that plaits you into a taut Passmaquoddy ash and sweet

grass weave—can't you see those beach grass baskets women sit with

after the long mid-summer cull at low water—sweetgrass

up to their hips then laid flat as a swaddled baby, kept cool so it won’t go

brittle, so, as they do with Palm Sunday’s thin fronds, they won’t burn

in a year to smudge the third eye shut for Lent? They smudge for other reasons.

Each blade, each splint has its root in you, her cool bog, you the who in the song she sings,

gleaning alone, before she’s cut forever from that place.  Her mourning

is breathless, separate, until, one by one, in a way wind could never do,

it’s all unity again, dream and heart, a basket bottom, a tapestry of brown

ash and grass, it’s one girl’s hand reaching for another girl’s hand,

walking off the lip of the frame, then nearly out

caught, when the ends are tied, by the same grass top, free

as Ruth and her Naomi, from the plait that was pulling the screaming scalp,

to choose to contain, once it holds water, what’s gleaned against all that's
chaff.