The Appearance
of Freya
one of five panels
80x20" acrylic on doorskin,
Fall, 2003

[note: Freya is the ancient norse fertility goddess who was stolen from the indigenous people by hordes of iron age invaders. She became a goddess of love, as diminished in range as the Roman Venus, but she has always retained her shamanic core. Accused of trading sexual favours for the necklace (the coming of light to the dark region), in Christian times she was both healer and witch, like other witches, burned for her knowledge of the forgotten mysteries as well as for her frank desire.]

Freya is stolen for her necklace.
Brisingamen. Aurora Borealis...

Her secret is the dawn itself...
As she hovers near the north pole
for the long summer months,
we are lidless and separate—
felled night fyers—displaced
hyperboreans waiting in the thick heat
for the coming of the Fall...

What we do not see is the antediluvial
and continuing shift of the heavens,
the infinite turning and precession
of the equinoxes, the slow motion
of the now-dry riverbed
in the speech of stones.

Just now reduced
to one-eyed vision,

we see a grid,
a figure in one corner,
the ground in the other—
we miss the turning wheel
of Freya's secret—
the turning of our starry night
in the field of stars.

And then the darshan...
the presence
of what is visible...

We see that that grid is the starry field,
at once the Other—the beloved
and at the same time
always touching
the not-not-I.

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