Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Yet so what if these words of Owl Woman come down to us, so what if the multiple child in the next room is researching the eco-system of its neighbors, did it wreak aught that we heard distinctly

I am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling

and does it wreak aught that the Chilean woman zoologist with lips turned white by months of following the chalk-mouthed javelina ran into botanist Marcus Jones in southwest country in roughly ‘83 and was more interested in just how Owl Woman’s words got conveyed than in what they were. She had a right to wonder, for how else would she explain being distracted from her trail by a curious man-botanist (historical, Jim one day years later found out) who told her he was bicycling the territory in search of all the kinds of locoweed, and she believed him, as he her, when she wondered aloud in his presence there in the solitary but quietly thoughtful desert how Owl Woman’s words which were obviously Owl Woman’s—"I am afraid it will be daylight before I reach the place to see" — came to her, a passing South American zoologist, only after Owl Woman had seemed to disappear: and all this Chilean traveler could see (though not hear) in the twilight was the biggest elf owl not in captivity staring snug from the porthole of a random cactus suddenly handy. The elf is the tiniest owl, just as small as the pigmy owl, and this one was keeping an eye out — like the eye of the cactus itself — though this elf owl saw distant hawk moths, beetles, and insect larvae plus also the occasional mini-vertebrate. All of which convinced Mena the woman-zoologist that the elf owl must have incorporated Owl Woman or been done-that-to by her. Remember the fine depth of her poems and the elusiveness of her person small as a fine horn spoon and as at one with others as the singing corn grinder who passes her fine meal to her neighbor until it is like pollen; a person even comparatively small for those who might want to go up to someone in order to say and mean something instead of grasping that meaning something is not the same as going up to someone, it’s only like it:

an insight in all of us simulcast also in the form of its denial: as Jim about half-knows in his unwillingness to tell the information peddler Spence (as sleazy-acting as if he knew he was your relation) a thing or two, for example that this gramma went on hearing these words of Owl Woman across the half-light, yet in the precipitating dark there’s less and less sign of the Papago seer herself: yet now witness other verses later known to be hers coming across the air to the Chilean zoologist as on some line of communication from the eye of the columnar cactus to the seeming forehead of the woman telling this to Marcus Jones later at rest upon his bike taking a breather. So, as she said, she began to think about the water-bearing interior structure of cacti, so close (for comfort) to animal life (though nowhere near the animal she had been tracking). Surprised at what the margins of the inner desert had brought forth in her, when she’d been shadowing javelinas (read peccaries) up from eastern Argentina, she found the meaning of the name Owl Woman not only in all the lines of that known Indian woman-poet’s making, but between those lines (as sinewy-calved, lonely Marcus Jones in all his botany remembered till his dying day, although those who were with him at the end could say for certain only that he recalled at that final moment how the Chilean zoologist the woman Mena had found her own left life, her own original musical household plus the why of her setting out in search of wild pigs yet of search itself "research"), in all the other words which were also apt but especially in

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling,

which meant, if only to her, that back home the art of war refined and strengthened its texture around her angry, fantastic mother, whose native Chilean operas on serious Anglo-European themes had met with repeated rebuffs from the musical establishment — from even her own London-based (secretly anti-Argentine) dear father governing from a book-ridden house in Chelsea one of the major Chilean liberation lodges, on down to her cheerful, scar-faced husband (the javelina-zoologue’s father) who made (while ever seeking the secret of Stradivarian permanence) violins, and made agreements and claimed friendship with that gifted Bavarian emigre Aquinas Reid, composer of the first opera written in Chile, dead just fourteen years ago in 1869; and to Guillermo Frick, still active—"ser o no ser!" he was fond of saying — at seventy, one more German who had relocated in Chile with much Spanish on his tongue, who found Mena’s mother’s restless masterpiece unfortunately political when it was nothing of the kind — though hardly ahistorical as its leading tenor-pessimist falsely imagined he was — and no more secret(l) (much less Masonic) in architecture than any notoriously unperformed opera loosely drawn from Hamlet if not directly via Shakespeare but from a half-abandoned anti-miso-gynistic Italian score surfacing in manuscript in Civil War America.

Marcus Jones liked the naturalist Mena on sight, perceiving her gradually across the plateau floor as if she were daring the blinding colors of the darkness to reach Marcus before she did, and he thought her unflinchingly an Indian god at a distance, fixing Marcus in some attitude of intense feeling, awe, friendly awe; hence, he confessed having moved hardly a muscle when, upon seeing her in her many-colored cotton summer poncho down even to her hair pants from a distance despite the half-light lowering from the sky and wanting to go to her, he had waited where he was, his hand on his bike, until she should reach him; for do we go to the gods or do they come to us? and are there angels much less angel invaders in us? — and to the six-hundred-year-old Anasazi healer (who predicted not only telephones but the social power principle in the telephone expressed in the words unspoken and on certain occasions spoken, "Who called who?") she at another time recounted that Marcus had come toward her. And he would not get over those lunar lips, for he had never seen a javelina, muzzle to muzzle (which was to become, with its hind-mounted scent glands, sacred to the memory of Mena for years afterward in his mind). Marcus didn’t want to explain Mena’s white lips, only feel the divine wind. Marcus’s Spanish complemented Mena’s English, and before she had reached him where he waited on the plateau, they were conversing, and never saying things more than once. She said she had been coming from the south; but she had in fact already visited the multi-laddered eyrie of an Anasazi medicine man who, by Marcus Jones’s sense of direction, should have been slightly north of this present point of his locoweed-naming spree. Well, her interior map proved as resilient and infectiously blessed as his own navigand was firm and customary; and before she would leave him dumbfoun-dered (his own nautical word) with enough delight to do what he did not actually do — pursue for years more locoweed as yet unnamed — she had told Marcus Owl Woman’s words and the reaction they produced in the ancient Anasazi when she passed them on to that leaf-crisp memory of a man who had reached a phase so exactly fragile that one touch upon his presence and he would detonate into a cloud.

But while she spoke to Marcus of that old luminary-healer to the north who Marcus believed might be south since she could not yet have met him (if she was coming from the lower Arizone where Owl Woman flourished in and out of form), Marcus could believe in her both as a god and as a teller-bearer of likely truth, in particular the effect of the double moon on him. For this had yielded in him through its two shadows doubt as to what Marcus was later told by the Hermit-Inventor of the East in return for informations he gave to the Hermit. Who, to continue, surprised Marcus with the news that the double moon doubly shadowing the Anasazi medicine man, as Mena the javelina zoologist reached the top of her last apparently original Apache scaling ladder en route to the old healer’s eyrie, had come to her and become hers to convey (she said) on the evening when Marcus Jones, one of the most vivid men she had met, had pedaled up to her upon the desert floor and upon dismounting from his great bike cast (perhaps with its wheels) the double moon’s shadow and its light on her, which was then hers to convey until her next human.