When I Dive
When I Dive by Christine Mulvey
When I dive head first into the river that is always sliding through me, when I slip below its tresses, into the darkness I have swum in since before the womb, when I find the ice-cold stream at the center, that current that can take me down, there comes a sudden swirling, sucking ,spiralling down, into a tunnel, then a funnel, of whispering voices, faces white-eyed and grimacing, down to the muck-thick bottom, where white bones hide like shipwrecked timbers, buried and protruding, ancient ribcages, broken sternums, limbs bent with struggle, and beneath them, deeper still into the fire-cast mud of an ancient portal through which I catch a glimmer of green, green and gold like sunshine through a forest of oaks, daylight streaming into ivy curtained caves, seaweed floating over rippling sands, broken shells, where the oldest ones still walk, their eyes open and gently shining, like lakes beneath a morning mist, their mouths soft and undefended, opening in welcome, pouring melody, singing the speech of animals and plants, the green world that pulses even still, pulses and flows even now, as it did before the coming of the stranger.
When I close my eyes and drop into the cavern of my body, reaching my senses like filaments of seeking back into the fogs of time, at first there is colour and movement, the passing of crowds, blacks and greys, browns and navys, markets and stalls of vegetables rotting in the pouring rain, ships and fishing boats, harbours, castles, fortressed walls, soldiers, rebels, guns, canons, pitchforks, furrowed fields, rilled hillsides, churning seas, wind over the empty bog, wrens in the bushes, gulls overhead, cairns in the hillsides, what trees remain swaying in the breeze, humming with lullabies beneath the harsh and wintry crying of the crows coming in droves to roost in the barren branches.
And then a wall of darkness, ten stories high, that soon becomes a canyon, deeper than I can plumb, swirling with impenetrable darkness, the sense of unseen masses crowding over its bottom, blindly groping, searching for a passage out. Bottomless pit of coiling bodies, stench of death, clench of untold life, mass graves interrupting the landscape, hedgerows that once were houses, stones that once were walls, little hills that used to be fields, bursting with food, soil that used to be bone and flesh, muscle and organ, bound to and singing the land that made them.
When I ask myself how the history of my people and my land has written itself into, has sculpted the very shape of my body, my life, biology, biography, sinew and artery, I find the fibers everywhere, the stories of the ones that came before, history, legend, the myths that bore us. Scarcity and Hunger. Powerlessness and Shame. Self blame and hatred. Migration. Flight. The search for safety, refuge, any kind of escape. The search for home. The umbilical chord of poetry, language, the scent, the song of Earth. Invasion. Conquest. Massacre. Starvation. Internalized. Believed. And the song that refused to die. Beneath and through it the fire that can’t be quenched, eternity of sky, inimitable light, the Fifth province, the one that cannot be taken.
The ongoing war of matter and spirit. Relentless rolling wave thrusting towards the shore, spark at its center, song of the universe locked in its thimbles of light, the storied roar of water under the witnessing sky.
Fire in the sky Star in the dirt Sun finger stroking the hills Receptacle of steel Flesh to sword
Flame in the Sacred Heart Tree at the center of the ring The boundless in the bound
Night pool at the heart of the rose Celt in the soul Black edge between the worlds
Colours of Ireland: black and brown and grey, the hidden thread of green and gold, beneath the weft and warp of the somber tweed and the loom that connects it – bright red scarlet of blood. Splintered chalk of bone.
I came in with a body blocked to food, unable to allow what was given to pass through, to nourish or strengthen me. I suffered immediate rejection, generator of disgust I named myself connecting that story to the violence and the isolation visited upon me. I tried hard to be good, to survive yes, but also to earn my place. Expecting nothing, willing to fight for nothing, never assenting to standing my ground, defending my self and my own, protecting everyone but me, praying for, and oh so grateful for any scraps that came my way, sneaking their taking, believing they were not my due. Throat closed. Voice throttled. Spirit shamed. Thyroid inactive. Only flight saved me. The constant searching for home til Death stalked me and following its beckoning I found change. Breast invaded. Flesh unable to die devouring me. Ancestral haunting, the mist, the smallness, the watching, the failure, desperation, nowhere to run, never good enough, cloying, rigid gripping, sniping, damp and dark, lisping, soaking, wretched and lost, the thunderous ocean and somewhere, somewhere the gold thread of Royalty, buried in the muck, the invisible, invincible heart.
I come from a long line of women. Generators of war, metallic containers of the potency of fire, feigners of silence, the bent knee, safe play. Betrayers and betrayed. If I close my eyes I can see them, standing in line, a long, wavering disappearing line extending from in front of my eyes all the way back through time into a swimming darkness, like a glimmering thread of water flowing through the dark sands of a measureless cave.
Images come: a round nut in a dark case, leaves like coins wet pressed into a trail through the woods, the fleshy red of the Sacred Heart, pierced and wreathed with thorns, dripping into the darkness. All dark. All darkness. But in the darkness movement. Each one stretching back into the darkness, trying to peer over the shoulder or out from behind the head of the one before. Shoving a little. Jockeying for space. Each one trying to be seen, wanting but not daring to ask for attention.
Behind me now a mountain. Tall and steep. Once upon a time heavily, gorgeously forested. Now bare. Folded into crevices of stone, dry and cracked. Beckoning me. I know it is holding them. Coil upon coil of them. If I lean into the dry wind that is blowing down that canyon where there once was water but now no longer, I can hear them: low, ebbing and flowing, now cascading, now scarcely there, like the sound of bees somewhere, foraging. A constant drone but one I know would yield its different songs were I to do, as I know I’m being asked to do, and draw closer. Closer and closer. And closer still.
I can hear them now, the buzz like the sound of bees working but threatening, like hordes of insects, clouds of them blackening the sun, coming to feed. A myriad of voices sounding from a distance like one note but closer in, a sound that stops my heart. Wailing. Screaming even. Sound not just of sorrow, but of despair, sound that does not expect to be heard, much less listened to. Sound that holds within it sorrows of a world I do not want to know. I can feel it now, like the whirring of a thousand wings, tightening my chest, mounting my throat, calling me to listen.
When I dive head first into the river that is always sliding through me, when I slip below its tresses, into the darkness I have swum in since before the womb, when I find the ice-cold stream at the center, that current that can take me down, there comes a sudden swirling, sucking ,spiralling down, into a tunnel, then a funnel, of whispering voices, faces white-eyed and grimacing, down to the muck-thick bottom, where white bones hide like shipwrecked timbers, buried and protruding, ancient ribcages, broken sternums, limbs bent with struggle, and beneath them, deeper still into the fire-cast mud of an ancient portal through which I catch a glimmer of green, green and gold like sunshine through a forest of oaks, daylight streaming into ivy curtained caves, seaweed floating over rippling sands, broken shells, where the oldest ones still walk, their eyes open and gently shining, like lakes beneath a morning mist, their mouths soft and undefended, opening in welcome, pouring melody, singing the speech of animals and plants, the green world that pulses even still, pulses and flows even now, as it did before the coming of the stranger.
When I close my eyes and drop into the cavern of my body, reaching my senses like filaments of seeking back into the fogs of time, at first there is colour and movement, the passing of crowds, blacks and greys, browns and navys, markets and stalls of vegetables rotting in the pouring rain, ships and fishing boats, harbours, castles, fortressed walls, soldiers, rebels, guns, canons, pitchforks, furrowed fields, rilled hillsides, churning seas, wind over the empty bog, wrens in the bushes, gulls overhead, cairns in the hillsides, what trees remain swaying in the breeze, humming with lullabies beneath the harsh and wintry crying of the crows coming in droves to roost in the barren branches.
And then a wall of darkness, ten stories high, that soon becomes a canyon, deeper than I can plumb, swirling with impenetrable darkness, the sense of unseen masses crowding over its bottom, blindly groping, searching for a passage out. Bottomless pit of coiling bodies, stench of death, clench of untold life, mass graves interrupting the landscape, hedgerows that once were houses, stones that once were walls, little hills that used to be fields, bursting with food, soil that used to be bone and flesh, muscle and organ, bound to and singing the land that made them.
When I ask myself how the history of my people and my land has written itself into, has sculpted the very shape of my body, my life, biology, biography, sinew and artery, I find the fibers everywhere, the stories of the ones that came before, history, legend, the myths that bore us. Scarcity and Hunger. Powerlessness and Shame. Self blame and hatred. Migration. Flight. The search for safety, refuge, any kind of escape. The search for home. The umbilical chord of poetry, language, the scent, the song of Earth. Invasion. Conquest. Massacre. Starvation. Internalized. Believed. And the song that refused to die. Beneath and through it the fire that can’t be quenched, eternity of sky, inimitable light, the Fifth province, the one that cannot be taken.
The ongoing war of matter and spirit. Relentless rolling wave thrusting towards the shore, spark at its center, song of the universe locked in its thimbles of light, the storied roar of water under the witnessing sky.
Fire in the sky Star in the dirt Sun finger stroking the hills Receptacle of steel Flesh to sword
Flame in the Sacred Heart Tree at the center of the ring The boundless in the bound
Night pool at the heart of the rose Celt in the soul Black edge between the worlds
Colours of Ireland: black and brown and grey, the hidden thread of green and gold, beneath the weft and warp of the somber tweed and the loom that connects it – bright red scarlet of blood. Splintered chalk of bone.
I came in with a body blocked to food, unable to allow what was given to pass through, to nourish or strengthen me. I suffered immediate rejection, generator of disgust I named myself connecting that story to the violence and the isolation visited upon me. I tried hard to be good, to survive yes, but also to earn my place. Expecting nothing, willing to fight for nothing, never assenting to standing my ground, defending my self and my own, protecting everyone but me, praying for, and oh so grateful for any scraps that came my way, sneaking their taking, believing they were not my due. Throat closed. Voice throttled. Spirit shamed. Thyroid inactive. Only flight saved me. The constant searching for home til Death stalked me and following its beckoning I found change. Breast invaded. Flesh unable to die devouring me. Ancestral haunting, the mist, the smallness, the watching, the failure, desperation, nowhere to run, never good enough, cloying, rigid gripping, sniping, damp and dark, lisping, soaking, wretched and lost, the thunderous ocean and somewhere, somewhere the gold thread of Royalty, buried in the muck, the invisible, invincible heart.
I come from a long line of women. Generators of war, metallic containers of the potency of fire, feigners of silence, the bent knee, safe play. Betrayers and betrayed. If I close my eyes I can see them, standing in line, a long, wavering disappearing line extending from in front of my eyes all the way back through time into a swimming darkness, like a glimmering thread of water flowing through the dark sands of a measureless cave.
Images come: a round nut in a dark case, leaves like coins wet pressed into a trail through the woods, the fleshy red of the Sacred Heart, pierced and wreathed with thorns, dripping into the darkness. All dark. All darkness. But in the darkness movement. Each one stretching back into the darkness, trying to peer over the shoulder or out from behind the head of the one before. Shoving a little. Jockeying for space. Each one trying to be seen, wanting but not daring to ask for attention.
Behind me now a mountain. Tall and steep. Once upon a time heavily, gorgeously forested. Now bare. Folded into crevices of stone, dry and cracked. Beckoning me. I know it is holding them. Coil upon coil of them. If I lean into the dry wind that is blowing down that canyon where there once was water but now no longer, I can hear them: low, ebbing and flowing, now cascading, now scarcely there, like the sound of bees somewhere, foraging. A constant drone but one I know would yield its different songs were I to do, as I know I’m being asked to do, and draw closer. Closer and closer. And closer still.
I can hear them now, the buzz like the sound of bees working but threatening, like hordes of insects, clouds of them blackening the sun, coming to feed. A myriad of voices sounding from a distance like one note but closer in, a sound that stops my heart. Wailing. Screaming even. Sound not just of sorrow, but of despair, sound that does not expect to be heard, much less listened to. Sound that holds within it sorrows of a world I do not want to know. I can feel it now, like the whirring of a thousand wings, tightening my chest, mounting my throat, calling me to listen.