Poetas y Pintores: Artists Conversing with Verse

The Artist The Poet

Regina Diaz María Meléndez

"Pass Back Through Me" (detail)

2005

Acrylic on Canvas, 30" x 40"

The Poet

María Meléndez

Remedio

Let go your keys, let go your gun,

let go your good pen and your rings,

let your wolf mask go

and kiss goodbye

your goddess figurine.

There is a time to grip

your talismans,

a time to strip yourself of them.

Spirit and flesh

will have sometimes had enough

of go-betweens—

A refastening

of our noses and our ears

onto our soul

can only be accomplished

in the company of master exemplars.

Take wolves, each with a soul full of scents:

asperine willow leaves

and damp earth, willow-rooted.

At the end of summer, a wolf’s soul hears

cottonwood catkins’

long trajectory down an ageless azimuth,

feels, in her inner ear,

myriad shifts of air

as the tufty seeds ride twilit rays

and glow as we imagine all

eternal things to glow.

A remedy for when you’ve lost your sense

of Spirit in the world,

a simple spell for home lycanthropy:

Smell the new season,

acrid, tensed to grow

in budding wolf willow,

and feel the heat recede

from a moose’s corpse—then

recuerda esta loba.

Recuerda…from the Spanish recordar

which is at root not remember or re-mind,

but pass back through the heart—

let her pass back through your heart again,

this wolf.

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