Ask the Phoenix: do dreams rise from ashes? (fwf April 21 2013)

Suitcase
Half packed half unpacked
Crinkled, delaminating leather suitcase
Stow the paper airplanes of names
Neatly laid out scraps from my sensible brain
The one that functions
Produces, normalizes
Calligraphizes; studies in pain and beauty
Rational thinking on irrational days
Careful record of one side brain
This half-packed pile of paper, words, feelings
Not too wet with tears to set alight?

Half unpacked full of
Shredded, torn, scribbles
A cacophony of paper
Rumpled, wadded up
Or held together in notebooks
By strings of sameness
Too dangerous, too explosive
For a soul-purge bbq?
Stand back and watch

Loud bangs set to thunderous music

Fireworks of change
Big, expansive
Controlled, contained
Ashes swirling ever skyward
Catching the thermals off the cliff
Follow tracers of smoke and mirrors
Hard against the softened sunlight
Day break, setting sun,
Now neither matters
Or exists

fwf: the wisdom of three

Strange to have a keepsake, a lucky charm, a statement of life, love, and death, yet have no real memory of how it came to be around my neck. I remember going through the artifacts of my father’s last day, hidden by my mother, deep in shock, anger, and grief, in a dark wooden box from their time in Russia.

I don’t remember my father ever wearing more jewelry than a Seiko watch; the kind that you shook your wrist to keep time going forward. I knew he had worn “dog tags” in the “hot spots” he visited.

At some point between goodbyes and my parents leaving for Moscow, and the goodbyes when my father left this world, he had acquired a gold chain with a small, golden scimitar as its charm. An amalgam of the exotic places he had been, and his regimental, ceremonial sword. Somehow, the necklace became mine – though I don’t know if I asked or it was given.

Later, the representation of an inuksuk kept the scimitar company – gold playing off pewter and bronze. The sword to protect me, the inuksuk to show I’d been here.

When my mother died she was wearing a necklace with a thin, filigree butterfly; a golden link to my acquired scimitar. Each charm nestles into the next: butterfly floats over the inuksuk, protected by the sword. When thinking, drifting, dreaming, sighing, I grip these charms and run them along the chain like a life-line, a buoy that demarks the shifts in time and space.
A PS: I also have treasured objects such as crystals and bracelets given to me by friends; these items make the wisdom of 3 into that of many. Thank you all.