Incantations for an Ordinary Life

They said the incantations weren’t always real words.
Sometimes they were just marks scribbled by hucksters
for illiterate buyers. Still. There are magic bowls
with prayers pressed into their clay, and kept there.

I spit, eat, touch the woods.
I tie a blessing stick in the basswood tree
which hasn’t leafed out yet, but will.
Nothing is written on the stick. Still. An intention.
A hope secured, until it drops away, or rises.

The ancient bowls were spiraled with charms and holy writ,
then buried face down under the door, or in a courtyard.
Now they are excavated, preserved, catalogued.
Here and there in the markings I make out small fiddleheads,
or hexes. A woman giving birth. A snake and storm.

Christina gave me a cobalt devotion bowl and that year
it was filled with blood and sacred things.
Now it’s the cats’ water dish because it is
precisely the right size and it pleases me to see it there
every day, on the floor, sturdy as consecrated things must be.

Up the stone steps. Follow the trail to the creek.
Nettles, violets, the raccoon skulls I settled on a stone.
Always water, then the ridge and sun, water, the ridge again.
All sensible and sacred with our laughter and parish talk.
Here, everything is built of green circling fire,
all cauldron with bright gold handles.
We are contained, sent out, brought in, remade.

Thirty years ago I saw a hearty celadon bowl at the flea market,
and my grandmother tried to scold me for being so delighted
in front of the vendor. She paid thirty dollars to buy it for me,
and it was cracked and irregular and should have been ten.
The price of my obvious pleasure was double that.
She got a bargain.

With an afternoon to squander as I pleased, I squatted today
in the wild columbine near the beehive with that celadon bowl
and pulled dandelion roots to roast for coffee.
For hours after, a rich fragrance—chocolate cake, coffee,
chocolate!—sang on my skin. I had forgotten how resonant
those roots were, how aromatic and sweet. I got a bargain.

Sometimes the incantations were just marks, just
scribbles for illiterate buyers. Still.
Are the letters and shapes our bodies inscribe different
as we circle toward the rim of this hollow, the edges of
our mending and wreckage? Can this hike past seep and saxifrage
be read by crow and ice and oak? Does it matter
if we are intelligible to the basswood
or the small snake with the gold collar?

Archaeologists don’t like unprovenanced antiquities.
Incantation bowls shouldn’t be studied, one man argued,
due to risk of further theft and cultural destruction.
He said, imagine our heritage, undiscovered and safe!
But another said, I will press myself into this shape
and commit to hope. I will be the ward and believer.

On this mountain I found the disorder in my head,
you planted two dozen apple trees. We turned over stones,
lost and found a child. I brought home bees, and honey.
Three cups were emptied, two filled as the needle rose
and dropped on the cloth. The stylus leaves her mark
in our bone, our clay and quartz. I feel the ribbon
of our commitment rise and rise again.

Names spiral up in black ink. Beneath the bowl’s lip,
a prayer circle the color of humus, of carbon
and collapsed gravity. All things pour in.
I slip and your hand finds my back. Vesper sparrows
rattle off creeds for no reason and all of them.
Magic fills the bowl, circling, banishing, blessing
our shadows behind us, caring nothing for profit, gods, or glory.

I wrote this poem in May of 2022, in the closing chaos of the pandemic, after reading this article on Aeon about “incantation” or “magic” bowls.

Thank you for reading.