Incident Reports: Owl, Swan, and the Secret Name of Water

FRANCES HATFIELD

Grand Canyon

You thought you had your reasons

but it was the River who called you to Her

one immensity to another, said

ditch the computers, clocks, cars,

trade your couch and sleep number bed

For a boat, a cot and a blanket of stars

and make your way to Lees Ferry

where the boatman calls you by your name.

And so you are washed and rocked and drenched

and splashed and tumbled down

and down

and deeper down

into a chasm unfurling the story of time, to the sipapu

of your mother.

Kaibab,

Hermit,

Muav,

Bright Angel,

Tapeats,

down a billion years to Vishnu Schist

and Zoroaster Granite, your guide pointing,

reading to you the history of your heavenly body,

its syntax of heat and gravity both delicate

and violent, how collisions with necessity

cook and shape, fracture and bind,

annihilation transfigured, finally,

into beauty.

At Fern Glen, you walk into a slot canyon

carved by a spring to find the song of stone,

which is a silence below stillness

that only your bones can hear, and answer.

At Hakatai Rapid, you know what the River wants to take from you

is the rock against which your life has been shattered

that you’ve carried at the bottom of your heart ever since

because Her law allows no obstacles,

because Her job from the beginning of time

is to bring that souvenir of your undoing back to the sea

where all is understood and all is forgiven.

At Stone Creek, you are baptized in a clear spring waterfall

guarded by a lizard and adorned in tender green

and you realize the secret name of water

is mercy, and something

has been returned to you

that you didn’t know you’d lost.

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Notes on contributors

Frances Hatfield

Frances Hatfield is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a training analyst at the Jung Institutes of San Francisco and Santa Fe, and vice president and treasurer of the Santa Fe Institute. Her book of poems, Rudiments of Flight (Wings Press), won the 2013 Gradiva Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Correspondence: [email protected].