BERNEVAL

What struck me in this emergence of an orisha was the plural “sweet teeth”. It lends a fierceness to the goddess of love.

women of honey harmonies offer
alfalfa wild flower buckwheat and clover
to feed Oshun who has sweet teeth
and is pleased to accept their gift

Harryette Mullen. Muse & Drudge collected in Recyclopedia.

Craving. Appetite. And a glorious sense of possession.

Mullen explains her project thus:

When I wrote Muse & Drudge, I imagined a chorus of women singing verses that are sad and hilarious at the same time. Among the voices are Sappho, the lyric poet, and Sapphire, an iconic black woman who refuses to be silenced. Diane Rayor had translated surviving fragments of Sappho’s ancient Greek poetry into an American idiom that sound to my ear like a woman singing the blues. So Muse & Drudge, in a sense, is a crossroads where the blues intersects with the tradition of lyric poetry, as well as a text for collaborative reading and on occasion to unite audiences often divided by racial and cultural differences.

There are many types of sweet teeth as there are of honey — clover buckwheat wild flower and alfalfa

In a country far away someone else was musing differently on fierceness and love through an envocation of Oshun through the voice of a top

Orange seeds, I’ll spit five your way.
The rind is mine.

O-rages for Oshun (12/4/92)

Like a back beat, Other teeth in Muse & Drudge

those cloudy days I’d fly
from the icy airport
while you tried to breathe life
into your bucktoothed scarecrow

a thing of shreds and patches
hideous scarecrow she
puts teeth in any nightmare
of the man who sleeps with matches

And so for day 1699
08.08.2011

Out of “Ulterior Thule” by Phil Hall in The Little Seamstress

What topsoil tells the hand—the hand tells a pencil—a pencil
tells type—type tells a program—a program tells brains—
brains tells the gods—& the gods tell topsoil …

Telluric wanderings. Airy driftings. Culture and nature caught in the same anthropocene ecology. Whispers of a great chain of being pluralized and streaming along planar surfaces.

And so for day 1698
07.08.2011