(PROSE POEM)
A SELF PORTRAIT OF THE WRITER AS MINERVA HAMILTON HOYT
JANE HAWLEY
A SELF PORTRAIT OF THE WRITER AS MINERVA HAMILTON HOYT
JANE HAWLEY
Call her Apostle of the Cacti. Supplicant at the Altar of the Desert Sunrise. Minerva. Goddess of Poetry, coiled like a serpent, sprung from her father’s head. Sing, Muse. Sing, Mojave. Chuparosa emerges red from the barren land like the baby who bloomed from Minerva’s womb then was lost to darkness. Minerva, Our Lady of Sorrow, aimlessly wanders the Devil’s Garden, a sword piercing her soul, cleaving the bloody mass of her heart in two. She plants both pieces of fleshy muscle in the arid ground and covers her broken heart with sand. In her affliction, Minerva sues the land for peace. She slithers across the sand, her teeth clicking like a rattlesnake. She tears her hair, rends her linen dress, and howls with the coyote at the amethyst sky fading to darkness. Finding consolation in the deformed branches of the Joshua trees, Minerva casts her frail arms into the air, a nocturnal animal calling out to the universe. She closes her eyes and listens, not for her heartbeat, but for the pulsing of existence under the soles of her feet. She feels the timeless echoes of death and rebirth rattling underground, opens her eyes, and finds a salamander wriggling over her toe. Examine the salamander. The vulnerability of its soft, moist, scaleless skin. Its ability to withstand fire. She now knows what she must do to survive. Minerva pulls a needle from the heart-shaped pad of a beavertail cactus, threads the silver ribbon of time, and sews her mouth shut. She wanders the Mojave for forty days, observes the tortoise inch from rock to rock, watches the flowers of the prickly pear bloom gold, witnesses the hatching of chuckwallas from their sandy eggs. In her contemplation, Minerva exists in desert time, slow timeless time, the time of shadows dancing across sand and stars hanging in the sky. Her heart begins to call out to her from underground. It sings: I am, I am. Her unspoken desire stirs in the empty cavity of her chest, the void where her heart belongs, and she knows that she must return to that grave and raise the dead. Minerva sprints across the desert, her arms outstretched, ready to receive herself again. The wind whips her tattered dress like a moth in flight. Her hair flies out behind her, a moonbeam illuminating dust. Her bones become wolves. Curving her finger around the silver ribbon sewn to silence her grief, Minerva pulls, unravelling the thread, unravelling herself, until her mouth opens and from her throat a sun rises.
___
Minerva Hamilton Hoyt was a southern belle from Mississippi who moved to South Pasadena, California, where she founded the International Deserts Conservation League. Following the death of her husband and son, Hoyt devoted her life to protecting desert landscapes and successfully persuaded President Franklin Roosevelt to designate more than 800,000 acres of land now known as Joshua Tree National Park.
Jane Hawley received her MFA in Fiction from Texas State University and her work has been published in The Pinch, Memoir Journal, Amazon's Day One Journal, and Because I Was A Girl: True Stories for Girls of All Ages.
