Freyja's Distaff

by Lisa Creech Bledsoe


It sometimes begins with the sound of bees, or the breathless silence
after Maria Callas finishes Casta Diva. It doesn't take an oracle—

or Emmylou Harris wending her way through Poor Wayfaring Stranger—
to conjure death's proximity. Freyja says their names as she chooses half

of all the dead, though she's not a stickler for rules and often
brings home more. She never/always sees the forces amassing

against someone she loves. Remember that night in the 24-hour
doughnut place, back when they still let truckers smoke inside?

We staked out the back corner and drilled him until we believed
he'd make it through finals, hours away. We arrived in the exam hall

reeking of cigarettes and sugar, throbbing with immortality.
Later we smoked a celebratory bowl with a friend whose bong

had a Norse name. Fenrir or Frida, I think, but it's been an age.
She loved him like we did, and the shock of finding him flung, boyish

and broken at the crossroad, never made any kind of sense. Neither
did the other, who kept marbles in a jar to mark a journey of two years,

then four, then six, before it ended/began. That one was surrounded
by every sort of petition. Freya hardly notices the presence/absence

of prayers or offerings. Most religion is horseshit, anyway. Try Just Plain
Love for a change. Remember how we hooted through Shaun of the Dead,

loved the way he and Liz got back together in the face of a zombie apocalypse?
What it takes to keep a relationship together all these years, despite

a shocking amount of collateral damage. Did you ever wonder why
there are two heroic paradises? Valhalla gets a Brückner painting and

Led Zeppelin, while Fólkvangr gets pretty much nothing. Another man/woman
thing, Freyja muses. Conquerors write the history. She sings their names

as she chooses half/all the dead and directs them toward warm, capacious
barns where her cats stretch in the sun, and the milkwort hasn't been renamed

for a virgin, or Freyja herself recast as a whore by holy men. I wept
when I heard my grandfather sing Man of Constant Sorrow under the stars,

years before he died. Somehow he untied time, pulled it loose from the needle,
and now it is wonderfully cast in every color on the floor of the universe,

leading everywhere/when. Immortality doesn't mean never dying. It is
a pile of work, like gathering up the dead. When sheet lightning flickers

over the mountain, I think of them all, and especially you. How we will
hear bees, and the song of our names, and it will be right now again.


* * * * *

Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer living in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. She is the author of two books of poetry, Appalachian Ground (2019), and Wolf Laundry (2020). She has new poems out or forthcoming in Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Chiron Review, Otoliths, and Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, among others.

Website: https://appalachianground.com/