I can see now that it was a winter for travel
although I never left the house in Bountiful
and the cat rarely traveled
far from the southern windowsill I traveled
to the edge of belief      my religion     like seaweed
tangled around my ankles     pleading to some God: help me traverse
this trouble     the loss of the religion I traveled
with my whole life     I am searching for the right word
to describe this battle with my old self     those unpredictable words
that I see out there beyond my small life     I want to travel
to those exotic places where I might find the woman
I believe I really am     the woman

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     I want to be    authentic and unrepentant as thunder and lava     the woman
just out of my reach     the object of all my inner battles
I have been defined:    weaker sex   helpmeet    the kept woman
goodwife   better half    one of nature’s agreeable blunders    the woman
behind the man    sister    second-class citizen, I live in the heart of Bountiful
where my story is full of women ruled by religion     women
sacrificed to religion for man’s love of God more than woman
the tangled sacred sense of God turns out to be the Devil’s shoelace seaweed
in thin filaments that trip the logic beached lumps of seaweed
the smell of salt     a time of wrack and loss and women
cast up     cast out     scapegoats     I want a word
to describe this kind of wordlessness

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    I am labeled    by this language    so many words
none of them written     by women
I am not a consolation prize     a word
that can be underlined    pinned down    I am the word
dangerous    the word wild     I can only travel
in one direction     I’ll be a scalpel cutting out the words
that insist I take someone else’s word
for it not      my own here     in Bountiful
I will weave an elaborately and bountiful
life of shells and string    and the words
I’m not supposed to think    question I can’t ask caught in this seaweed
my whole life     a sweet tangle of weeds

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     separating the self from the saint/sorceress/sinner/seaweed
the colors of the ocean I drown in     I collect words
for kelp: knotted wrack    sea whistle    gulfweed
the cottage industry of green bottle seaweed
the metaphor for a woman’s
hair    what is acceptable    what is not     chenille seaweed
black tang    lady wrack    carrageen
mermaid’s fan      I will find a way to travel
away from my past    unknotting myself    travel
to an ocean big enough for Saturn to float    surrounded by seaweed
I will find answers there    that I can’t find in Bountiful
where I drown in the unappreciated bounty

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     of identical houses    a cherry tree in each yard    bountiful
place in the desert of roses    near the Great Salt Lake where no seaweed
beaches    just crusted salt    oolitic sand    the bounty
of silence    of being silenced      how ironic that Bountiful
is the place where I lose my religion    where it’s not just a word
for abundance      where I am finally full
of loss     enough                            to let go              and accept the bountiful
imperfection of myself this is where I live just a woman
who is naming herself    one letter at a time   a woman
who lives in a kind of poverty     so rich    I can be full
of questions    my feet bare      I carry a jar of ointment    I am a traveler
looking for answers     I will choose what I need to take with me      I travel

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    towards my own definition     the one I choose
I travel alone into this bountiful place to become
a woman who gathers    words and stones
shells and seaweed
a woman who hoards her verbs

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