This is a story that my father used
to tell me when I was a kid.
My father was a part of a group of storytellers.
And I don't know if you have them here,
but where you would get together,
and there was no written word.
And you sit, and you repeat stories
that might be lost that are in the oral tradition.
And they are-- in every culture, it was a lot--
many of them were Native American culture,
but it was in--
we were in-- this particular meeting was in San Francisco,
and so it was everyone from everywhere.
And this was one of the stories that he would tell.
"Cannibal Woman."
I'm looking for the right words, but all I can think of
is parachute or ice water.
There's nothing but the sailboat inside, me slowly trying
to catch wind.
Maybe, there's an old man in it, maybe a small child.
All I know is they'd like to go somewhere.
They'd like to see the sail straighten,
go tense and take them someplace.
But instead, they wait.
A little tender wave comes and leaves them right
where they were all along.
How did this happen?
No wind I can conjure anymore.
My father told me the story of a woman
larger than a mountain, who crushed redwoods
with her feet, who could swim a whole lake in two strokes.
She ate human flesh and terrorized the people.
I loved that story.
[LAUGHTER]
She was bigger than any monster, or Bigfoot, or Loch Ness
creature-- a woman who was like weather,
as enormous as a storm.
He'd tell me how she'd walk through the woods, each tree
coming down, branch to sawdust, leaf to skeleton,
each mountain pulverized to dust.
Then, they set a trap--
a hole so deep she could not climb out of it.
I have known that trap.
Then, people set her on fire with torches.
So she could not eat them anymore,
could not steal their children or ruin their trees.
I liked this part too.
The fire, I imagine how it burned her mouth, her skin, how
she tried to stand and couldn't, how it almost felt good to her
as if something was finally meeting her desire with desire.
The part I didn't like was the end,
how each ash that flew up in the night
became a mosquito, how she is still around us in the dark,
multiplied.
I've worried my whole life that my father told me this
because she is my anger.
First comes this hunger, then abyss, then fire,
and then a nearly invisible fly made of ash
goes on and on eating mouthful after mouthful of those I love.