Lincy

All day I was neither here nor there; I felt other than, at once disconnected, and deeply connected. I mean when I wrote something, I was in that line; when I sat still, I was in that stillness. Something was either very off, I said to my brother when he called, or very on or something else entirely. Then in the evening, I received the news that it seemed the whole day was waiting to give: my friend Sas wrote to say, Lincy had passed.

I met Lincy Nauka Sullivan just once, over a year ago. I was visiting Sas in Vermont. I was decimated from  months of too much: too much movement, too much work, too much emotion, too much crisis…just too much. So - I was visiting Sas and it was a sharp sunny winter afternoon and I said, I'd love a hair cut and Sas said, let me call Lincy and turned out Lincy was free right then so I went right then and met Lincy for the first time.

It was a hallowed afternoon. I remember the sun through the glass window, and how my brain and my heart just lit up as our conversation deepened and widened, how something in me unlocked and something else healed. 

Lincy left me better than she had found me. From our conversation, this poem emerged. I wish I'd had a chance to share it with her. But I came back to New Mexico, kept playing with it, a word here, sentence there, kept thinking wait, wait, the poem isn't ready yet. And just yesterday, I found her email address again and was going to send it. And then today…  

The poem comes too late but it is what I have and I offer it here to testify to the breadth and width and grace of my encounter with such a beautiful and generous spirit. 

Salon in New Guinea
by Shebana Coelho

for Lincy  

A woman cuts my hair
          cuts heaviness away

Pain 
- pulling at my scalp for months - 
          ebbs

the swish of scissors
         drowsy 
               I am a dream
                       waking, I listen

I am short, stocky, strong-
          legged, she says, 
               made for mountains
               forests thick with shade
               houses of earth and thatch
               ten to a room 
               smoke black walls
               and seven day churches singing hymns to            
               drown the calling 
                     - older than seven days - 
                             to root and burrow 

In these forests, she says – 
             and trees rise from the swivel chair
                     my hands touch black soil,  
in these forests are green spread valleys 
ripe with rain and root and song

Who sings, I ask, why?

A man walking, she says, carries his songs 
            so they precede him into villages not of his line
            so those who hear know he is carrying peace
            so they let him pass in song

Here, too -  she points to men in khaki
            carried on shoulders of her kin
            wading through rivers bound for gold
            and cities called Hagen named for
            those who arrived first…

…First contact, she laughs -  
        as if we never existed before 
        someone found us
              as if we were lost then 
                  as we are lost now.

I left, she says, adopted away,
         the scissors snap
                into the present
                  -the swivel chair
                  -the thinning of hair

The woman in the mirror
sees the girl in the village
              bare feet, bare earth
something in her is 
             calling -  kin to kin

the tip of scissors – snip - 
              my hair blackens the floor

She sweeps it all into song
             into forest
everything is green
             Rain