Dancing at the Edge of the World
Page 8
At Chillicothe, the Hopewell Burial Mounds.
The people whom the White invaders dispossessed had been living here for several hundred years; they called the ones who built these mounds the Old Ones. Walk in the silence of the vast sacred enclosure among the green mounds built above the bones and ashes of the illustrious dead
laid between levels of mica, sheets of mica
transparent and glittering as eyes, as souls.
The pipes are stolen
The sacred pipes are broken
The beautiful carvings of Bobcat, Prairie-hen, Raven, Turtle, Owl
The sheets of pure thin copper cut in the shape of the Bear,
of the Falcon, the soul-falcon,
of the falcon’s foot
and the human hand.
So, back to the New World, the thin, sick skin we laid on this land,
the white skin. And onward past Londonderry, Salt Creek, Ratcliffburg,
Allensville, Zaleski Freewill Baptist Church, Lump Coal for Sale,
and you can see the streaks of coal in the shaley yellow soil. Prattsville.
Dingers Motel in Prattsville. Athens County. Greysville. Coolville.
Hey man I come from Coolville. And cross the brown Ohio
into WEST VIRGINIA.
AND ANOTHER DAY
Now here are Allegheny names as we went in the early morning
with the red sun rising over the misty heads and chill fog-filled
hollers of the hills:
Buky Run
Ellenboro
Pennboro
Burnells Run
Spring Run
The sun is robed in a glory of mist enrayed by tree-branch shadows
shooting like arrows down.
Snow Bird Road
Smithburg
Englands Run
Morgans Run
Buckeye Run
Dark Hollow
Fort New Salem
Dog Run
Cherry Camp
Raccoon Run
Salem Fork
Flinderation.
After breakfast at Lums, the Entire Lums Family Thanks You,
comes the Child Evangelism Camp, and Harmony Grove,
and Pruntytown, 1798, Founded by John Prunty.
And we come over Laurel Mountain and from the top see all the misty ridges
and coming down we’re into the Eastern Seabord smog, that yellow bile
that you see from airplanes, the yellow breath of our god.
Nite Crawlers 75 cents a dozen,
beside the Cheat River, a misty mirror for the hills.
Into Maryland at Backbone Mountain
and then right back into West Virginia, a state all backbone,
loyal to the union.
Mineral County.
Mount Storm.
The Knobley Farm, 1766, on knobbly hills
Ridgeville village on the hogback ridge
Hampshire County, 1754, we keep going back
The Stone House
Little Cacapon River
Paw Paw, on Short Mountain.
Where ye bin, honey?
I bin to Paw Paw, maw.
WELCOME TO VIRGINIA!
Jesus is coming ready or not.
And it’s left one mile to Mecca, and right one mile to Gore.
We’d better go straight on.
So we went on to Georgia.
Specifications for this part of the journey: Diesel VW, middle-aged couple; daughter of 21; Englishwoman of 21 trying hard not to melt; a lot of luggage, and a huge palmetto fan.
III
THE DEEP AND SHALLOW SOUTHS
The names that run along the road that runs along the coast in western Florida: Sea Breeze, Dolphin, Pine Tree, Palm, Sun N Sand, Steak N Seafood, the Sand Flea, Luxury Townhouses, Seafood, Luxury Highrise Condominiums, The Hottest Place Under the Sun, The Outrigger, Seafood, Vacation Forever on the Gulf, Solarcaine Stops Sunburn Pain, Seafood, Riviera Cottages, Marina Towers, Sandpiper Cove, Shrimp, Swimwear, T-Shirts, Seafood, Shrimp,
and dead trees and waterlilies in the swamps among the pines
and the great melting clouds of faint cobalt blue ride easy inland off the azure Gulf
and it’s 83 degrees at nine a.m.
Even So Come Lord Jesus, Are You Ready?
IT GOT TOO HOT TO WRITE
SO HERE’S ANOTHER DAY
It’s 96 degrees at two p.m. as we leave the soggy bogs of Louisiana
for Mississippi green as green as green as grass
as green as Emerald.
The Indian Mound at Emerald:
a holy hill, handmade, where temples stood,
a country cousin of the Great Pyramid in Mexico.
Like a huge bed with a green bedspread
emerald green
in the infinite chanting of cicadas:
in the cicadas are the souls of ancient priests.
And now along the Natchez Trace, that dark and bloody trail,
in the sweet cool of shade,
from Natchez that looks down along the river of rivers
to Vicksburg where it’s 91 degrees at seven p.m.
AND ANOTHER DAY
and at seven in the morning it’s 83 degrees
and the soft wet air is bluish over the big bend of the big river.
Near Onward, Mississippi, the morning air is moist and easy.
Flat fields of the Delta, soy and cotton, run clean and even green
between bluish walls of trees.
A tractor goes slow down the rows.
Eight Black people in white shirts away off down the rows
hoeing cotton.
Rolling Fork
Nitta Yuma
Estill
Darlove
It’s too damn hot to say hard names, they’re soft as cottonballs.
It’s 94 at noon as we come into Arkansas
across the mighty muddy milewide Mississippi.
And Arkansas is yellowish-brown under the even green.
Nobody moves
in all of Arkansas
except eight people in hats and kerchiefs going very slowly west in a beatup pickup truck
and one old White man in a hat going very slowly south in his front yard on a tractor.
Nobody else. Nobody else in all of Arkansas.
ANOTHER DAY
We started West from Russelville at five in the hot moist dark just before daybreak. Rosyfingered dawn above the Ozarks. Beside the road in the twilight of morning a little yellow dog looked up at us: but no dog ever looked at human eyes across so wide a gap.
A little god in Arkansas.
O Coyote, you made my country.
At Indian Nations Turnpike we have left the South. There’s a dry wind blowing over the scrub oaks on the long, low ridges; and things aren’t even green and humid blue, but other colors, dry, distinct.
Okfuskee County
Weleetka
Wetumka
Okemah
Shawnee
Wevoka
North Canadian River
Seminole
Pottawatomie
Kickapoo
Tecumseh
Choctaw
Anadarko
Caddo These are the names, the true names,
names of the world Coyote made.
At the Cherokee Trading Post there’s lamps and cactus jelly for sale, totem poles—Cherokee totem poles?—and Perfumes of the Desert.
O Coyote you always got things all wrong
and then ran off with your tail between your legs
laughing
There: all the little black elegance of foot and ear and jackrabbit brain
is gone to a bit of bloated bloody ragged mud by the tire-side.
A million times a night on our ten thousand roads.
The trouble with us is, you know what the trouble with us is?
we waste food.
O Coyote get it right next time!
North Fork of the Red River
hasten to bid me adieu,
and there’s sagebrush, yahoo sagebrush,
and we enter Texas at the Wheeler County Line.
ANOTHER DAY,
and here’s a sunrise for you. In the Panhandle, dawn among the thunderstorms. A gentle rain and lightning in the dark, packing the car to leave Shamrock, Texas, and the sky above I-40 mottled with black clouds and lighter patches of sky holding one faint wet star. Thunder, thunder near and far. From the dark, dark rain falls and lightning flares in huge bright blurs northward, to the right. And the earth is without form, and void. Slowly light, slowly light slowly enlightens the soft fertile dark world-cave, defines, separates Earth from Heaven.
A fourlegged god with yellow eyes
is making the world over.
And the roadside signs creep into being out of unbeing, selling beds and goods and foods and Texas Souvenirs.
At nine a.m. the road falls off the edge of things into the desert.
Sagebrush ahead and mesas, far as the eye can see,
under the sky of turquoise and white shell.
NEW MEXICO. Names of New Mexico:
Tucumcari.
Santa Rosa.
A heavy red river, the Gallina, like a red snake, crawls
past Santa Rosa through rock-strewn, brush-dotted, red-green hills.
Colonias.
Pecos River, red, braiding red mud
San Miguel
A sweet dry air.
Dark green juniper
dark red dirt
dark blue sky
bright white clouds
Flowers: white stars, gold pads, purple spikes & yucca
Tecolote turnoff
These names are far between,
miles apart
Bernal
Behind the dark purple northern mesa is a great Source of Clouds: from it clouds rise and float and feather out and fade in silver shell-ripples above the deserts.
Glorieta
Mesa Glorieta
Villanueva, San Juan, San José, and on to
Santa Fé.
ANOTHER DAY
Oh, one more sunrise, this is the next to last,
leaving Cortez, Colorado.
To the right a distant mesa is on fire.
Behind the San Miguels and Mesa Verde, a citron sky streaked orange-pink.
The lights of Cortez fade under the mountains, under grey-haired rainclouds;
and to the left, a full moon rides faint in veils of rose and blue,
over the long mountain called The Sleeping Ute.
The mesa on fire blazes up, and then a huge, soft raincloud
sits down on the sunrise and puts it out.
After a long time from the grey one shaft of pure light rises, white,
too white for the eye to bear, and Coyote wins again, and welcome
to Dove Creek, Colorado, pinto bean capital of the world!
IV
FAR WEST GOING WEST
WELCOME TO UTAH early in the morning.
The sunflowers are confused, haven’t got turned sunwards yet, face every whichway.
Juniper. A good, strong, catspray smell of juniper in the high dry air.
Sagebrush, chamiso, the little yellow-flowered clover that’s been along
our way from Oregon to Georgia and back. And crows.
Suddenly we descend from mountains into desert
where there are monsters.
A potbellied Mexican waterjug two hundred feet high
turns into a sphinx as you pass it.
A throne of red rock with no seat, a hundred feet high.
Red lumps and knobs and kneecaps and one-eyed skulls the size of a house.
The sunflowers now are all staring east like Parsees,
except a couple in the shadow of the roadcut, which haven’t got the news
or received orders yet.
There aren’t a whole lot of names, in Utah,
but here’s one: Hole in the Rock:
big white letters on a big red bluff with a hole in it, yessir,
and also Paintings of Christ and Taxidermy.
A lone and conceivably insurgent but probably uninformed sunflower
stands in the shadow of a cliff, facing southwest, at 7:41 a.m.
Well the last time I saw the sun it was over there and how do I know where the damn thing’s got to?
Arches National Monument, near Moab: Red stone arches. Red stone lingams, copulating alligators, camels, triceratops, keyholes, elephants, pillows, towers, leaves, fins of the Ouroboros, lizard’s heads. A woman of red stone and a man of red stone, very tall, stand facing the falconfaced god of the red stone. Many tall, strange stone people standing on the red sand under the red cliffs; and the sanddunes have turned to stone, and the Jurassic sea that lapped on these red beaches dried and dried and dried away and shrank to the Mormons’ bitter lake. The sky is as blue as fire. Northward, stone dunes in white terraces and stairways pile up to the violet-red turrets and buttresses of a most terrible city inhabited by the Wind. A purple fortress stands before the gates, and in front of it, four tall, shapeless kings of stone stand guard.
NEXT MORNING
Heading out of green and gentle Delta to the Nevada line, early, to get across the desert in the cool.
Jackrabbits flit
on the moonlit salt pans
to the left of the mountains of dawn.
Jackrabbits dance
in the moonlit sagebrush
to the left of the mountains of dawn.
Four pronghorn drift
from the road into the sage
in the twilight of morning
to the left of the mountains of dawn.
Nevada
There are no names here.
The rosepink shadowless mountains of dawn now are daylit,
deepshadowed, and the moon has lost her dominion.
In this long first sunlight the desert is grayish-gold.
By the road as straight as an imaginary canal on Mars are flowers:
Michaelmas daisies, Matilija poppies white as the moon up there,
milkweed, blue chicory. The green lush South was flowerless.
There are
five fenceposts
in the middle of a vast sagebrush flat of which the middle
is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
Five crows
one crow per post
soak up the morning sun.
Only Crow’s been with us all the way,
north, middle, south, and west. Even the redwing blackbird
gave out in Nevada, but Crow’s here, Crow of the Six Directions.
Jackrabbits go lolloping off like wallabies
with magnificent blacktipped ears.
Gabbs Luning. There’s a name for you!
At Gabbs Luning there’s a Schneelite Mine.
I don’t believe anything in Nevada. This is pure Coyote country.
A vast lake that holds no water
is full to the brim of glittering light.
Far out, towards the center of the lake,
lie the bones of a wrecked ship
that struck on the reef of the mirage
and sank through heatwaves down and down
to lie now bleaching fathoms deep in blinding light,
all souls aboard her drowned in air.
Probably a potash mine. Who knows? We drive on west.
THE PRINCESS
(1982)
I was asked to give a keynote address to open a workshop conference of the Portland branch of the National Abortion Rights Action League, in January of 1982.
You are going to be working hard today on very serious and urgent work, matters literally of life and death, so I thought it might be a good idea to fool around a little first. I am going to tell you a fairy tale.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, in the Dark Ages, there was a princess. She was wealthy, well
fed, well educated, and well beloved. She went to a college for training female royalty, and there, at the associated college for training male royalty, she met a prince. He, too, was wealthy, well fed, well educated, and well beloved. And they fell in love with each other and had a really royal time.
Although the princess was on the Honors List and the prince was a graduate student, they were remarkably ignorant about some things. The princess’s parents, though modest and even inhibited, had been responsible and informative: she knew all about how babies are made. She had read books about it. But it had not occurred to her parents or the people who wrote the books that she might need to know how to keep from making babies. This was long ago, remember, in the Dark Ages, before sex was obligatory, before the Pill. All she knew was that there was something called a rubber, and boys always sniggered when the Trojan War was mentioned in high school. The prince, of course, knew everything. He’d been around. He’d had sex since he was fifteen, he said. He knew you had to wear a condom the first time each night. But the second or third time each night, you didn’t. It was safe. He knew that.
Perhaps you can imagine what happens next in this story? Like all fairy tales, it follows a familiar path; there is a certain inevitable quality to the events.
“We have to get married!” the princess said to the prince.
“I’m going home to my mother,” the prince said to the princess.
And he did. He went home to his family palace in Brooklyn Heights, and hid in the throne room.
The princess went to her family palace on Riverside Drive and cried a lot. She cried the Hudson River full of tears. But, though she had never been punished for anything in her life, she could not bring herself to tell her parents why she was crying. She made up a pretext to go to her mother’s gynecologist and get a pregnancy test. They used rabbits; if the test was positive, the rabbit died; remember, this is the Dark Ages. The rabbit died. The princess didn’t tell her parents, but went and dug the prince out and said, “We really have to get married.”
“You’re not a member of my religion, and anyhow, it’s your baby,” said the prince, and went back to Brooklyn Heights. And she went back home and cried so hard that her parents finally saw what had to be the matter. And they said, “O.K., it’s O.K., honey, and if he won’t marry you, you don’t have to have the baby.”