Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent

by Liz Howard

of my hand the fingers phalanges

  the rivers of northern Ontario

  all at length elaborate the dawn

  as our baroque moment qua

  the gorgeous brokenness the viaduct

  is a glitter of lacklace

  you say you have a culvert to your name

  its brackish echoes fracture into

  the reeds the diesel the fertilized

  emblem of a culture disabused

  to abandon the regular stars that

  mark your arrival

  in the community shelter the orange

  is porous a kind of dawn seeping into

  the storage space where

  we have accounted for our nouns

  the coterie is split along a conjugal axis

  these urban foxes bury

  our wisdom teeth by the river

  the bingo of happenstance has

  already started but we have

  no amulets for trust

  your jeans are high above

  my face I don’t know what to say

  the feeling erases me

  the city the township the home

  range displaced the cattle the caribou

  the day itself displaced sea swell

  and fenestrae, the unintelligible

  diction we are wont to swallow

  across transatlantic silicon

  hear your clinic, hear it clear

  what hand over my plush-covered gills won’t sing?

  forged from Algoma steel

  receive me caught in mayflies

  a verdant symptom through

  the porch screen of you

  in this sinkhole of time called the present

  exquisite kinship we coddle our knees

  against the stolen furniture

  we simply tumble down

  the rote division

  of light

  ANISHINAABEMOWIN GLOSSARY

  Jiisakiiwinini: spiritual healer who conducts the Shaking Tent rite wherein spirits are consulted to obtain beyond human knowledge

  miskwaa: red

  nibowin: death

  Gitchi Manitou: Great Spirit

  Bowating: original name for Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

  Nanabozho: trickster figure and cultural hero

  NOTES

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 epic The Song of Hiawatha appropriated and confused Anishinaabe history and mythology and inserted/naturalized a colonial presence within Anishinaabe cosmology. It is a textual assimilation of Indigenous rhythmic oration into a bombastic trochaic tetrameter, itself borrowed from the Finnish national epic Kalevala. Minnehaha, a creation of Longfellow, was the spouse of Hiawatha, whose death set the stage for the reception of settler influence later in the poem. “OF HEREAFTER SONG” is something of a translational détournement of The Song of Hiawatha, an intertextual recombination, filtered through the sited embodiment of myself and subsequent readerly selves; it engages the systemic tentacles of assimilation as they unfurl within and possibly enclose the contemporary New World. Words and phrases from Longfellow’s epic are sampled and remixed. As I am both settler and Indigenous, the text may contain the sweet horrors of my diary, a girlish self-narrative that arose from the once-irreconcilable. Language is also thrifted from ecological reports on the Lake Superior region, in which the original text is set, and sociological reports regarding the injustices lived by many Indigenous women, men, and two-spirit persons. These injustices are an inevitable extension of the ideologies inscribed in Longfellow’s poem. “OF HERE” is a linguistic performance that seeks to display/acknowledge its own implication in the effects of assimilation while simultaneously revealing those ideologies that underpin the assimilative program as it operates to this day.

  “Ring Sample: Addendum” is a recombinative sonnet that constitutes a dendrochronology of language pulled from the first 14 poems of the book. The preceding “Revenant” poems constitute an earlier foray into this strategy and linger here as a necessary haunting.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The writing of this work was supported by a Toronto Arts Council Writers Grant and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Research Scholarship.

  Previous iterations of several poems appeared in The Capilano Review, ditch, The Puritan, The Rusty Toque, in the anthology Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press), and the chapbook Skullambient (Ferno House Press). Special thanks to the editors of these publications: Jenny Penberthy, Kathryn Mockler, Amy De’Ath and Fred Wah, and Mat Laporte and Spencer Gordon.

  Thanks to my editor Ken Babstock for his fierce intelligence and reassurance.

  Profound thanks to Dionne Brand for her keen attention to my work, to Margaret Christakos for deft guidance and encouragement, to Lisa Robertson for her mentorship and generosity, and to Erín Moure for her continuing support.

  Thanks to the excellent team at M&S, especially Anita Chong and Ellen Seligman.

  I have been supported by many friends, colleagues, and family throughout the writing of this book. Simply listing their names here does little justice toward the gratitude I have for them or for the measure of their influence and love. Infinite thanks to: my partner, David Whitton; my poetic godmother, Lynn McClory; fellow Influencers Sonja Greckol, Ralph Kolewe, Joan Guenther, and Eric Foley; Kerri Scheer, Richie Stevens, Cara Chellew, and Jaime Whitecrow for unwavering friendship; and the following fellow workshoppers, reading hosts, and poets: John Bell, Sean Braune, Natalie Marie Helberg, Shannon Maguire, Jimmy McInnes, Jay and Hazel Millar, Edward Nixon, Ariana Reines, Meaghan Strimas, Fenn Stewart, Jess Taylor, and many, many others. Thanks to my employer, Professor Lynn Hasher, and the members of the Aging and Cognition Lab. Thanks to my parents, Tamara and Sylvain Rousseau, the Howard family, my grandmother Betty Ann Turcotte, and my brothers, Jameson and Nelson.

  Finally, a big thanks to you the reader. Chi-miigwetch. Merci.