When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through
Page 13
out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,
out of leaves creaked shut, out of hiding.
We have come here too long.
It is their turn now,
their turn to follow us. Listen,
they put down their equipment.
It is useless in the tall brush,
and now they take their first steps, not knowing
how deep the woods are and lightless.
How deep the woods are.
I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move
We watched from the house
as the river grew, helpless
and terrible in its unfamiliar body.
Wrestling everything into it,
the water wrapped around trees
until their life-hold was broken.
They went down, one by one,
and the river dragged off their covering.
Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,
snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:
a whole forest pulled through the teeth
of the spillway. Trees surfacing
singly, where the river poured off
into arteries for fields below the reservation.
When at last it was over, the long removal,
they had all become the same dry wood.
We walked among them, the branches
whitening in the raw sun.
Above us drifted herons,
alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,
settling their beaks among the hollows.
Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people
moving among us, unable to take their rest.
Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.
Their long wings are bending the air
into circles through which they fall.
They rise again in shifting wheels.
How long must we live in the broken figures
their necks make, narrowing the sky.
Advice to Myself
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic—decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
GWEN NELL WESTERMAN (1957–), Dakota and Cherokee, received her BA and MA at Oklahoma State University and her PhD in English from the University of Kansas. She teaches American Literature and American Indian Literature at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She is the director of the Native American Literature Symposium, a Native American Studies conference founded in 2001. She has won awards for her research on Dakota history and language. Her collection of poems, Follow the Blackbirds, written in Dakota and English, was published in 2013.
Wicaŋĥpi Heciya Taŋhaŋ Uŋhipi
(We Come from the Stars)
Stellar nucleosynthesis.
That explains
where everything
in our universe
came from according to astrophysicists who
only recently discovered the cosmological constant causing
the expansion
of our universe.
Our creation story tells us we came from the stars to this place Bdote
where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers converge,
our journey along the Wanaġi Caŋku,
in our universe,
that stargazers later called the Milky Way now disappearing
in the excessive glow of a million million urban uplights.
The original inhabitants of this place,
of our universe,
we are Wicaŋĥpi Oyate, Star People
and will remain here as long as
we can see ourselves
in the stars.
MARK TURCOTTE (1958–), Anishinaabe–Turtle Mountain Band, grew up in North Dakota on the Turtle Mountain Reservation and later in Lansing, Michigan. Turcotte won the first Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award, and the Wisconsin Arts Board named him a literary fellow in 1999 and 2003. He has published four books of poetry, and his work has appeared in several anthologies. He lives and works in Chicago.
Burn
Back when I used to be Indian
I am crushing the dance floor,
jump-boots thumping Johnny Rotten,
Johnny Rotten. Red lights blue bang
at my eyes. The white girl watching
does not know why and it doesn’t matter.
I spin spin, eat I don’t care for breakfast,
so what for lunch. She moves to me,
dark gaze, tongue hot to lips. The music
is hard, lights louder. She slides low
against my hip to hiss, go go Geronimo.
I stop.
All silence he sits beside the fire
at the center of the floor, hands stirring
through the ashes, mouth moving in the shape
of my name. I turn to reach toward him,
take one step, feel my skin begin
to flame away.
Battlefield
Back when I used to be Indian
I am standing outside the
pool hall with my sister.
She strawberry blonde. Stale sweat
and beer through the
open door. A warrior leans on his stick,
fingers blue with chalk.
Another bends to shoot.
His braids brush the green
felt, swinging to the beat
of the jukebox. We move away.
Hank Williams falls again
in the backseat of a Cadillac.
I look back.
A wind off the distant hills lifts my shirt,
brings the scent
of wounded horses.
ELISE PASCHEN (1959–), Osage, was born and raised in Chicago. While an undergraduate at Harvard University, she won the Garrison Medal for poetry. She earned her M.Phil and D.Phil from Oxford University, studying twentieth-century British and American literature. While at Oxford, she cofounded the journal Oxford Poetry. Her 1996 collection Infidelities won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Houses: Coasts; Bestiary; and most recently, The Nightlife. The daughter of the Osage prima ballerina Maria Tallchief, she lives in Chicago, where she
teaches in the MFA writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Wi’-Gi-E
Anna Kyle Brown. Osage.
1896–1921. Fairfax, Oklahoma.
Because she died where the ravine falls into water.
Because they dragged her down to the creek.
In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt.
Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring.
Because I turned the log with my foot.
Her slippers floated downstream into the dam.
Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body.
Because she lived without our mother.
Because she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land.
She was carrying his offspring.
The sheriff disguised her death as whiskey poisoning.
Because, when he carved her body up, he saw the bullet hole in her skull.
Because, when she was murdered, the leg clutchers bloomed.
But then froze under the weight of frost.
During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon.
I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver.
I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.
High Ground
Across the meadow flecks
of elk congregate into the dark.
Their hooves mark the soaked hillock
rimming the pond. A garter
snake zags, silvery as lightning.
Through scrub brush a shade ripples,
crosses ancient earth mounds
where, during the Bear Dance, sage sprigs
once topped every stone altar.
A meteor plunges fast
as Great Horned Owl swerves
across rooftop at sun-fall.
Along the ridge a coyote yowls,
echoes by others from all corners.
The song chills the dead, wakes the living.
HEID E. ERDRICH (1963–), Anishinaabe–Turtle Mountain Band, earned degrees at Dartmouth College and Johns Hopkins University, and she holds an interdisciplinary doctorate. Her sister, Louise Erdrich, is also a writer. Heid is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and Loft Literary Center, and she has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. She edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press. Her poetry collection Little Big Bully is forthcoming from Penguin in fall of 2020. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota.
Pre-Occupied
River river river
I never never never
etched your spiral icon in limestone
or for that matter pitched a tent on cement
near your banks
Banks of marble stock still all movement in the plaza
river walking its message on an avenue
rallied in bitter wind
Excuse my digression my mind tends . . .
In reality my screen is lit with invitations
bake a casserole—send pizza—make soup for the 99%
Sorry somehow I haven’t time
Flow flow flow both ways in time
There’s a river to consider after all
No time no hours no decades no millennia.
No I cannot dump cans of creamed corn
and turkey on noodles and offer forth
sustenance again
A bit pre-occupied, we original 100%
who are also 1%, more or less
Simply distracted by sulfide emissions tar sands pipelines foster
care polar bears hydro-fracking and the playlist deeply intoning
Superman never made any money . . .
River river river Our river
Map of the Milky Way
reflection of stars
whence all life commenced
100% of all life on our planet
River in the middle Mississippi
not the East Coast Hudson where this all started
waterway Max Fleischer’s team lushly rendered
via the wonder of Technicolor
Emerging from an underwater lair
a Mad Scientist we comprehend as indigenous
has lost his signifiers (no braids, no blanket)
but we recognize him
A snappy dresser who flashes a maniac grin
he is not not your TV Indian
Ignoble Savage “ . . . and I still say Manhattan
rightfully belongs to my people”
Superman “Possibly but just what
do you expect us to do about it?”
Occupy Occupy Worked for the 99
Occupy Re-occupy Alcatraz and Wounded Knee
Sorry somehow now I’ve too much time
Flow flow flow both ways story-history-story
There’s a river that considers us after all
All time all hours all decades all millennia
River river river
I never never never—but that is not to say that I won’t ever
/// NOTES OF PRE-OCCUPIED DIGRESSION: Descendants of the indigenous population of the US remain just a tad less than 1% of the population according to the 2010 census. If you add Native Hawaiians to the total we are 1.1% of the population. So, we are, more or less, the original 1% as well as the original 100%. As the Occupy Movement took hold, indigenous groups continued struggles to protect our homelands from imminent threats such as the tar sands in Canada and its Keystone pipeline, copper mining in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and hydro-fracking elsewhere—everywhere, it seems. This era of alternative energy has become the new land grab, the new water grab. Indigenous activists are thoroughly pre-occupied with the social and environmental issues I mention and more. Activists can’t be everywhere at once—not like Superman. I refer here, of course, to the Crash Test Dummies’ 1991 “Superman’s Song,” that despairs the world will never see altruism like that of the unpaid hero. In the 1942 cartoon Electric Earthquake, an indigenous (but not stereotypically “Indian”) Mad Scientist is thwarted, of course, by Superman. At one point Clark Kent admits indigenous land claim as “possibly” valid, but says there’s nothing the Daily Planet can do about it. A shrewd Tesla wanna-be, our villain attempts to publish his demands first, then occupies Lois Lane while toppling Manhattan skyscrapers. You can see this beauty all over the Internets.
Offering: First Rice
for Jim Northrup
The grains should be green as river rocks,
long as hayseed, with the scent of duckweed
and sweetgrass that grows along the lake’s banks.
First manoomin, feast plate laid for the spirits—
berries and tobacco offered with song.
What it must have meant to give
what little the people had to give:
herbs left in thanks for the food that will sustain us,
for the water that gives up that food,
for the world working the way it should
—living and full of living god.
The Theft Outright
after Frost
We were the land’s before we were.
Or the land was ours before you were a land.
Or this land was our land, it was not your land.
We were the land before we were people,
loamy roamers rising, so the stories go,
or formed of clay, spit into with breath reeking soul—
What’s America, but the legend of Rock ‘n’ Roll?
Red rocks, blood clots bearing boys, blood sands
swimming being from women’s hands, we originate,
originally, spontaneous as hemorrhage.
Un-possessing of what we still are possessed by,
possessed by what we now no more possess.
We were the land before we were people,
dreamy sunbeams where sun don’t shine, so the stories go,
or pulled up a hole, clawing past ants and roots—
Dineh in documentaries scoff DNA evidence off.
They landed late, but canyons spoke them home.
Nomadic Turkish horse tribes they don’t know.
What’s America, but the legend of Stop ‘n’ Go?
Could be cousins, left on the land bridge,
contrary to popular belief, that was a two-way toll.
In any case we’d claim them, give them someplace to stay.
Such as we were we gave most things outright
(the deed of the theft was many deeds and leases and claim stakes
and tenure disputes and moved plat markers stolen still today . . . )
We were the land before we were a people,
earthdivers, her darling mudpuppies, so the stories go,
or emerging, fully forming from flesh of earth—
The land, not the least vaguely, realizing in all four directions,
still storied, art-filled, fully enhanced.
Such as she is, such as she wills us to become.
TIFFANY MIDGE (1965–), Standing Rock Sioux, grew up in the Pacific Northwest and lives in Idaho. She received her MFA from the University of Idaho. Her poetry collection Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed won the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, and her collection The Woman Who Married a Bear won the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry. Her most recent book is a collection of comic essays, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s.
Teeth in the Wrong Places
Coyote was ripe for adventure and wanted to visit the evil old woman
he’d been warned about; she lived with her two wicked daughters and