New Poets of Native Nations, page 11
I haven’t much traveled the third except to visit
a hospital where, after the first time,
my mother had refused chemotherapy.
And the last road you know as well as I do—
past the coral-painted Catholic church, its doors
long ago sealed shut to the mouth of Mission Canyon,
then south just a ways, to where the Rockies cut open
and forgive. There you and I are on the ascent.
After that, the arrival is what matters most.
Equilibrium
IN MEMORY OF ERIC LEVI BIGLEGGINS
1
After child after child after child, no one
believes in the cacophony of sirens anymore.
If only we could break back these bones
and form a new ceremony from each of our losses.
O’ mend our teeth from another dark stretch of road,
our rugged knuckles from another first of the month.
2
And still the children keep jumping from trains.
The people in town dream anxiously,
fire and iron licking at the corners of old,
handmade quilts. They have forgotten
the language of antelope and creek bed,
find in its place only one way to say
we are not responsible.
Today one man woke to the callous offering
of a bird’s beak and black wing
left on his doorstep at daybreak.
And what of all the other warnings,
of all the family lost because their hearts
were too heavy for them to carry?
If we could put these omens away, down in the basement
the door could be locked,
the mutter of crows left there to decay.
3
Next time and it will be the dance of chairs
and imaginary high speed chases.
It will require a fine sense of balance
and a song of stars.
Just the slightest slip of the rope
and the sky will be set
loose, the body
like a shift in the river’s current.
4
The Bridge can hold, the body can not, and our excuses
will do nothing to save us now.
We survive between these barbed wire
fabrications. We gather together in the middle of the night,
call out the names of lost cousins and friends who cannot
cross over to the other side because we keep
praying them back.
We ask so much of them: slow the car down, don’t jump, don’t let go, come back to us.
But what are we really guilty of?—the blood memory of what
we can’t forgive ourselves for.
5
Hollowed out grief becomes electric,
loosens a thousand storm patterns
in the marrow of ghost homes,
ghost children, ghost love.
We are the ones
FOR DEZMOND
Waiting.
A syllable: forming,
generating energy in small, dark masses: marrow, stem cell, neuron.
Waiting to come alive again in this tiny body.
Guwa—you should learn this is the word between you and I,
my son, hokshina.
Come here. Come home. To this place. Between you and I
no separation. But always room. And silence—until
we can find meaning and the words together.
I repeat it, again and again, gesturing for you to come over. Hoping
the vibrations will come alive, you will listen inside yourself. And you will sense
just who you are, who you belong to and among.
As if you were under water and could feel your pulse,
the whir and swish of your blood traveling miles and miles.
Across the wind-blown graves of your great grandparents and their grandparents—
Mikushi, Mitugash—yours. And they are out there, belonging to you before
you were even born. Waiting.
Heart Butte, Montana
The unsympathetic wind, how she has evaded me for years now,
leaving a guileless shell and no way to navigate. Once when I stood
on a plateau of earth just at the moment before the dangerous,
jutting peaks converged upon the lilting sway of grasslands, I almost
found a way back. There, the sky, quite possibly all the elements,
caused the rock and soil and vegetation to congregate. Their prayer
was not new and so faint I could hardly discern. Simple remembrances,
like a tiny, syncopated chorus calling everyone home: across
a thousand eastward miles, and what little wind was left at my back.
But I could not move. And then the music was gone.
All that was left were the spring time faces of mountains, gazing down,
their last patches of snow, luminous. I dreamed of becoming snow melt,
gliding down the slope and in to the valley. With the promise,
an assurance, that there is always a way to become bird, tree, water again.
LEANNE HOWE
LeAnne Howe is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Her novel Shell Shaker is a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award winner. She is coeditor of Seeing Red, Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film 2013. Her memoir Choctalking on Other Realities is winner of the 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Howe holds the Eidson Distinguished Professorship in the Department of English at the University of Georgia, Athens.
Evidence of Red is LeAnne Howe’s first collection of poems, published in 2005. Her second book is Savage Conversations (2019).
A Duck’s Tune
Ya kut unta pishno ma*
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
So I moved to this place,
Iowa City, Ioway
Where green-headed mallards
walk the streets day and night,
and defecate on sidewalks.
Greasy meat bags in wetsuits,
disguise themselves as pets
and are as free as birds.
Maybe Indians should have thought of that?
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Maybe you would have
left us alone,
if we put on rubber bills,
and rubber feet,
Quacked instead of complained,
Swam instead of danced
waddled away when you did
what you did …
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
So I moved to the Place
The “Jewel of the Midwest”
Where ghosts of ourselves
Dance the sulphur trails.
Fumes emerge continuous
from the mouths of
Three-faced Deities who preach,
“We absolve joy through suffering.”
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
So I moved to this place where
in 1992, up washed Columbus again
like a pointy-chinned Son of Cannibals.
His spin doctors rewrite his successes
“After 500 years and 25 million dead,
One out of 100 American Indians commit suicide
One out of 10 American Indians are alcoholics
49 years is the average lifespan of American Indians.”
Each minute burns
the useful and useless alike
Sing Hallelujah
Praise the Lord
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
And when you foreigners
build your off-world colonies
and relocate in outer space
This is what we will do
We will dance,
We will dance,
We will dance
to a duck’s tune.
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
Ya kut unta pishno ma
* This is a dance refrain for a song. The phrase is to be performed. Ya kut unta pishno ma means “We were doing this.” Dancing.
Finders Keepers: Aboriginal Responses to European Colonization
Almost three hundred years ago
Mississippi Choctaw women took
Frenchmen into their beds
into their iksas,
into their hearts
for their blood.
The men called this ritual
the sweet medicine of immortality.
Bread is the human body
Bread confers immortality.
When my story is finished,
You will offer yourself again to me like bread.
Unafraid.
And I will take you.
My God you are brave.
Have you forgotten what Grandmother said?
That the women of my family
are like the plants
we call bashuchak.
Everlastings
Ballast
Dear Dean,
I know what you mean. Like shipping costs from China, all things rise over Okieland, bodies, baseballs, Wiley Post’s eye, you remember that eye, my adopted father’s right arm as he pitches a ball so high into the great blue yonder, I lost sight of it in 1958.
If we were home, (and we’re not) I would show you Wiley Post Airport one block from the house on Hatley Street in Bethany, Oklahoma where I was raised along with a yard of chickens and images of Wiley Post in his pressure suit hovering above us. Sometimes his sub-stratospheric flights without enough O2 make his good eye go gaga like the ones we saw in Modigliani paintings, you remember those eyes. Raised up in Maysville, Wiley was quintessential Okie, an ex-con turned oil field roughneck turned parachute jumper turned aviation inventor. He and the Cherokee kid Will Rogers were up 26,000 feet when their plane engine failed. No screaming, no sorrow, no hubris, just three lines over Alaska.
Point Barrow
26 thousand feet, we’re in a vertical dive.
Orion-Explorer seaplane in …
If we were there, (and we weren’t) I would have elbowed,
Oklahoma here we come!
Catafalque
June 1875
Bellevue Place Sanitarium 333 Jefferson Street, Batavia, Illinois
Midnight, Mary Todd Lincoln’s bedroom. The underarms of her nightdress are badly soiled. Her small feet are swollen; the skin is paper-thin.
Savage Indian has a small box on his lap filled with her jewelry. He fingers each piece and finally fastens a pearl necklace around his neck.
Mary Todd Lincoln
Nightly I examine the ruined heads in my handheld mirror: yours and mine, our eyes dangle like dull grapes on a broken vine, is it the candlelight?
Savage Indian Watches her with menacing eyes but does not move.
Mary Todd Lincoln
I touch the blemish on your face, finger your blood-stained shirt, a drop of spittle has escaped your tight lips, your bare feet clammy as fish, all there, and here; I kiss the mirror, beg you to wake, fight to catch your attention through some mad, theatrical gesture, remember? My bed, always a catafalque to you; Oh let fly my flesh, hair, and eyelash, pay the Nightjar who regularly serenades, but like us, steals the milk of goats.
Here, at last, I’ll tell it all; I did wish you dead, Sir, eight thousand thirty-nine times for all the days you ran sideways from our home, whistling a Nightjar’s tune. Pay them all now Sir, before dawn’s light.
Savage Indian Reads aloud the inscription of her wedding ring.
Love is Eternal.
Catafalque II
June 1875
Bellevue Place Sanitarium 333 S. Jefferson Street, Batavia, Illinois
Mary Todd Lincoln and Savage Indian pace around the room like amateur boxers.
Mary Todd Lincoln
Arriving nightly without invitation,
You make my room a ceremony as
Nightjars sing, wing clap, chirr a bird’s song.
Inhibited at dawn by God’s will, like us.
When shall I tell them the truth?
Where shall I keep the truth?
Under my frayed petticoat,
It will not flower now.
She fingers a small picture of Abraham Lincoln on her bureau.
There is no need to wait for tea: I confess
I did long for the pleasure of your coarse skin,
Money to spend, kid gloves, chiffon and satin
Ball gowns with lavish trains properly hemmed. Doomed children.
Tonight, let us hoist the catafalque over a new grave
Hold my hands above the dank earth as the Nightjars serenade
Oh what a great heart smasher you are, Mr. Lincoln.
Adieu, my confessor, my all-in-all, lover, protector, ghost husband.
Turning to Savage Indian.
Wishing for nothing, not even breath,
Take the flint knife,
Cut me, I dare you.
The Rope1 Seethes
Out of Fort Snelling’s coffin
I swing like a fool on holiday
Backward, forward, and
Around and around
1 A single noose from the December 26, 1862, Dakota hangings has been preserved in the collections of Fort Snelling, Minnesota. In 2011 representatives from the Dakota Nation visited the collection to see the noose. Prayers were offered. For additional readings see The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose, by Jack Shuler.
CEDAR SIGO
Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. Sigo is the editor of There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera, on Joanne Kyger. Sigo lives in San Francisco and is editor of Old Gold Press.
Selected Writings is Cedar Sigo’s first collection of poems, published in 2003 and revised and expanded for a 2005 publication. Sigo is also author of eight books, including Expensive Magic (2008), Stranger in Town (2010), Language Arts (2014), and Royals (2017).
Now I’m a Woman
When you hear the knives ring
Turn the page.
I wonder why I am not
Myself of late, ridiculous glass edges
Turn back on themselves
And soon reveal
The hand of an apprentice
And godforsaken embarrassing torch,
Stormy back hallways
Out of the black and wooden theaters.
Crystal Waters plus her driver
Plus her entourage is still rolling out
Of the sands, Atlantic City
On soundtracks to shows
Held over at The Fairmount
She is throwing back shots
With the mafia. I have learned
To take apart this American Songbook
And very fortunately as I would take
My audience in confidence
Threads of gold fall closely together
Coming to break us off.
At the first if the shows
I sang this song
And in between I saw him in the hall,
What could I tell you?
“Someday we’ll build on a hilltop high.”
Thrones
For Phillis Wheatley: A book of verse uncovered in cornerstones of a Moorish castle, purple and gold depicting souls in various stages of release, the pitch, anger and arc of the poems an unrhymed mirror to the long Atlantic.
For Jayne Cortez: An intertribal grand entry of poets in cedar bark jackets split skirts and whalebones pinning them closed, a voice in praise and suspension of the drum.
For Amiri Baraka: The Pisan cantos decoder ring dipped in black hills gold slipped onto the finger of Donyale Luna who is Cleopatra reborn sleeping soundly in bed.
For Bob Kaufman: A clamp for the mind, docking in a Persian house of ill repute, a striped gabardine diary and the American prison system picked open with an amethyst knife.
For Henry Dumas: A window open on the fog of New York. A studio with desk lamp and a shadow of his writing self pointing back at certain habits, taking off his coat to sit, spilling a little coffee, with all of eternity waiting enthralled.
For Bob Thompson: An all expense paid trip back to Rome on a riverboat tied with roses, its ballroom filled with golden ghouls and hugely debutant postures collapsed, the walls are wet with organ music.
For Alice Coltrane: A custom isolation booth the exact size of Stravinsky’s last silhouette. He stares out. He taps from behind the green glass.
For Stephen Jonas: Your favorite Eric Dolphy faded to a room of golden tasseled light. A couch of friends’ faces smeared in a gleaming silver crown
Green Rainbow Song
Hung up on
my hearing
and deep in whose
playbook
one too many
nights and never
a black-out
Doing the best
I can, only a man
it hurts me too
Blues in the Night
Verlaine Blues
sitting here thinking
a blues for Anne
(all nerves)
and mine
the most dirty
unhurried
afternoon jags
A freshly penned
lyric for sinking
to autumnal
Atlantean shade
I wish us more luck
I wish my little
tiger lily sheltered
in a clear crystal
box (being carried)
Green pearl-handled
mallets edging
