American Poets in the 21st Century
Page 23
16
I will appear again.
statement 7
17
Sinuous, I am.
statement 8 (31)
Despite its apparent invisibility to the naked eye, and despite its history of violation, Snake Mound asserts its ongoing physical and spiritual presence, its ongoing roles, that is, as sacred site (“My weight remains / heavy upon this land”), sacred cite (“mouth undone, / for egg swallow”), and sacred sight (“my vision bears / all even still”). In its penultimate, seventh statement (the fourth prime), which occurs at line 16 (4 × 4, or four squared, that is, four made two-dimensional), Snake Mound asserts (in four words), “I will appear again.” In its final, eighth statement (4 × 2, or 2 × 2 × 2, the cube of two, or the first and only balanced prime made three-dimensional), which occurs at line 17 (the seventh prime), Snake Mound then asserts (in three words) both the primacy of its curving physical form, “Sinuous,” and the primacy of its spiritual being, “I am.” For many readers, Snake Mound’s final phrase, separated from the serpentine adjective sinuous by the singular curve of a comma, will evoke one of the self-reflexive self-representations of the invading settlers’ Hebrew God as expressed in Exodus 3:14: “I am who I am.”
It is worth drawing further attention to Hedge Coke’s provocative use of the adjective sinuous, with which Snake Mound directly responds to the dominant ideologies that authorized the razing of its physical body in an assertion of the effigy’s own self-reflexive self-representation. Formed from the noun sinus, indicating a curve or bend, or a curving part or recess within a larger structure (not unlike the punctuation of a comma), sinuous indicates a serpentine or wavy physical form but also carries primary meanings of strong, lithe movements, intricacy or complexity, and indirectness. The related verb sinuate means to curve or wind in and out, while the verb insinuate means to suggest or hint slyly, to introduce by indirect or artful means.
The derivation of sinuous from sinus is most evocative in the specific connotations it draws from the field of anatomy. Here sinus indicates a recess or passage: the hollow in a bird bone, cavities in a skull. In human bodies, the sinuses evoke connection to the nasal passages and thus to life-giving breath. The sinuses are also receptacles and channels for fluids, especially for venous blood, that is, blood that has been deoxygenated and charged with carbon dioxide, ready to pass through the respiratory organs to release carbon dioxide and to renew its supply of life-giving oxygen. “Sinuous, I am” thus does more than simply indicate the (apparently absent) effigy’s serpentine physical form. Within the line’s overt biblical syntax and tone and its subtle numerical alignments, sinuous slyly suggests, as well, Snake Mound’s assertion of its central role as a technology for activating the physical and spiritual life of Blood Run. It is through the vehicle of this presently invisible, narrow, and curving passageway that life-giving breath will return.
That the celestially aligned Snake Mound evokes a renewing breath links Hedge Coke’s representation of the effigy to Cajete’s assertion that “[t]he historic efforts of Native cultures to resonate with the heavens also represent their attempts to live up to an ideal ecological relationship with the Earth.”18 Resonance and renewing breath also link this representation of the Snake Mound effigy back to Hedge Coke’s opening narrative poem in section I, “Dawning.” Titled “Before Next Dawning,” the narrative poem offers an expansive overview of Indigenous history, moving from the ancient North American past to world events of the early twenty-first century in a total of 176 lines. This number indexes the 176 earthworks still extant when the Blood Run site was mapped at the end of the nineteenth century, a fact to which Hedge Coke draws attention in her author note (xiv). It can be factored as 4 × 44, emphasizing the book’s sacred basic unit of measurement, four, and in effect evoking its cube; this factoring of 176 thus evokes the number sixty-four (4 × 4 × 4), the number of persona poems that make up Blood Run. “Before Next Dawning” ends in ritualized prayer organized into a four-part, nearly palindromic structure. Through the metaphor of “breath” and “breathing,” the speaker prays for the renewal of the endangered land, the violated earthworks, the desecrated human remains at Blood Run, ultimately, for the renewal of the entire planet:
Yet,
testament in danger still, monstrous machines,
bulldozing scars upon soil,
lifting the earth’s very skin up,
baring her bones, bones
of her People for raking, then smothering her
breath with concrete, brick, mortar—
Never more allowing her to freely breathe.
May she breathe again.
May she breathe.
…….
May she breathe.
May she breathe again. (9–10)
“Sinuous, I am” asserts Snake Mound’s crucial role in this prayed-for physical and spiritual renewal.
In Snake Mound’s invocation of a breathing, life-giving passageway, we can discern, too, Hedge Coke’s thematic alignment of the Snake Mound persona with that of the central, life-giving River at Blood Run. River appears twice in the sequence: first in the privileged (and unique) position of the first persona to speak in Blood Run, poem one in section II, “Origin,” and then in the similarly privileged position of the sixteenth poem (4 × 4, or the square of the sacred basic unit of measurement, four) in section III, “Intrusions.” This second appearance is simultaneously the forty-fourth persona poem within the larger sequence of sixty-four, again emphasizing River’s connection to the sacred number four and aligning her, as well, with the significant factoring of the 176 lines of the opening narrative poem (4 × 44).
Across the sequence, other personas allude to River and her unparalleled power, especially the collective physical entity The Mounds and the singular spiritual guide Clan Sister. In her fourth appearance, for instance, positioned in section III, Clan Sister prophesies:
River will come for them [the intruders].
She only rests till time
needs her to bathe, wash over.
Without offerings
She will come swollen,
snatch them up like pollen,
disperse, dispense, derogate. (62)
In her sixth, penultimate appearance, positioned in section IV, “Portend,” Clan Sister then explicitly links the serpentine shape of River to the serpentine shape of snakes (80). The Mounds, in their seventh, final appearance, positioned as the seventh poem in section IV (seven is the fourth prime), reiterate this connection between Snake Mound, which they describe as an “elegant effigy” whose purpose is “immaculate,”19 and Clan Sister’s prophecy of River’s power:
When the animals leave this place,
now without protective honorary sculpture.
When River returns with her greatest force.
………….
when The Reclaiming comes to pass,
all will know our great wombed hollows,
the stores of Story safely put by.
All will come to truth. (82)
River makes her most powerful appearance, however, in the book’s second narrative poem and second poem in the Epilogue, “When the Animals Leave This Place,” with which Hedge Coke concludes her poetic sequence and fulfills Clan Sister’s prophecy. In eighty-nine lines (the twenty-fourth prime) and in the imagery of the serpentine River flooding its banks to reclaim Blood Run, Snake Mound’s sinuous promise of world renewal is brought to physical fruition.20 The poem and the sequence end with the three words (and four syllables) “It has begun” (92).
Following “Snake Mound,” the final two persona poems in the third set of seven in section II reinforce the role of the effigy in the spiritual life at Blood Run. The sixth poem, which immediately follows “Snake Mound,” animates the mysterious persona “Esoterica,” which represents Indigenous sacred and medicinal knowledge: “spark between Creator, Creation. / I am sacrament for some nearby” (32). Composed of fifty-three lines, “Esoterica” is the longest p
ersona poem in the sequence, and it is the only poem divided into numbered sections. At this point in the analysis, it will come as no surprise that fifty-three is the sixteenth prime; sixteen, as already noted, is the square of four, the sacred basic unit of measurement for Blood Run.21 Moreover, the number of sections in the poem, seven, is the fourth prime and another number associated with the sacred. Finally, the set ends with the seventh persona poem, the spiritual guide Clan Sister, who, like the collective persona The Mounds, appears seven times across the sequence. This is Clan Sister’s second appearance (two is the first prime); her poem consists of sixteen lines divided evenly into four stanzas of four lines each, accentuating her relationships to natural phenomena, ritual activity, and the sacred. Mid-poem, anticipating her coming prophecy, Clan Sister states, “Wondrous revelations / occur rarely. / Once a lifetime” (35).
“Recognize me to free thyself”
Although Snake Mound speaks only once, in section II, its persona returns in an altered form and under an altered name in section III. Section II, “Origin,” is composed of twenty-eight persona poems, the result of the sacred number four multiplied by the sacred number seven; section III, “Intrusions,” is composed of twenty-seven persona poems. Twenty-seven is the cube of the book’s other basic unit of measurement, three (3 × 3 × 3, or three made three-dimensional). In contrast to the number four or other even numbers, in many Indigenous North American cultures, three is associated with creative activity and with action that is ongoing and incomplete.22 Here, in the section that highlights the intrusion into Blood Run of violent ideologies, people, and machines, “Snake Mound” manifests as “Stone Snake Effigy.”23
Among the section’s six “intruding” personas, which appear in seven poems, the collective “Squatters” is especially connected to the related personas of Snake Mound and Stone Snake Effigy. These unlawful occupiers of the land justify their “settling” of “wilderness” and their “tam[ing]” of “savages” by damning unwanted “beasts” and railing against “blasphemous symbols—Snakes!” (51). That they invoke the specific language of blasphemy and snakes helps explain why the section’s intruders as a whole and the Squatters’ poem in particular occupy a seemingly exalted status within the thematic geometry of Blood Run. The six intruders claim a total of seven poems (the fourth prime), with “Squatters” positioned as the seventh poem within section III and simultaneously as the thirty-fifth persona poem (7 × 5) within the overall sequence. Moreover, “Squatters” is composed of twenty-eight lines (7 × 4) arranged into sixteen statements (4 × 4, or the square of the book’s sacred basic unit of measurement).24 Unlike the sins of irreverence, impiety, or sacrilege, which manifest in multiple forms, the sin of blasphemy typically manifests as spoken language or inscribed speech. Thus, in coupling “blasphemous symbols” and “—Snakes!” (the drama of the coupling accentuated by the dash, capital S, and exclamation point), the Squatters implicitly recognize—and explicitly recoil from—Snake Mound as both biblical Serpent (that sly tempter to knowledge) and Indigenous text. In their own inscribed speech, the Squatters claim rights guaranteed by “Manifest Destiny,” “God’s will,” and “providence”—rights to “raze,” “exterminate,” “obliterate.” Their claims are structured, however, as an unlawful occupation of the sacred numbers seven and four. It is thus the Squatters—and the six intruders as a whole—who commit sins of profanity and defamation, who blaspheme, within the symbolic economy and thematic geometry of Blood Run.
Within section III, “Stone Snake Effigy” follows the embedded sequence of the six named intruders to the Blood Run site. The twenty-first poem within the section (3 × 7), “Stone Snake Effigy” is simultaneously the forty-ninth persona poem (7 × 7, or seven squared) within the larger sequence of sixty-four. Like “Snake Mound,” “Stone Snake Effigy” is composed of seventeen lines divided into eight stanzas, with seven gaps or “convolutions” of white space on the page, and arranged into eight statements, and it is similarly sited across the open spine of the book in dialogue with the collective persona of The Mounds. And like the Snake Mound, the Stone Snake Effigy asserts its ongoing centrality at Blood Run and its ongoing relevance for the human community:
Stone Snake Effigy
1
Before ignorance
2
my length was modeled
3
for protection,
4
sacred presence.
statement 1
[1]
5
Presenting myself fully so long.
statement 2
[2]
6
Now these stones, still mark
7
glorious envisioned
8
being I once was.
statement 3
[3]
9
What is now considered miles
10
once stretched by rope-lengths.
statement 4
[4]
11
Walk along my length made
12
considering what is done, will be.
statement 5
[5]
13
What is necessary surely remains so,
14
regardless of hands, or hearts of man.
statement 6
[6]
15
My purpose thus exists among needs
16
of the world to this very day.
statement 7
[7]
17
Recognize me to free thyself. (65)
statement 8
Stone Snake Effigy’s imperative at line 17 (the seventh prime), “Recognize me to free thyself,” echoes Snake Mound’s self-representation at its line 17, “Sinuous, I am,” in its biblical diction, syntax, and tone. Only now, situated within section III, “Intrusions,” the biblical discourse resonates not only with the Old Testament (the Serpent’s role in prompting the primal couple toward knowledge) but also with the New. Combined with the poem’s references to “length,” “presenting,” “stones,” “glorious,” and “miles,” and with the invitation to “Walk along my length made / considering what is done, will be,” beginning at line 11 (the fifth prime), the imperative to “Recognize me” in order “to free thyself” is suggestive of the story of Christ’s recognition at Easter as presented in the Gospel of Luke, especially the story of the two disciples who fail to recognize the risen Christ as they “walk along” the Road to Emmaus.25 With the Emmaus allusion in mind, we can discern the poem’s subtle play with the details of the “stones” of Christ’s tomb, a “mark” of his resurrection, and with its emphasis on the details of “walk[ing],” “length,” and “miles.”
In the story of the Road to Emmaus, the risen Christ challenges his unseeing disciples to recognize his glory and thereby to gain their freedom from the Old Law. Through the persona of the Stone Snake Effigy, the contemporary Indigenous poet challenges readers to recognize—and, significantly, to engage in—an Indigenous scientific rather than a Western scientific understanding of earthworks technologies: not to assume a detached view of the world, but rather to actively participate with the living earth and cosmos. Cajete describes this understanding of Indigenous science: “Native science embodies the central premises of phenomenology (the philosophical study of phenomena) by rooting the entire tree of knowledge in the soil of direct physical and perceptual experience of the earth. In other words, to know yourself you must first know the earth.”26 The imperative to “Recognize me to free thyself” thus directly depends upon the invitation to “Walk along my length made / considering what is done, will be.”
Hedge Coke’s complex sequence of poems demands nothing less of its readers than to understand the multiple sitings of civic and sacred earthworks at Blood Run—and across the North American continent—in specifically Indigenous scientific terms. In the thematic geometry of her poetic forms, based in the natural numbers four, three,
and seven and in the sequence of the first twenty-four primes, she actively demonstrates the efficacy of Indigenous earthworks technologies, for it is at this level that she literally embodies aspects of those technologies within her contemporary poetic practice. Through the poetic sequence of Blood Run, she orients readers to see regular, persistent systems of natural, cosmic, and human patterning, and thus she positions readers to imagine the ongoing persistence and the potential renewal of Indigenous worlds rather than to accept the colonial fictions of their erasure.27 This is the dramatic and political power of Hedge Coke’s earthworks poetics. As the speaker reflects toward the end of the opening narrative poem, “It is in this dawning consciousness is raised. A chance” (9).
NOTES
1. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Blood Run: Free Verse Play (Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2006), 94. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
2. Hedge Coke describes her methodology for writing Blood Run in her introduction to Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). For information on Good Earth State Park at Blood Run, dedicated in 2017, see gfp.sd.gov and southeastsouthdakota.com.
3. See, for instance, Ray Hively and Robert Horn, “Geometry and Astronomy in Prehistoric Ohio,” in Foundations of New World Cultural Astronomy: A Reader with Commentary, ed. Anthony Aveni (1982; reprint, Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008); and Bradley T. Lepper, The Newark Earthworks: A Wonder of the Ancient World (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 2002).
4. For an early account of the research for establishing the so-called Great Hopewell Road, see Bradley T. Lepper, “Tracking Ohio’s Great Hopewell Road,” Archaeology 48 (1995): 52–56.
5. Computer-based interactive exhibits of earthworks sites have been developed by the Center for the Electronic Reconstruction of Historical and Archaeological Sites (CERHAS) at the University of Cincinnati; see the EarthWorks website at www.cerhas.uc.edu. Also see the website for the Ancient Ohio Trail, a collaborative site geared toward earthworks tourism created by the Ohio Historical Society, the US National Park Service, the Newark Earthworks Center at the Ohio State University at Newark, and CERHAS at www.ancientohiotrail.org.