Runaway Dreams

Home > Other > Runaway Dreams > Page 8
Runaway Dreams Page 8

by Richard Wagamese


  in bringing others with you, sharing it, offering it to other

  travellers lost without a light. So you stand looking upward

  at the sky together then, the awe you feel in bringing energy

  together, the sacred circle of you, joined by an everyday glory

  you only need to breathe to recognize, to haul into you to

  join, to hold in your chest like a wish that frees you. Great

  wheel, spin, spin.

  Nets

  you stand on the shore

  of the Winnipeg River

  and watch the old men smoking

  laughing and mending nets

  their hands moving

  almost by themselves

  and when they look up

  and see you there

  they smile

  their hands continuing

  the dance they’ve learned

  by touch

  this is what it means

  to be Indian, you say, Ojibway

  the effortless, almost mindless

  mending of the nets

  we cast across

  the currents of time

  Powwow

  See them dance

  against the slow

  and even movement of the sky

  so that to the eye

  colours shift against

  the grass and the drum

  and the rattle of elk teeth

  the swish of shawl, and the clatter

  of bells on leggings becoming

  the smile on young kids’ faces

  and the wistful grins of the old ones

  sitting back in wheelchairs now

  wishing they might dance again

  to join the whirling, swirling, stomping, glee

  of this great wheel of regalia danced

  so that energies might become a blessing

  and a prayer bestowed upon this sacred earth

  where a simple song sung with drums

  sends waves of light across

  the universe to that spiritual place

  where we all began our journeys

  toward this place

  where it all comes together

  like a vision that travels in

  a circle of prayer

  to encircle all who

  come

  here

  now

  Trickster Dream

  Crow came to my room last night

  dressed in a checkered western shirt

  and boots and jeans too tight in the rump

  so that he squawked soprano

  and groused vociferously

  about the lack of a proper avian line

  he’s hip to things like that

  Crow gets around, you know

  him and Coyote, well

  they’ve been known to carouse

  something awful in the streets of Milan

  and even though no one likes

  a knock-down loaded Trickster much

  they’ve got a fashion sense to die for

  all that fur and feather accessorizing

  to go with the Pucci (Coyote’s call) scarves

  and the Salvatore Ferragamo calf-skin

  bag that Crow adores because he

  can’t hack the shoes

  (they don’t call them crow’s feet for nothing

  is how he says it)

  anyhow, Crow was on the lookout for Raven

  whom he’d heard had been seen

  in the vicinity and needed

  some advice on metaphor or allegory

  aphorism or some such Trickster trick

  because he had a gig in Kasabonika Lake

  and them Oji-Crees up there

  had heard all his schtick before

  and the kids were even using

  his best lines in the schoolyard now

  Crow was after belly laughs

  and Coyote couldn’t help much with that

  on account of he always wanted

  to make them howl

  although he did have some of the

  snappiest zingers in the Trickster biz

  and Crow himself had busted a gut

  every now and then when Coyote

  let loose with those moonlight

  prowl stories of his

  Raven knew the ins and outs of Trickster-ism

  he’d even hung with the big guys

  Nanabush and Wesakechak

  creating mayhem in a tamarack bog

  and driving the local Cree kids wacko

  just before they drove south in

  a battered ’57 Chevy

  to dig the crazy Cajun food

  in N’aw Lins before Katrina

  so he knew a thing or two

  Crow hopped from the dresser

  to the window ledge and fluffed

  his inky feathers in the moonlight

  and laid the full force of his

  beady obsidian eyes on me

  and cackled and croaked

  and wondered if we had

  any jalapeno-stuffed olives in the house

  or the new Black Crowes CD

  because Tricksters gotta stay hip

  you know

  it’s where the best bits come from

  so I told him that this wasn’t

  really Raven country but that

  there were a lot of crows around

  if he wanted to ask

  “any nesting in the sunshine?” he asked

  I asked him why and he wriggled his shoulders

  in the red-checkered shirt

  and hiked the jeans up some

  “always on the lookout for a hot black chick,”

  he said and mimicked a rim shot

  and a cymbal crash

  he was right

  he was in desperate need of schtick

  Mountain Morning

  it’s so still you can feel

  the boundaries of things shimmer

  with the effort it takes

  to hold themselves in

  even the birds are hushed

  and in this perfect silence

  where not even a faint breeze strays

  the idea of manitous

  hovered over everything

  becomes the first wavered light

  of the sun through the clouds

  and the storm that gathers to the west

  announces itself

  in a fanfare of silence

  small wonder, you say

  that there’s no word

  for “power” in your language

  only spirit

  only medicine

  but then

  there’s no word for “obvious”

  either

  On Battle Bluffs

  for Jennifer and Ron Ste. Marie

  they say that in the old days

  the scouts would come to sit and watch

  for any sign of enemies coming

  out of the purple mountains

  or across the hard iridescent platter

  of the lake

  from this height the land

  stretches out across the territory

  of the Secwepemc, the Shuswap

  as it’s said in the settler talk

  and there’s history in the sudden flare

  of space, the country below us reduced

  to angle and a narrowing where the lake

  pulls our focus forward into the hard vee

  of its disappearing

  so that it becomes like time, really

  wending, winding, curving in upon itself

  turning into something else completely

  while we breathe the exhalations

  of the breath of those who came

  and went before

  wind on stone

  the clock of us ticking

  relentlessly

  I can hear the cries of battle rising

  upward on drafts of air

  just as I feel the solemn peace

 
that fell over young men who sat for days here

  praying, fasting, seeking the vision

  that would lead them into manhood

  perhaps becoming one of those who fell

  beneath the hammered blows of conflict

  amidst the clumps of medicine sage

  on the sere grasslands below

  it’s a sacred place because of that

  this place of becoming and leaving

  this warrior place where the spirit of a people

  resides in wafts of air

  risen from their territory to climb beyond

  here to the place of old voices

  whose home is the wind

  eagle wings skimming

  silently across

  this hallowed blue

  lying against the ancient rock

  feeling the push of it on my back

  the sun bakes everything in radiant waves

  that shimmer and dance

  so that looking out across the battlefields below

  the land itself weaves into motion

  the sun dance maybe

  or another act of being

  I don’t know why places like this

  affect me so

  only that the search for a sense

  of my own history involves many histories

  the sum of us lodged within these sheer bluffs

  so that coming here becomes a pilgrimage of sorts

  a deliberate marching, plodding, shuffling forward

  and backwards at the same time

  to reclaim a piece of me

  I didn’t know existed

  this rock a vertebrae

  in the great spine of story

  of our time here

  together

  songs rise higher

  borne on air

  returning

  Papers

  for Debra

  I walk by with another armload and watch you scanning

  papers for signs of life. This life that passed. It’s funny how

  something like a postcard scribbled against the gunwales of

  a sloop off Wanganui can come to mean so much. Vague

  hieroglyphics cast from the hands of an unknown people,

  place and time and distance referenced by what’s implied and

  not by what you know, a connection you feel as paper in the

  hands. Still, you plumb each line and image like a sounder

  reading the depth of unknown waters, breathless for the tale

  born by echo. There’s a lifetime in these boxes, and in their

  faded inks and snapshots running to opaque your father’s

  world fills itself in hint by hint, line by line, detail by detail,

  until finally, as the boxes disappear you assemble a keepsake,

  a shrine they so inelegantly call a “scrap” book — the only

  treasure you can take away. They are the sum of us the things

  we keep and in the hands of loved ones once we’re gone,

  those paper trails of living retain their sense of self, sit there

  squarely in the palm, crooning old jazz ballads, moaning a

  particular blues, singing their histories.

  Getting Supper

  there’s nothing too traditional

  about a tuna steak fashioned

  into burgers to someone

  with sturgeon as a totem

  but you could make the case

  that wasabi is an Ojibway word

  if you said it slow enough

  still I’ve learned to brandish a knife

  and I can mince without too much

  damage to my manliness

  and now that I know there’s things to skin

  I can retain a savage decorum

  even if it’s just an onion

  and I face the whole

  slice and dice thing

  like a cavalry charge

  over a battlefield of lettuce

  but there’s something elemental in

  the hunkering over a stove or a grill

  that hearkens back to fires

  glowing orange in the night

  and the smell of meat roasting on a stick

  so that this whole getting supper thing

  has its merits in a purely

  cross-cultural way

  even if I flunk the miso tuna burger test

  the hunter prowls Safeway aisles now

  the gatherer chases bargains

  in the produce section and hey

  shiitake is a ceremonial word you know

  honest

  Monk at Midnight

  They say he learned to play by ear and that by the time he

  made it to Minton’s he was shellacking the keys with his whole

  body as though the fingers splayed in gigantic stretches were

  extensions of the spirit he pushed across the room, over the

  tables, up to the rafters and down again to explode in the

  souls of the ones lucky enough to hear him then. He was a

  bear of a man, a grizzled veteran of the road, so that when he

  laid down a note it meant more than the timbre of it against

  the night, the room, the crowd, it meant a thousand nights

  walking alone through darkened streets with shards of sound

  borne down from streetlamps, up from the desolate alleys and

  sluiced down the gutters and out to the black current of the

  river to the sea where jazz is born in the tempest of things

  and the toss and tide of fate made manifest in cigar smoke

  and whiskey and seven octaves alive in the hands of a genius

  who brooked no falsehood in notes or life. Monk played with

  his whole body. You could hear that. He played every note in

  sheer amazement of the one he’d played before. So that the

  cascade of runs made that keyboard sound eighteen feet long

  and standing looking out from the window at the shadow of

  the mountains in the darkness, Monk, dead as hell for almost

  thirty years, reaches out behind you and fills the corners of

  the room with sound. Awesome, you think to be touched this

  way and jazz becomes an Ojibway thing by virtue of the blues

  built into it and the feeling of the moan of a song caught in

  the throat and begging release to the land where all things

  are born and all things return in the end and the belief we

  hold that it can save us, the song spilled out upon the land.

  Jazz and soul and hope and harmony and all things Ojibway

  becoming one at once, everything alternating a semitone

  apart, until the last note fades and you stand there in your

  lack, waiting . . .

  Paul Lake Fog

  Great beards of air

  moving slow

  stretching as if tugged

  by a child’s hands

  introducing trees

  limb by limb

  and crows placed

  neatly along the power line

  like a string of beads

  hung around the neck

  of the mountain

  nothing but the air moves

  until the sun intrudes

  from the east

  to show the deer

  watching you from the trees

  at the end of the driveway

  the smoke of her breath

  joined to the fog

  leaving

  no one ever pulled up

  to heaven with a U-Haul

  someone told you that once

  and if you laughed about it then

  here you come to understand

  the utter sense of it

  that this mosaic of things

  the bits and pieces

  of this life that move

  you so

  are what you carry with you


  when you go

  spirit lives in everything

  there are no departures

  only another joining

  West Arm Kootenay Lake

  There’s a wind from the southeast pushing

  waves up to the edge of the beach

  where you can see the full moon hanging

  behind a bank of clouds set between

  the humped shoulders of mountains

  everything is indigo now

  even the shadows have retreated to purple

  as the silvered mercury of the moon

  puts a sheen on the body of the lake

  if you look long enough the motion

  of the water makes it look as though

  the moon were moving, drifting further

  away across the depths of space

  with the planet giving chase until

  you come to feel yourself move

  so you spread your arms and close

  your eyes to feel the tractive tug of it

  calling you forward outward beyond

  all sense of where you are until

  a part of you becomes moonbeam, star

  dust, nebula and the tail of a comet maybe

  and you laugh to feel that

  it’s not very Indian you say

  to let yourself escape like this

  to wander out across the universe

  when all your issues are here on the planet

  land claims, treaty rights, the clamour for a

  place at the negotiating table on things

  that affect us and dammit all Wagamese

  there’s people starving in Pikangikum

  and eighteen people share a two-room house

  without a proper toilet in Atawapiskat

  and there’s kids surrendering to gang life

  glue and solvents and their parents

  are drunk and can’t give a damn

  because the chief ran off with a few

  hundred grand of the fiscal funding

  in the new pickup truck he bought

 

‹ Prev