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
Runaway Dreams Page 8