knowing nothing surprises
those who present hope. What is hope? Feel fortune?
Opportunity? Grace?
In the meantime, all wade through ashes, in a place ash
turned to stone when volcanoes
came up from the sea floor,
now high desert, what’s left of it, caldera.
Putting down the suffering,
the day’s work. Beloved and betrothed—horse, cattle, goat.
The chickens hold a roost with their burnt legs, they go as well
to wayside memory, now asunder,
memory, like the paisano,
skipping in, out, walking upward, falling,
bird, fountain motion,
moving.
We were born here, someone mentions.
We don’t know when fire will still, when embers left end themselves,
nor when rain will visit, come to renew,
to free us from burn, from danger.
Nor do we know what caused this end, the timing of a heat plate on long
grass, the nearness of glass to blade in sunlight.
The year of the drought,
though some speculate larger cycles,
the roundabout here is intangible.
Nor do we offer ideas, unless plied with cold lager in the heat here, or
in evenings laid out under fiery stars still gleaming, always lighting
pathways we lean toward in nighttime escapes,
to towns down the road.
No we don’t know. All we know is we are not alone
and yet we are and everything is subject to fire,
even water leaves
in heated paths. What we don’t know we don’t search for, nor do we
attempt to understand. No, we take it.
Deal with it. We muster.
We move through the crust salvaging pieces, we are salvagers, moving
through the heat, lifting recognizable source,
lifting permanence
from tempered time. Lifting home. We tote burned wire, curled into sphere
like story, surround light with it,
harness energy and plug it in until
spherical globes rekindle Marfa fires once surrounding livestock, now bordering
glow, it is the strand we fill, the obligation,
remaking stuff from cinder.
Remaking.
Remaking.
Twins we carried then laid.
One light, one fire. Do they rest?
Do they feel this burden? The melting iron, wire,
shifting wind funneling
them across prairie in winding plumes, are they turning?
What of the way
we embraced to conceive them? Held there like satchels beaded
in cedar spring holding floral bursts. In dense trees, hills, waterways
we come from, the kneel there
when we bury, bring them gifts, make offerings.
In the burn of your brow, when you hastened, did you think before belting
me? Conceive intent?
What were you, but burning?
What were you, but burning?
Yet, fire is the birth of life, the spark there and we
were with spark, ignited.
My life emptied into the banks below mounds they now lay within. They
were within me, now within our mother.
I sometimes long to lie there but
I, too, muster.
You, long gone to other worlds,
not over there, but wandering spark,
burn.
CODA
HARP STRINGS
Sweet rain on old growth sweeps past in fanning sheets,
this morning each veil brings joy, like someone strumming
mist releasing song, falling to branch above hummingbird
dashing in, out, grabbing nectar in the wet, wet, music.
Dashing in, out, grabbing nectar in the wet, wet, music.
Mist releasing song, falling to branch above hummingbird
this morning, each veil brings joy, like someone strumming.
Sweet rain on old growth sweeps past in fanning sheets.
NOTES
This book contains references to cultural ideology, cosmogony, scientific phenomena, and historical and political events, as well as multiple inclusions of botanical, zoological, and geological terminology. I believe most of these references are readily available for research and hope to lead the reader to discover more, extending the work of the poems. Some cultural complexities will have an aesthetic effect on the audience, while understanding the deeper encoded properties will resonate more with those more familiar with the culture base (as in any world literature). Additionally, I hope these few notes will serve some use to the reader.
STREAMING
• Dog Road: The Milky Way.
• Darkening Land: A place of afterlife for humans and animals.
• Cygnus: A seasonally demonstrative constellation.
• Northern Cross: A prominent asterism featured in Cygnus that is also known as the backbone of the Milky Way. As Cygnus moves with the seasons, the shape of the Northern Cross within it seems to peer down, like a long bird looking over the horizon to the west toward the Darkening Land. The bird formations migrate west seasonally.
• Albireo: The fifth-brightest star in Cygnus. It is actually a binary star, where the brighter star is a golden yellow and the dimmer, a deep, rich blue.
• tutsi bowl: A bowl, or pocket, spun of spider silk that Spider wears on her back to carry great things (like fire).
DRUNK BUTTERFLIES
• kamama: Butterfly.
HEROES
• Reference to an event on March 14, 2013, at Falls Park on the Big Sioux River in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Garret Wallace, a white six-year-old, fell into the falls. His sister Madison, a white sixteen-year-old, jumped in to try to save him. Lyle Eagle Tail, a twenty-eight-year-old Lakota—and a complete stranger to them both—jumped in to try to save them. The boy survived, and the other two drowned. It was both an act of heroism and a supreme sacrifice.
PANDO/PANDO
• Pando, the Trembling Giant Aspen: A giant indigenous North American clonal colony. At eighty thousand years old and weighing six million kilograms, it is the heaviest living organism (and among the oldest) on Earth and was once thought to be a whole forest of individual, separate growth (rather than a single living organism sharing a massive underground root system) in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah.
• Pando, massacre: Also known as El Porvenir Massacre. The deadly ambush occurring September 11, 2008, was on Indigenous community members (including students) who were supporters of President Evo Morales, the first Indigenous president—and an Indigenous giant—of Bolivia.
SWARMING
• The invasion of Iraq in 2003.
HIBAKUSHA
• Hibakusha: Literally translates to explosion-affected people. The term refers specifically to the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
STEEL
• Aftermath, September 11, 2001, New York City.
STORY
• Aftermath, September 11, 2001, New York City.
SEARCHING GROUND
• Aftermath, September 11, 2001, New York City.
1973
• Reference to the Wounded Knee incident, a seventy-one day occupation, standoff, and protest of civil and human rights violations on people of the Oglala Sioux Tribe by the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOON) political force and the United States government. Local youth, and adults were in bunkers with leaders from outside the area who came in to answer a call for support. Many of the participants lost family members to the ongoing brutality by GOON forces. In the aftermath of the protest, the GOONs killed about sixty more people, and multitudes of others were injured. Those locals that were teenagers while protesting are in their fifties today, if they survived.
• leciya o iyokipi: ov
er here / (the people) we are happy—pleased with something pleasant (in this case in the afterlife, as a double entendre).
SOLAR FLARES
• Reference to the K-12 teacher protests February 14, 2011, in Madison, Wisconsin, and the powerful X2.2-class solar flare occurring the same date.
• Which Way Home: A documentary following unaccompanied child migrants.
FIRST MORNING
• The March 2010 Split This Rock festival in Washington, DC.
BARRIO TRICENTENARIO, PLAZA DE BANDERAS
• References places where community people were criminally executed and murdered, and a bombing of a Botero sculpture as an act of violence upon the poetry festival of Medellin, Colombia, held annually for peace, and where I have read on multiple occasions.
NIÑO DE LA CALLE
• Niño(s) de la Calle: Term for street children in Medellin, Colombia.
DUBLIN CROSSING
• The Blue Boy: A magnificent play I attended as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theater Festival regarding the horrendous abuse in residential schools in Ireland, and a ghost story of a boy who perished in unknown circumstances.
• The Magdalene Laundries: Asylums where unwed mothers and their children were taken, treated as criminals, kept, starved, and abused in Ireland.
• Also relates to crimes by the Church on Indigenous peoples across the waters in the Americas, in this case in northern North America, beginning with the Black Robes.
WAS MORNING CALL
• Qahweh: Coffee.
• chayi: Tea.
• Arabi: Arabic.
HATCHLINGS
• Anitsata: Choctaw.
• Wampano/Quiripi: A language spoken by Indigenous peoples from western Connecticut and Long Island.
• Mercy Nonsuch: The last full-blood Nehantic.
• Borrelia burgdorferi: The causative agent of Lyme disease, which is spread by deer ticks.
• Little Deer: Punished hunters that killed without need or mercy (and without prayer for mercy from the deer) with inflamed joints, as in rheumatoid arthritis and Lyme disease.
WEATHERBAND/FM/AM
• The tornados on May 20, 2013, in Moore, Oklahoma, and surrounding areas.
WE WERE IN A WORLD
• Birling: Spinning.
• Boson: A photon or other subatomic particle with zero or integral spin.
• Boson melts: My (coined) reference to Higgs boson (aka the God particle, a boson with no spin, electric charge, or color change; also, a particle that is very unstable), the Large Hadron Collider, and the quantum melting and absence of Bose-Einstein condensation in two-dimensional vortex matter, as demonstrated in an experiment by Jairo Sinova, C. B. Hanna, and A. H. MacDonald, who estimate “the boson filling factor at which the vortex lattice melts are consistent with recent exact-diagonalization calculations” (“Quantum Melting and Absence of Bose-Einstein Condensation in Two-Dimensional Vortex Matter,” Physical Review Letters, no. 89 [2002]).
• The reference here also relates to fundamental forces of nature, symmetry, chaos, and creation, and the possibility of breaks in these laws. The irony in the seeking.
• Oraliteratures: Indigenous scholar term, especially common in South America.
IN THE YEAR 513 PC
• References to multiple climate change occurrences—and Indigenous prophesies regarding their coming—with the arrival of Europeans upon the Americas.
TWISTIN’ THE NIGHT AWAY
• Tornados in the Oklahoma City area, May 2013.
• Deep Deuce: Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Oklahoma City homeplace.
THEN
• The Black Blizzard of May 9, 1934 (other Dust Bowl poems follow in tribute to my father, a survivor).
RAINMAKER
• This poem relies on cultural and familial memory and knowledge while considering the complications faced in climate shifts, resource depletion, and exterminations of beings necessary to Indigenous livelihood and culture, from North America down to the Orinoco Delta in Venezuela, while noticing similarities between, and indicating possible kinships with, Indigenous peoples in each region, and renewing reliance on traditional beingness in the world gone awry.
TOBACCO RISE
• Visqueen: A heavy plastic used in plant beds to shield infant plants, in this case the tobacco seedlings. I was a tobacco sharecropper in my teens and early adulthood in North Carolina. My father had been a migrant and local cotton picker, with his cousins working in indigo, as demonstrated in two previous poems.
REDUCTION
• References the largest expedition ever mounted upon American Indians at that time (1779). Tribes were under treaty with the British Empire. The “patriots” were British as well. The Haudenosaunee suffered and were starved, and many expired from floods and fires caused by the expedition. Others died as the result of a steady onslaught under Washington, who called for the Six Nations’ towns to be completely destroyed, and that no overture of peace be heard by the troops before total ruinment was achieved. This was an American holocaust and involved fiery death.
BREATHING
• Aftermath, September 11, 2001, New York City.
BURN
• This poem stems from the multiple Marfa fires of 2011. It references many other personal, historical, familial, and newsworthy events that were intensified in the midst of the heat, climate change, and catastrophe.
HARP STRINGS
• Written during a 2010 residency in old growth at the Dragonfly Eyes National Science Foundation Research Field Symposium in H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some versions of these poems first appeared in editions of Anti-; Asian American Literary Review; Black Renaissance Noire; Caliban Online; Connecticut Review; Connotation Press: An Online Artifact; Cream City Review; The Ecopoetry Anthology; Future Earth Magazine; Gargoyle Magazine; Ghost Town; A Harvest of Words: Contemporary South Dakota Poetry; Hick Poetics; Kenyon Review; Love Rise Up: Poems of Social Justice, Protest, and Hope; Malpais Review; Many Mountains Moving; Naropa Summer Magazine; Native Realities; New Mexico Poetry Review; North American Review; North Carolina Literary Review; North Carolina Arts Council Website; Paddlefish; Passages North; Political Affairs; Poets Against the War; Prometeo; Sentence; Sing: Poetry of the Indigenous Americas; South Dakota Review; Sou’ wester; Split This Rock; Talking Stick Amerind; United Nations: Poems for Peace; The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets; Waxwings; Weber: The Contemporary West; The Willow’s Whisper: A Transatlantic Compilation of Poetry from Ireland and Native America; Wingbeats II; Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence; and Yellow Medicine Review;
were recorded for entities such as From the Fish House, PennSound, Poets House, the Naropa Archive, the Poetry Center, the Poetry Project, Harry’s House Archive, and for the 2014 Harry’s House, Vol. II album with Ambrose Bye for Fast Speaking Music;
composed within the Red Dust Project;
printed as broadsides in P3 shows at the Washington Pavilion;
included in the special edition Burn for MadHat Press;
& recorded & released on the Streaming album with the trio Rd Klā (rdkla.com) for Long Person (Yvwi Gvnahita) Records.
Thank you to Drue Heinz & Hawthornden Castle
for the generation of this collection.
Thank you to the Weymouth Center &
Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for additional time.
Thank you to the Lannan Foundation; completion of this book
was made possible by residency at Marfa.
For Quincy & Margaret Porter Troupe, Diane Zephier, Matthew Shenoda, Juan Felipe Herrera, Sherwin Bitsui, Adrian Matejka, Jodi Melamed, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Jan Beatty, Wang Ping, Cristina Eisenberg, Kim Blaeser, Thea Temple, Craig Santos Perez, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Kaikainali‘i, Paula Nelson, and Kimberly Becker, whose friendship, kindness, collaboration, and care are deeply appreciated & essential;
to Kelvyn Bell & Laura Ortman fo
r the genius sound art & camaraderie;
to John Carolos Perea & Jimmy Biala for the sweet sounds & smooth collaboration;
to Dustin Mater for the fierce beauty and Shane Brown for exquisite work & exceptional presence;
to Nancy Morejon, Sonja Sanchez, Marc Vincenz, Marilyn Lone Hill, Bill Wetzel, Jennifer Foerster, Marilyn Nelson, Kim Blaeser, Anne Waldman, Arthur Sze, Natasha Trethewey, Karenne Wood, Jon Davis, Jill O’Mahony, Ted Kooser, Sydney Brown, Royce Sharp, Jeffrey Palmer, James Payne, Crisosto Apache, LeAnne Howe, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Chadwick Allen, Susan Bernardin, Ceca Cooper, Phil Young, Joy Castro, Bojan Louis, Jack Collom, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Linda Rodriguez, Penelope Kelsey, Cari Carpenter, Molly McGlennen, and Connie Walstrom, for support, inspiration, collaboration, and camaraderie.
This book pays tribute to Mary Maria, Charley Patton, Harry Partch, Lou Reed, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Ralph Waldo Ellison, Bob Creeley, Jack Myers, Ivy Lucy, Anselm Hollo, Charlie Hill, Milton Apache, Lyle Eagle Tail, and Madison Leigh Wallace;
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