(Lollie meets resistance to her quest)
“Sit with me, mother,”
He said
“Before you go off to gather ghosts
Before you try to hide your pain
In miles
From us.”
“I’ve been still too long,” I said
“Too many night, too many lifetimes
At a kitchen table
Wondering who was wrong
And who had closed
So many old doors in my life”
“How can you not imagine this will not end
In a thirty-dollar motel room
Watching some all-night news
A thousand miles further
From your only son?
Stay here. With us.”
Yes, I thought, and
Too soon I will be
Last summer’s waves
On last summer’s shores
Last week’s sunlight
On a garden wall
Yesterday’s child
Dancing in the rain
“There are too many cobwebs upstairs,” I said, getting up
“There are too many moldy boxes in dusty rooms
I’ll send you a postcard.”
Not Because
(Lollie likes to think she has a wild and impulsive streak)
Not because I promised myself
Last winter, kicking snow off the car
Not because I told myself I would
When summer's heat was gone
Not because of what I almost told
My son’s wife on Tuesday
Or because the verandah needs shingles
And the garden should be turned over soon
Maybe because the prices of apples
Is less than the round of donuts
And the sound of small birds
Is soft, like melted copper drops
Maybe I’m skipping out of this tame town
Only because the road map was free
This September day is warm, the tires a bit worn
And the aspens such a darling shade of yellow.
Part 2: Loon Lake
Here Lollie arrives in Loon Lake, a small northern Ontario community near a Cree reserve. She’s at a loss as to what to do next, but fortunately, meets Tom Small Wolf. Tom’s returning to his native roots as a First Nations person. Tom introduces her to his native religion and offers to show her some petroglyphs during an overnight canoe trip. Lollie accepts. It’s a beginning.)
I Think I Might Have Changed My Mind About the Whole Thing
(Lollie prepares to meet her first natives in Northern Ontario)
I like to think my ancestors were terrified to move
out onto the plains
I was petrified just getting out of my car
In Loon Lake.
Minnehaha
(Lollie approaches her first native person, a woman behind a counter in a reserve crafts store)
“Can I help you?” she asked
Tan skin, dark hair behind the counter
I hesitated, my light brown hair
Out of place, out of place
“One of my ancestors,” I said
Looking at the moose mitts
“Was a Cree.”
“Ah,” she said, unsmiling
In the August heat.
“An Indian princess, of course?”
“Minnehaha,” I said,
“Laughing Water.”
“We remember her well
In our legends. She married
Chief Maxihaha.”
“Why yes! Her son,
Medihaha, my great grandfather
Was a famous warrior.”
“Would you like to buy a dreamcatcher?” she asked
“In honor of your native roots?”
“Got one,” I said. “Real good one.
Made in China.”
“Best kind. Be good Injuns,
Them Chinese, soon as
We get them civilized.
Moose mitts? Scalps? Lucky bookmarks?”
“Moose mitts,” I said
“Good idea. You never know:
It might get cold.”
She wrapped them carefully.
An owl hooted once in broad daylight.
We both paused to listen
For the second call.
Landfall
(Lollie Meets Tom Small Wolf in a beer parlor in Northern Ontario)
I am the lost child
Of present time
Arrived in a harbour
Of strangers
A million drops of salt water
Have washed me here
I order a coke and fries
Sit at a corner table
Don’t watch a roomful of
Dark-haired men who
Don’t watch me, carefully.
This sense of shore
I knew it would come to this
They told me it would
My retreat
Is sudden but
Blocked by a guy
Offering me a beer
It isn’t wings, but
There’s only the sea behind me
“Of course,” I said.
Travel
(Lollie has a few words with Tom over a Molson’s draft)
I asked him if he’d traveled much
he took out eight smooth rocks
put them in a circle
laid sweetgrass on them
pointed
“to the ends
of the universe.
And you?”
I showed him the sticker
On my camera bag.
“Disney World.”
He nodded, smiled:
“Space Mountain’s pretty good.”
Jerusalem
(Tom Small Wolf tells Lollie about his religion)
So you’re
Returning to the old religions?
Are you leaving
The Good Book
The World Tomorrow
The smiling priest?
Did you know, he said, that
Jesus had tan skin
Dark hair
A big hooked nose
Maybe
When Jesus enters Jerusalem
His black hair in braids
And hooked Semitic nose
Just a little out of place
Among tourists from Toronto
It’ll be time to talk again
For sure
If he’s riding a ’78 Skidoo
We’ll hold a powwow
Just for him.
The Puzzle
(Tom tries to tell Lollie what he thinks the future of First Nations Peoples will be)
“Pretend,” he said
“I’ve got five hundred boxes.
Jigsaw puzzles, from the Goodwill store
I take a handful of pieces
From some boxes
Two hands full from others
None, from some.”
Behind the church hall
Powwow dancers practiced
Laughing
“What will be made,” I whispered
“When it all gets assembled?”
In his old aboriginal voice:
“I don’t know. I don’t know at all
But I think, on that day, even
The manitous will hide.”
“And on that day
Where will I fit in?”
“It’s a big puzzle.
When we need to know where the white margins go
Maybe we’ll look you up.”
Ten Little Indians
(Wasn’t anybody paying attention?)
Ten little Indians north of the ‘Soo
A few white men’s germs and then there were two
Two little Indians, out in the sun
Waited on promises, till there was one
One tough little Indian, somehow alive
A few years passed,
and then there were five
Better watch, before it’s too late
As the last powwow I counted eight.
Peter, Water, and Church
(Two media; two religions.)
“Jesus,”I told him
“Walked on water -
At least that’s what the nun told me
And anyone with a steel ruler
Obviously measures truth
Very carefully.”
He nodded. “They told me that, too,
And of course, my elders told me
Just so I’d know, that
Mishipizou, the great lynx serpent
Swims through water. And rock.”
“You’ve seen this monster?”
“Not me. I think he’s waiting
For Jesus to return
So they can talk about
The many uses
Of water and rock.”
The Canoe Becomes the Passage
(Lollie takes up Tom’s offer to see some petroglyphs.)
I was too old to be in that canoe
Generations of friends groaned along the shore
The sky was full of eyes and
Two loons looked like nuns:
Too old; far too old
What the hell, I thought, that’s what a canoe is for
To carry us to the very edge of cold fish and air
To the edge of drown and sing
And, in the long run, cold eyes hunt us all
Life was always meant to be an edge of sorts
A temporary challenge to the grave
An act of bravery performed under a disapproving gaze
I was too old not to be in that canoe
Solid Rock, Creator’s Touch
(Lollie and Tom visit a petroglyph site by canoe)
He touched the red ochre on rock and
When a crow called, he said
"I am that crow, that song
I am power in the water
I am movement in the treetops"
I forgave him; he was born
Of loon cry and the pagan dark
In old deep lakes
I touched the red ochre painting
But the cold rock
Said nothing to me
He forgave me; I was
Chained to normal
By a bearded old man
Who once reached down to give
Nothing but life
To Adam
Last Time We Came to Ground
(Tom and Lollie go camping in the deep woods)
When we came to ground
There was a flat spot big enough
For a tent, but the
Hill loomed with forest and the
Water was dark as a cave
When we lit a fire
I was defiant, but
He laughed at me
And the night came
Anyway,
And something howled its
Soul out under the black water
Soundlessly. I wished
We’d pulled the canoe in;
You should always hold close
To your lifeline
When the dark came
There were no stars, so I
Poked the fire and
Listened to my heart;
It fluttered
In the aspen leaves;
For a moment, I thought
I'd heard a manitou whisper
When I came to midnight
He went down to the lake for water
And noticed, suddenly
That the black hills,
Against the indigo skies
Looked like teeth.
Some Ancient Arts Survive
(Lollie is less than shaken by the rock art she is shown, but is still satisfied with Tom’s efforts on her behalf.)
She met a man by a far northern lake
Who said, “You have a doctrinal ache
A couple of nods
And I’ll show you our gods
And also my totem, the snake”
Then he offered to “show her an etching”
And she accused him of polytheological leching
But she knew in her heart
There’s more than one type of art
And more than her theology needed stretching
He put his heathen hand on her tush
But she told him, “You don’t have to push
I’ve taken your measure
And I tell you there’s pleasure
Just messing around in the bush”
I won’t say she altered her religion
But her theology changed just a smidgen
And in between talkin’
She saw those paintings on rock’n
Managed some intercultural bridgin’
Out by Otter Lake
(Lollie has social intercourse with Tom Small Wolf)
After the thunder
The heat waning
Resting in long grass
Out by Otter Lake
“So we’re maybe related?” I asked
“Probably,” he said
Passing me a beer
“But you got a lot more
White in you.”
I nodded
“Is that a problem?”
“Nah,” he said
“We were looking for a spy
To go into the Tim Horton’s
Find out what they’re planning.”
Three Haikus About Noise
(Lollie always found few things as dreadful as silence)
Don’t be still, not now
The woods are full of darkness
And very still themselves
Don’t be quiet, not yet
Those old streets are far too hushed
With midnights of lives
Sing, sing crazy songs
Till the last black crow has sprung
Sunward, above life
Music by the Lake
(Lollie and Tom)
Like a hurdy-gurdy organ tune
To the silence by the lake
Close to the grass, you hear
The music lovers take
Give me your hand, this score
Rolls wild against the sky
It holds all the songs we dared to sing
Lovers, you and I
Loons out by the islands
Chickadees scattering seeds
Saw the songs we dared to sing
Lovers’ quiet needs
Oh, we took chances by that water
And laughed beneath that sky
We mocked the cold and tuneless night
Lovers, you and I
The Foolish and the Brave
(Tom explains about terrors)
Yes, he said, here we still fear
monsters
The non-Christian monsters that
thunder under the warm earth
and take away so many
of the unwary, who go in quest of
the visions they get.
The brave are lost first
The young, next
The caring, afterwards
You don’t understand?
Try the corner of Yonge and Dundas
You’ll find the foolish and the brave
In a place that makes the young old
And the old, young.
Of course, of course, you laugh
but the rushing gut
of bus and subway
have swallowed more of my friends
than any forest wendigo
you’ll ever meet.
Ravens I have Met
(Lollie sees merit in First Nations religion)
Ravens I have met
Angels, no
In my very own church
No-one would have to believe anything
That didn’t
At least occasionally, bother
To walk the good brown soil.
Part 3: Heron Feathers Poems 1
These are Lollie’s first poems about her mythical ancestor, Heron Feathers, a Cree woman living in what is now Northern Ontario, in 1835.
Because Lollie’s mother didn’t know who the original Cree ancestor of the family was, Lollie feels free to make up both the person and the events.
In this sequence, Heron Feathers meets Jean Dumont, a young French-Canadian coureur de bois, and leaves with him for the west.
Under the Infinite Ceiling
(Why must the gods come inside?)
Jowls swinging
Crow-on-the-Ground did her four times
Around the Mide tent
Her arthritis slowing the others of
The Ultimate Mystery Society
They disappeared inside
Seven men, one old woman clutching
Clan totems
I know that the drumming
And the songs
Had everything to do with
A small girl playing
With the warm wind
With the first berries
This is the trick
Of all priests
To build a place small enough
For the human mind
To know it all
And keep out of the rains
That fall from
The unknowable sky
More Hills, More Trees
(Heron Feathers in her teens)
Long dreams and short days, dark tipi
Dark, in the winter camp with my mother
Chewing moccasins with my sister
My father, two brothers, gone three days on the hunt
“I want,” I said
“To go beyond the high hill
By the Lake of the Broken Pine.”
“Nothing there,” said my mother
Working the bone needle
“More hills, more trees.”
But she’d never been there
“The men go. Maybe they’re there, now.”
“Maybe cold,” mother said. “Wait.
Someday in your children’s souls
You will find further lands than any man
Could ever know.”
In my life, I thought
I may know the taste of a thousand moccasins
And not the view
From one high stone hill.
Sister Talk
(Heron Feathers and her sister talk)
“He’s a good hunter,” my sister said
We sat on smooth rock by the reeds
Sunlight on the lake
Hurting our eyes
“Strong, but sometimes too quick to anger.”
What could I say
He strode the forest like he owned it
He paddles the water like the lake spirit
Was his grandfather
“You are foolish,” my sister said
“You don’t want him, but
You don’t know why.”
What god ever made a woman
Wise enough to know why?
Maybe
I wanted to go just one step
Past the furthest place
He’d ever go.
Only Because
(Why women leave their homes to go with passing strangers.)
Only because he had a red sash
And looked me in the eye with laughter
Or so I said
Actually he had
Horizons in his eye
The Touch
(Jean tries to convert his new bride)
He touched the cross and
When a crow called, he said
"That is just a crow:
We should be glad
God permits it"
I forgave him; he was born
Where beaver were pelts and
Trees were lumber
I touched the small silver thing
But the cold metal
The Minor Odyssey of Lollie Heronfeathers Singer Page 2