When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through
Page 8
Dreams of Water Bodies
Nibii-Wiiyawan Bawaadanan
Wazhashk,
Wazhashk
small whiskered swimmer,
agaashiinyi memiishanowed bagizod
you, a fluid arrow crossing waterways
biwak-dakamaadagaayin
with the simple determination
mashkawendaman
of one who has dived
googiigwaashkwaniyamban
purple deep into mythic quest.
dimii-miinaandeg gagwedweyamban.
Belittled or despised
Gigoopazomigoog
as water rat on land;
ninii-chiwaawaabiganoojinh akin
hero of our Anishinaabeg people
ogichidaa Anishinaabe
in animal tales, creation stories
awesiinaajimowinong, aadizookaanag
whose tellers open slowly,
dash debaajimojig onisaakonanaanaawaa
magically like within a dream,
nengaaj enji-mamaanjiding
your tiny clenched fist
gdobikwaakoninjiins
so all water tribes
miidash gakina Nibiishinaabeg
might believe.
debwewendamowaad.
See the small grains of sand—
Waabandan negawan
Ah, only those poor few—
aah sa ongow eta
but they become our turtle island
maaaji-mishiikenh-minis
this good and well-dreamed land
minwaabandaan aakiing maampii
where we stand in this moment
niigaanigaabawiying
on the edge of so many bodies of water
agamigong
and watch Wazhashk, our brother,
Wazhashk waabamang, niikaaninaanig
slip through pools and streams and lakes
zhiibaasige zaaga’iganan gaye ziibiinsan
this marshland earth hallowed by
mashkiig zhawendang
the memory
mikwendang
the telling
waawiindang
the hope
ezhi-bagosendamowaad
the dive
ezhi-googiiwaad
of sleek-whiskered-swimmers
agaashiinyag memiishanowewaad begizojig
who mark a dark path.
dibiki-miikanong.
And sometimes in our water dreams
Nangodinong enji-nibii-bawaajiganan
we pitiful land-dwellers
gidimagozijig aakiing endaaying
in longing
bakadenodang
recall, and singing
dash nagamoying
make spirits ready
jiibenaakeying
to follow:
noosone’igeying
bakobii.**
bakobiiying.
**Go down into the water.
[Translation by Margaret Noodin]
Apprenticed to Justice
The weight of ashes
from burned-out camps.
Lodges smoulder in fire,
animal hides wither
their mythic images shrinking
pulling in on themselves,
all incinerated
fragments
of breath bone and basket
rest heavy
sink deep
like wintering frogs.
And no dustbowl wind
can lift
this history
of loss.
Now fertilized by generations—
ashes upon ashes,
this old earth erupts.
Medicine voices rise like mists
white buffalo memories
teeth marks on birch bark
forgotten forms
tremble into wholeness.
And the grey weathered stumps,
trees and treaties
cut down
trampled for wealth.
Flat Potlatch plateaus
of ghost forests
raked by bears
soften rot inward
until tiny arrows of green
sprout
rise erect
rootfed
from each crumbling center.
Some will never laugh
as easily.
Will hide knives
silver as fish in their boots,
hoard names
as if they could be stolen
as easily as land,
will paper their walls
with maps and broken promises,
scar their flesh
with this badge
heavy as ashes.
And this is a poem
for those
apprenticed
from birth.
In the womb
of your mother nation
heartbeats
sound like drums
drums like thunder
thunder like twelve thousand
walking
then ten thousand
then eight
walking away
from stolen homes
from burned out camps
from relatives fallen
as they walked
then crawled
then fell.
This is the woodpecker sound
of an old retreat.
It becomes an echo,
an accounting
to be reconciled.
This is the sound
of trees falling in the woods
when they are heard,
or red nations falling
when they are remembered.
This is the sound
we hear
when fist meets flesh
when bullets pop against chests
when memories rattle hollow in stomachs.
And we turn this sound
over and over again
until it becomes
fertile ground
from which we will build
new nations
upon the ashes of our ancestors.
Until it becomes
the rattle of a new revolution
these fingers
drumming on keys.
Captivity
I.
A mark across the body. The morning I watched my beloved uncle disappear down the alley. His car left sitting in our yard for thirty days. This tattoo we cover with shame. The stories my mother whispered as if gitchi-manidoo was a child who should not be told of the troubles of humans. All those taken. Visits made on dusty trains. Letters adorned like birch bark art with lines and tiny holes. My shriveled grandma “an accessory” hiding my cousin from the interchangeable uniforms of civil pursuit. Her white hair another flag of truce.
II.
This is how we look over our shoulders. This is how we smile carefully in public places. This is how we carry our cards, our identities. This is how we forget—and how you remind us.
III.
Mary Rowlandson made it big in the colonial tabloids. Indian captivity narrative a seeming misnomer. But ink makes strong cultural bars of bias. This is how we remain captured in print.
IV.
Now I harbor fugitive names. csin came to my reading in ankle tether. Qu i chained herself before the R C building in protest. M cus who cannot receive email. The Ar tc at manager from Thi f ivels. His whiskey-inspired stories tell of cicada existence—a cyclical shedding of “dangerous” identities.
V.
We molt. The shell of our past a transparent chanhua. Yes, we will eat it like medicine.
GORDON HENRY JR. (1955–), Anishinaabe, poet, fiction writer, and essayist, is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation. He is the author of the poetry collection The Failure of Certain Charms (2008) and the novel The Light People (1994), which was the recipient of an American Book Award. Henry has held a Fulbright lectureship in Spain and is currently a professor of literature and creative wr
iting at Michigan State University, where he also serves as editor of its American Indian Studies Series.
November Becomes the Sky
with Suppers for the Dead
I am standing outside
in Minnesota
ghost wind recalling
names in winter mist
The road smells
of dogs two days dead
White photographers talk in
the house of mainstream
media
I can’t articulate
the agony of Eagle Singer’s
children to them.
We celebrate the old
man while another
generation shoots
crushed and heated
prescriptions,
sells baskets,
machinery,
the fixtures yet to be
installed in the house,
yet to be heated
by the tribal government,
for another night
stolen by the stupors
and the wondrous
pleasure of forget
everything medicines.
Back inside
Uncle Two Dogs rolls me
a smoke out of
organic American Spirit
I look to a last cup
of coffee.
The way home
fills with snow
our tracks
human and machine.
When Names Escaped Us
The boy painted himself white and ran into the darkness.
We let the words “he may be dead, bury him,”
bury him.
We took his clothes to the rummage sale
in the basement of the mission.
We put his photographs and drawings
in a birdcage and covered it with a starquilt.
For four nights voices carried clear to the river.
After winter so many storms moved in
strangers came among us.
They danced.
They shoveled in the shadows of trees.
Then, somehow we all felt
all of us were of this one boy.
Sleeping in the Rain
I.
Wake chants circle, overhead, like black crows watching her will stumble through weak moments. Like when she heard the carriage outside and went to the window with his name on her lips. Or when she looked over in the corner and saw him sleeping, with his mouth open, in the blue chair, next to the woodstove. She saw them, dissembled reflections, on the insides of her black glasses. Moments passed, etched, like the lines of age in the deep brown skin of her face. She’s somewhere past ninety now; bent over, hollow boned, eyes almost filled. She lives in a room. A taken care of world. Clean sheets, clean blankets, wall-to-wall carpeting, a nightstand, and a roommate who, between good morning and good night, wanders away to card games in other rooms. Most of her day is spent in the chair, at the foot of the bed. Every now and then, she leaves and takes a walk down one of the many hallways of the complex. Every now and then, she goes to the window and looks out, as if something will be there.
II.
Motion falls apart in silence, tumbling, as wind turns choreographed snow through tangents of streetlights. I am alone; to be picked up at the Saint Paul bus terminal. I fucked up. Dropped out. Good, it’s not what I wanted. What is a quasar? The tissue of dreams. Fuck no, there are no secrets. There is nothing hard about astronomy, sociology, calculus, or Minnesota winters. Those are just reasons I used to leave. To go where? To go watch my hands become shadows over assembly lines?
A voice clicks on in the darkness. “We are now in Saint Paul and will be arriving at the Saint Paul terminal.” Let me guess. In five minutes. “In ten minutes,” the driver says. It figures.
III.
My uncle’s eyes have long since fallen from the grasp of stars. Now, they are like the backends of factories; vague indications of what goes on beneath the tracks of comb in his thick black hair. He was waiting when I arrived. Waiting, entranced in existence. A series of hypnotic silences, between words, that had to be spoken. Silences leading me to a beat-up car in a dark parking lot. I am too far away from him; too far away to be leaving for something further. I don’t believe he doesn’t like me. No, that’s not quite what I’m getting at. It’s something I saw when his shadow exploded into a face as he bent down, over the steering wheel, to light his cigarette.
IV.
The cold white moon over houses too close together. Front windows, where shadows pass in front of blue lights of televisions. I am one of them now; a sound on wood stairs. There is a sanctuary of dreams waiting for my footsteps to fade.
V.
The old woman dreams she is up north, on the reservation. It is autumn. Pine smoke hanging over the tops of houses, leaves sleepwalking in gray wind, skeletal trees scratching ghost gray sky. She is in the old black shack. At home. Stirring stew in the kitchen. The woodstove snaps in the next room. Out the window, he lifts the axe. He is young. She watches as it splits a log on the tree stump. He turns away and starts toward the house. He is old. He takes out his pipe and presses down tobacco. She goes to the door to meet him. She opens the door. She tries to touch him. He passes through her, like a cold shiver, and walks into a photograph on the wall.
VI.
The mind bends over, in the light through a window, down and across the body of Jesus Christ as he stumbles through the sixth station of the cross. It comes to me sometimes, when I close my eyes. September sun in the old church. Smoke of sweet grass in stained glass light. Red, blue and yellow light. Prisms of thought behind every eye. Chippewa prayers stumbling through my ears. Old Ojibwa chants fading away in the walk to the cemetery. I look at the hole in the ground. I look at the casket beside it. I look at the hole, I look at the casket. At the hole, at the casket, at the hole, at the casket, at the hole.
The clock glows red across the room; a digital 2:37. My cousin lies in darkness. Another figure covered up in sleep.
VII.
Dust swims in sunlight of an open door as dreams evaporate in the face of a clock.
VIII.
“Get up, I said. It’s raining. It’s raining and you, lying there. Get up, old man, I said.” It is my uncle talking. He found the old man where he lay in the rain. He had fallen asleep and fallen down from his seat on an old bench I tried to set on fire when I was ten or eleven. The next week they buried him in the coolness of the Autumn coming. Weeks after, the old woman thought she heard his carriage outside the window of her new room in the city.
IX.
Cities of snow melt, blurred in liquid between wiper blades. We are waiting for the light to change. My uncle is driving. The old woman is waiting. Not really for us. Not for us, but waiting. I will see her this morning. This afternoon I will be gone. Another bus. Home. The light changes in the corner of my eye turning away.
X.
The room never moves for her. It is not like snow falling, like leaves falling, like stones through water. It is a window, a bed, and a chair.
XI.
As the old woman touches me it is like air holding smoke. I am something else. Vestiges of prayer, gathered in a hollow church. Another kind of reflection. A reflection on the outsides of her black glasses. A reflection that cries when eyes leave it.
As the old woman touches me it is like air holding smoke. I am something else. Fleet anguish, like flying shadows. A moment vanishing. A moment taken, as I am being.
As the old woman touches me it is like air holding smoke. It spins it. It grasps it. It shapes it in a wish. After that there is a mist too fine to see.
DIANE BURNS (1957–2006), Anishinaabe-Lac Courte Oreilles and Chemehuevi, was raised near various Native boarding schools where her parents worked as teachers. After graduating from Barnard College, she became an established member of New York’s Lower East Side poetry scene in the 1980s and published Riding the One-Eyed Ford in 1981. In 1988, she was invited by the Sandinista g
overnment to Nicaragua with other American poets to participate in the Rubén Darío poetry festival.
Sure You Can Ask Me a Personal Question
How do you do?
No, I am not Chinese.
No, not Spanish.
No, I am American Indian, Native American.
No, not from India.
No, not Apache.
No, not Navajo.
No, not Sioux.
No, we are not extinct.
Yes, Indian.
Oh?
So that’s where you got those high cheekbones.
Your great grandmother, huh?
An Indian Princess, huh?
Hair down to there?
Let me guess. Cherokee?
Oh, so you’ve had an Indian friend?
That close?
Oh, so you’ve had an Indian lover?
That tight?
Oh, so you’ve had an Indian servant?
That much?
Yeah, it was awful what you guys did to us.
It’s real decent of you to apologize.
No, I don’t know where you can get peyote.