Original Fire

Selected and New Poems

Louise Erdrich

Dedication

To Pallas

Contents

Dedication

Jacklight

Jacklight

The Woods

The Strange People

Captivity

Owls

I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move

Family Reunion

Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

Dear John Wayne

Manitoulin Ghost

Three Sisters

The Lefavor Girls

Walking in the Breakdown Lane

The Red Sleep of Beasts

The Potchikoo Stories

The Birth of Potchikoo

Potchikoo Marries

How Potchikoo Got Old

The Death of Potchikoo

Potchikoo’s Life After Death

How They Don’t Let Potchikoo into Heaven

Where Potchikoo Goes Next

Potchikoo’s Detour

Potchikoo Greets Josette

Potchikoo Restored

Potchikoo’s Mean Twin

How Josette Takes Care of It

Saint Potchikoo

The Butcher’s Wife

The Butcher’s Wife

That Pull from the Left

The Carmelites

Clouds

Shelter

The Slow Sting of Her Company

Here Is a Good Word for Step-and-a-Half Waleski

Portrait of the Town Leonard

Leonard Commits Redeeming Adulteries with All the Women in Town

Unexpected Dangers

My Name Repeated on the Lips of the Dead

A Mother’s Hell

Rudy Comes Back

New Vows

The Seven Sleepers

Fooling God

The Sacraments

The Seven Sleepers

Avila

Saint Clare

Mary Magdalene

Christ’s Twin

Orozco’s Christ

The Savior

The Buffalo Prayer

Rez Litany

Original Fire

The Fence

Ninth Month

Birth

New Mother

Sorrows of the Frog Woman

Time

Spring Evening on Blind Mountain

Blue

Thistles

Best Friends in the First Grade

Little Blue Eyeglasses

Grief

Wood Mountain

Advice to Myself

Morning Fire

Asiniig

About the Author

Books by Louise Erdrich

Copyright

About the Publisher

Jacklight

Jacklight

The same Chippewa word is used both for flirting and hunting game, while another Chippewa word connotes both using force in intercourse and also killing a bear with one’s bare hands.

——R. W. Dunning, Social and Economic Change Among the Northern Ojibwa (1959)

We have come to the edge of the woods,

out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,

out of knotted twigs, out of leaves creaked shut,

out of hiding.

At first the light wavered, glancing over us.

Then it clenched to a fist of light that pointed,

searched out, divided us.

Each took the beams like direct blows the heart answers.

Each of us moved forward alone.

We have come to the edge of the woods,

drawn out of ourselves by this night sun,

this battery of polarized acids,

that outshines the moon.

We smell them behind it

but they are faceless, invisible.

We smell the raw steel of their gun barrels,

mink oil on leather, their tongues of sour barley.

We smell their mothers buried chin-deep in wet dirt.

We smell their fathers with scoured knuckles,

teeth cracked from hot marrow.

We smell their sisters of crushed dogwood, bruised apples,

of fractured cups and concussions of burnt hooks.

We smell their breath steaming lightly behind the jacklight.

We smell the itch underneath the caked guts on their clothes.

We smell their minds like silver hammers

cocked back, held in readiness

for the first of us to step into the open.

We have come to the edge of the woods,

out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,

out of leaves creaked shut, out of hiding.

We have come here too long.

It is their turn now,

their turn to follow us. Listen,

they put down their equipment.

It is useless in the tall brush.

And now they take the first steps, now knowing

how deep the woods are and lightless.

How deep the woods are.

The Woods

At one time your touches were clothing enough.

Within these trees now I am different.

Now I wear the woods.

I lower a headdress of bent sticks and secure it.

I strap to myself a breastplate of clawed, roped bark.

I fit the broad leaves of sugar maples

to my hands, like mittens of blood.

Now when I say come,

and you enter the woods,

hunting some creature like the woman I was,

I surround you.

Light bleeds from the clearing. Roots rise.

Fluted molds burn blue in the falling light,

and you also know

the loneliness that you taught me with your body.

When you lie down in the grave of a slashed tree,

I cover you, as I always did.

Only this time you do not leave.

The Strange People

The antelope are strange people…they are beautiful to look at, and yet they are tricky. We do not trust them. They appear and disappear; they are like shadows on the plains. Because of their great beauty, young men sometimes follow the antelope and are lost forever. Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.

——Pretty Shield, Medicine Woman of the Crows transcribed and edited by Frank Linderman (1932)

All night I am the doe, breathing

his name in a frozen field,

the small mist of the word

drifting always before me.

And again he has heard it

and I have gone burning

to meet him, the jacklight

fills my eyes with blue fire;

the heart in my chest

explodes like a hot stone.

Then slung like a sack

in the back of his pickup,

I wipe the death scum

from my mouth, sit up laughing

and shriek in my speeding grave.

Safely shut in the garage,

when he sharpens his knife

and thinks to have me, like that,

I come toward him,

a lean gray witch

through the bullets that enter and dissolve.

I sit in his house

drinking coffee till dawn

and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps,

crawling back into my shadowy body.

All day, asleep in clean grasses,

I dream of the one who could really wound me.

Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look.

Not even with his goodness.

If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.

I swear I would never leave him.

Captivity

He (my captor) gave me a bisquit, which I put in my pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fearing he had put something in it to make me love him.

—From the narrative of the captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, who was taken prisoner by the Wampanoag when Lancaster, Massachusetts, was destroyed, in the year 1676

The stream was swift, and so cold

I thought I would be sliced in two.

But he dragged me from the flood

by the ends of my hair.

I had grown to recognize his face.

I could distinguish it from the others.

There were times I feared I understood

his language, which was not human,

and I knelt to pray for strength.

We were pursued by God’s agents

or pitch devils, I did not know.

Only that we must march.

Their guns were loaded with swan shot.

I could not suckle and my child’s wail

put them in danger.

He had a woman

with teeth black and glittering.

She fed the child milk of acorns.

The forest closed, the light deepened.

I told myself that I would starve

before I took food from his hands

but I did not starve.

One night

he killed a deer with a young one in her

and gave me to eat of the fawn.

It was so tender,

the bones like the stems of flowers,

that I followed where he took me.

The night was thick. He cut the cord

that bound me to the tree.

After that the birds mocked.

Shadows gaped and roared

and the trees flung down

their sharpened lashes.

He did not notice God’s wrath.

God blasted fire from half-buried stumps.

I hid my face in my dress, fearing He would burn us all

but this, too, passed.

Rescued, I see no truth in things.

My husband drives a thick wedge

through the earth, still it shuts

to him year after year.

My child is fed of the first wheat.

I lay myself to sleep

on a Holland-laced pillowbeer.

I lay to sleep.

And in the dark I see myself

as I was outside their circle.

They knelt on deerskins, some with sticks,

and he led his company in the noise

until I could no longer bear

the thought of how I was.

I stripped a branch

and struck the earth,

in time, begging it to open

to admit me

as he was

and feed me honey from the rock.

Owls

The barred owls scream in the black pines,

searching for mates. Each night

the noise wakes me, a death

rattle, everything in sex that wounds.

There is nothing in the sound but raw need

of one feathered body for another.

Yet, even when they find each other,

there is no peace.

In Ojibwe, the owl is Kokoko, and not

even the smallest child loves the gentle sound

of the word. Because the hairball

of bones and vole teeth can be hidden

under snow, to kill the man who walks over it.

Because the owl looks behind itself to see you coming,

the vane of the feather does not disturb

air, and the barb is ominously soft.

Have you ever seen, at dusk,

an owl take flight from the throat of a dead tree?

Mist, troubled spirit.

You will notice only after

its great silver body has turned to bark.

The flight was soundless.

That is how we make love,

when there are people in the halls around us,

clashing dishes, filling their mouths

with air, with debris, pulling

switches and filters as the whole machinery

of life goes on, eliminating and eliminating

until there are just the two bodies

fiercely attached, the feathers

floating down and cleaving to their shapes.

I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move

We watched from the house

as the river grew, helpless

and terrible in its unfamiliar body.

Wrestling everything into it,

the water wrapped around trees

until their life-hold was broken.

They went down, one by one,

and the river dragged off their covering.

Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,

snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:

a whole forest pulled through the teeth

of the spillway. Trees surfacing

singly, where the river poured off

into arteries for fields below the reservation.

When at last it was over, the long removal,

they had all become the same dry wood.

We walked among them, the branches

whitening in the raw sun.

Above us drifted herons,

alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,

settling their beaks among the hollows.

Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people

moving among us, unable to take their rest.

Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.

Their long wings are bending the air

into circles through which they fall.

They rise again in shifting wheels.

How long must we live in the broken figures

their necks make, narrowing the sky.

Family Reunion

Ray’s third new car in half as many years.

Full cooler in the trunk, Ray sogging the beer

as I solemnly chauffeur us through the bush

and up the backroads, hardly cowpaths and hub-deep in mud.

All day the sky lowers, clears, lowers again.

Somewhere in the bush near Saint John

there are uncles, a family, one mysterious brother

who stayed on the land when Ray left for the cities.

One week Ray is crocked. We’ve been through this before.

Even, as a little girl, hands in my dress,

Ah punka, you’s my Debby, come and ki me.

Then the road ends in a yard full of dogs.

Them’s Indian dogs, Ray says, lookit how they know me.

And they do seem to know him, like I do. His odor—

rank beef of fierce turtle pulled dripping from Metagoshe,

and the inflammable mansmell: hair tonic, ashes, alcohol.

Ray dances an old woman up in his arms.

Fiddles reel in the phonograph and I sink apart

in a corner, start knocking the Blue Ribbons down.

Four generations of people live here.

No one remembers Raymond Twobears.

So what. The walls shiver, the old house caulked with mud

sails back into the middle of Metagoshe.

A three-foot-long snapper is hooked on a fishline,

so mean that we do not dare wrestle him in

but tow him to shore, heavy as an old engine.

Then somehow Ray pries the beak open and shoves

down a cherry bomb. Lights the string tongue.

Headless and clenched in its armor, the snapper

is lugged home in the trunk for tomorrow’s soup.

Ray rolls it beneath a bush in the backyard and goes in

to sleep his own head off. Tomorrow I find

that the animal has dragged itself off.

I follow torn tracks up a slight hill and over

into a small stream that deepens and widens into a marsh.

Ray finds his way back through the room into his arms.

When the phonograph stops, he slumps hard in his hands

and the boys and their old man fold him into the car

where he curls around his bad heart, hearing how it knocks

and rattles at the bars of his ribs to break out.

Somehow we find our way back. Uncle Ray

sings an old song to the body that pulls him

toward home. The gray fins that his hands have become

screw their bones in the dashboard. His face

has the odd, calm patience of a child who has always

let bad wounds alone, or a creature that has lived

for a long time underwater. And the angels come

lowering their slings and litters.

Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.

Boxcars stumbling north in dreams

don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run.

The rails, old lacerations that we love,

shoot parallel across the face and break

just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars

you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross.

The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark

less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards

as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts

to be here, cold in regulation clothes.

We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun

to take us back. His car is dumb and warm.

The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums

like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts

of ancient punishments lead back and forth.

All runaways wear dresses, long green ones,

the color you would think shame was. We scrub

the sidewalks down because it’s shameful work.

Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs

and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear

a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark

face before it hardened, pale, remembering

delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.

Dear John Wayne

August and the drive-in picture is packed.

We lounge on the hood of the Pontiac

surrounded by the slow-burning spirals they sell

at the window, to vanquish the hordes of mosquitoes.

Nothing works. They break through the smoke screen for blood.

Always the lookout spots the Indians first,

spread north to south, barring progress.

The Sioux or some other Plains bunch

in spectacular columns, ICBM missiles,

feathers bristling in the meaningful sunset.

The drum breaks. There will be no parlance.

Only the arrows whining, a death-cloud of nerves

swarming down on the settlers

who die beautifully, tumbling like dust weeds

into the history that brought us all here

together: this wide screen beneath the sign of the bear.

The sky fills, acres of blue squint and eye

that the crowd cheers. His face moves over us,

a thick cloud of vengeance, pitted

like the land that was once flesh. Each rut,

each scar makes a promise: It is

not over, this fight, not as long as you resist.

Everything we see belongs to us.

A few laughing Indians fall over the hood

slipping in the hot spilled butter.

The eye sees a lot, John, but the heart is so blind.

Death makes us owners of nothing.

He smiles, a horizon of teeth

the credits reel over, and then the white fields

again blowing in the true-to-life dark.

The dark films over everything.

We get into the car

scratching our mosquito bites, speechless and small

as people are when the movie is done.

We are back in our skins.

How can we help but keep hearing his voice,

the flip side of the sound track, still playing:

Come on, boys, we got them

where we want them, drunk, running.

They’ll give us what we want, what we need.

Even his disease was the idea of taking everything.

Those cells, burning, doubling, splitting out of their skins.

Manitoulin Ghost

Once there was a girl who died in a fire in this house, here on Bidwell road. Now she keeps coming back, trying to hitch a ride out of here. Watch out for her at night and do not stop.

—Mary Lou Fox

Each night she waits by the road

in a thin, white dress

embroidered with fire.

It has been twenty years

since her house surged and burst in the dark trees.

Still, nobody goes there.

The heat charred the branches

of the apple trees,

but nothing can kill that wood.

She will climb into your car

but not say where she is going

and you shouldn’t ask.

Nor should you try to comb the blackened nest of hair

or press the agates of tears

back into her eyes.

First the orchard bowed low and complained

of the unpicked fruit,

then the branches cracked apart and fell.

The windfalls sweetened to wine

beneath the ruined arms and snow.

Each spring now, in the grass, buds form on the tattered wood.

The child, the child, why is she so persistent

in her need? Is it so terrible

to be alone when the cold white blossoms

come to life and burn?

Three Sisters

One sister wore the eyes of an old man

around her neck.

Scratched porcelain

washed down

with the hot lye of his breath.

One sister rode love

like a ship in light wind.

The sails of her body

unfurled at a touch.

No man could deny her

safe passage, safe harbor.

The youngest was shut like a bell.

The white thorns of silence

pricked in each bush

where she walked,

and the grass stopped growing where she stood.

One year the three sisters came out of their rooms,

swaying like the hot roses

that papered their walls.

They walked, full grown, into the heart of our town.

Young men broke their eyes

against their eyes of stone,

and singed their shy tongues

on the stunned flames of their mouths.

It was in late August in the long year of drought.

The pool halls were winnowed

and three men drew lots

to marry the sisters, all six in a great house.

On the night of the wedding

the wind rose on a glass stem.

The trees bowed. The clouds knocked.

We tethered our dogs.

Some swore they saw a hoop

of lightning dance down in their yard.

We felt the weight toward dawn

of lead sinkers in our bones,

walked out, and caught the first, fast drops on our tongues.

The Lefavor Girls

All autumn, black plums

split and dropped from the boughs.

We gathered the sweetness

and sealed it in jars,

loading the cupboards and cellar.

At night we went under the bedclothes, laden

beyond what the arms were meant to carry alone,

and we dreamed that with our shirts off

in the quarry, the cool water

came under to bear us away.

That season our sleep grew around us

as if from the walls

a dense snow fell and formed

other bodies, and the voices

of men who melted into us,

and children who drifted, lost, looking for home.

After the long rains, the land gone bare,

we walked out again to the windbreaks.

White crown of the plum trees

were filling the purple throats of the iris.

We lay in the grass,

the bees drinking in tongues,

and already the brittle hum of the locust

in the red wheat, growing.

Again, the year come full circle, the men

came knocking in the fields,

headfuls of blackened seeds,

and the husking, scorched mountains of sunflowers.

We went closed, still golden, among the harvesters.

Shifting the load from arm to arm,

they drove us into town.

We shook out our dresses and hair, oh then

There was abundance come down

in the face of the coming year.

We held ourselves into

the wind, our bodies

broke open, and the snow began falling.

It fell until the world was filled up, and filled again,

until it rose past all the limits we could have known.

Walking in the Breakdown Lane

Wind has stripped

the young plum trees

to a thin howl.

They are planted in squares

to keep the loose dirt from wandering.

Everything around me is crying to be gone.

The fields, the crops humming to be cut and done with.

Walking in the breakdown lane, margin of gravel,

between the cut swaths and the road to Fargo,

I want to stop, to lie down

in standing wheat or standing water.

Behind me thunder mounts as trucks of cattle

roar over, faces pressed to slats for air.

They go on, they go on without me.

They pound, pound and bawl,

until the road closes over them farther on.

The Red Sleep of Beasts

On space of about an acre I counted two hundred and twenty of these animals; the banks of the river were covered thus with these animals as far as the eye could reach and in all directions. One may judge now, if it is possible, the richness of these prairies.

—From a letter by Father Belcourt, a priest who accompanied the Turtle Mountain Michif on one of their last buffalo hunts in the 1840s, in North Dakota Historical Collections, volume 5

We heard them when they left the hills,

Low hills where they used to winter and bear their young.

Blue hills of oak and birch that broke the wind.

They swung their heavy muzzles, wet with steam,

And broke their beards of breath to breathe.

We used to hunt them in our red-wheeled carts.

Frenchmen gone sauvage, how the women burned

In scarlet sashes, black wool skirts.

For miles you heard the ungreased wood

Groan as the load turned.

Thunder was the last good hunt.

Great bales of skins and meat in iron cauldrons

Boiling through the night. We made our feast

All night, but still we could not rest.

We lived headlong, taking what we could

But left no scraps behind, not like the other

Hide hunters, hidden on a rise,

Their long-eyes brought herds one by one

To earth. They took but tongue, and you could walk

For miles across the strange hulks.

We wintered in the hills. Low huts of log

And trampled dirt, the spaces tamped with mud.

At night we touched each other in our dreams

Hearing, on the wind, their slow hooves stumbling

South, we said at first, the old ones knew

They would not come again to the low hills.

We heard them traveling, heard the frozen birches

Break before their long retreat

Into the red sleep.

The Potchikoo Stories

The Birth of Potchikoo

You don’t have to believe this, I’m not asking you to. But Potchikoo claims that his father is the sun in heaven that shines down on us all.

There was a very pretty Chippewa girl working in a field once. She was digging potatoes for a farmer someplace around Pembina when suddenly the wind blew her dress up around her face and wrapped her apron so tightly around her arms that she couldn’t move. She lay helplessly in the dust with her potato sack, this poor girl, and as she lay there she felt the sun shining down very steadily upon her.

Then she felt something else. You know what. I don’t have to say it. She cried out for her mother.

This girl’s mother came running and untangled her daughter’s clothes. When she freed the girl, she saw that there were tears in her daughter’s eyes. Bit by bit, the mother coaxed out the story. After the girl told what had happened to her, the mother just shook her head sadly.

“I don’t know what we can expect now,” she said.

Well nine months passed and he was born looking just like a potato with tough warty skin and a puckered round shape. All the ladies came to visit the girl and left saying things behind their hands.

“That’s what she gets for playing loose in the potato fields,” they said.

But the girl didn’t care what they said after a while because she used to go and stand alone in a secret clearing in the woods and let the sun shine steadily upon her. Sometimes she took her little potato boy. She noticed when the sun shone on him he grew and became a little more human-looking.

One day the girl fell asleep in the sun with her potato boy next to her. The sun beat down so hard on him that he had an enormous spurt of growth. When the girl woke up, her son was fully grown. He said good-bye to his mother then, and went out to see what was going on in the world.

Potchikoo Marries

After he had several adventures, the potato boy took the name Potchikoo and decided to try married life.

I’ll just see what it’s like for a while, he thought, and then I’ll start wandering again.

How very inexperienced he was!

He took the train to Minneapolis to find a wife and as soon as he got off he saw her. She was a beautiful Indian girl standing at the door to a little shop where they sold cigarettes and pipe tobacco. How proud she looked! How peaceful. She was so lovely that she made Potchikoo shy. He could hardly look at her.

Potchikoo walked into the store and bought some cigarettes. He lit one up and stuck it between the beautiful woman’s lips. Then he stood next to her, still too shy to look at her, until he smelled smoke. He saw that she had somehow caught fire.

“Oh, I’ll save you!” cried Potchikoo.

He grabbed his lady love and ran with her to the lake, which was, handily, across the street. He threw her in. At first he was afraid she would drown but soon she floated to the surface and kept floating away from Potchikoo. This made him angry.

“Trying to run away already!” he shouted.

He leaped in to catch her. But he had forgotten that he couldn’t swim. So Potchikoo had to hang on to his wooden sweetheart while she drifted slowly all the way across the lake. When they got to the other side of the lake, across from Minneapolis, they were in wilderness. As soon as the wooden girl touched the shore she became alive and jumped up and dragged Potchikoo out of the water.

“I’ll teach you to shove a cigarette between my lips like that,” she said, beating him with her fists, which were still hard as wood. “Now that you’re my husband you’ll do things my way!”

That was how Potchikoo met and married Josette. He was married to her all his life. After she made it clear what she expected of her husband, Josette made a little toboggan of cut saplings and tied him upon it. Then she decided she never wanted to see Minneapolis again. She wanted to live in the hills. That is why she dragged Potchikoo all the way back across Minnesota to the Turtle Mountains, where they spent all the years of their wedded bliss.

How Potchikoo Got Old

As a young man, Potchikoo sometimes embarrassed his wife by breaking wind during Holy Mass. It was for this reason that Josette whittled him a little plug out of ash wood and told him to put it in that place before he entered Saint Ann’s church.

Potchikoo did as she asked, and even said a certain charm over the plug so that it would not be forced out, no matter what. Then the two of them entered the church to say their prayers.

That Sunday, Father Belcourt was giving a special sermon on the ascension of the Lord Christ to heaven. It happened in the twinkling of an eye, he said, with no warning, because Christ was more pure than air. How surprised everyone was to see, as Father Belcourt said this, the evil scoundrel Potchikoo rising from his pew!

His hands were folded, and his closed eyes and meek face wore a look of utter piety. He didn’t even seem to realize he was rising, he prayed so hard.

Up and up he floated, still in the kneeling position, until he reached the dark blue vault of the church. He seemed to inflate, too, until he looked larger than life to the people. They were on the verge of believing it a miracle when all of a sudden it happened. Bang! Even with the charm the little ash-wood plug could not contain the wind of Potchikoo. Out it popped, and Potchikoo went buzzing and sputtering around the church the way balloons do when children let go of the ends.

Holy Mass was canceled for a week so the church could be aired out, but to this day a faint scent still lingers, and Potchikoo, sadly enough, was shriveled by his sudden collapse and flight through the air. For when Josette picked him up to bring home, she found that he was now wrinkled and dry like an old man.

The Death of Potchikoo

Once there were three stones sitting in a patch of soft slough mud. Each of these stones had the smooth round shape of a woman’s breast, but no one had ever noticed this—that is, not until Old Man Potchikoo walked through the woods. He was the type who always noticed this kind of thing. As soon as he saw the three stones, Potchikoo sat down on a small bank of grass to enjoy what he saw.

He was not really much of a connoisseur, the old man. He just knew what he liked when he saw it. The three stones were light brown in color, delicately veined, and so smooth that they almost looked slippery. Old Man Potchikoo began to wonder if they really were slippery, and then he thought of touching them.

They were in the middle of the soft slough mud, so the old man took his boots and socks off. Then he thought of his wife Josette and what she would say if he came home with mud on his clothes. He took off his shirt and pants. He never wore undershorts. Wading toward those stones, he was as naked as them.

He had to kneel in the mud to touch the stones, and when he did this he sank to his thighs. But oh, when he touched the stones, he found that they were bigger than they looked from the shore and so shiny, so slippery. His hands polished them, and polished them some more, and before he knew it, that Potchikoo was making love to the slough.

Years passed by. The Potchikoos got older and more frail. One day Josette went into town, and as he always did as soon as she was out of sight, Potchikoo sat down on his front steps to do nothing.

As he sat there, he saw three women walk very slowly out of the woods. They walked across the field and then walked slowly toward him. As they drew near, Potchikoo saw that they were just his kind of women. They were large, their hair was black and very long, and because they wore low-cut blouses, he could see that their breasts were beautiful—light brown, delicately veined, and so smooth they looked slippery.

“We are your daughters,” they said, standing before him. “We are from the slough.”

A faint memory stirred in Potchikoo as he looked at their breasts, and he smiled.

“Oh my daughters,” he said to them. “Yes I remember you. Come sit on your daddy’s lap and get acquainted.”

The daughters moved slowly toward Potchikoo. As he saw their skin up close, he marveled at how fine it was, smooth as polished stone. The first daughter sank upon his knee and clasped her arms around him. She was so heavy that the old man couldn’t move. Then the others sank upon him, blocking away the sun with their massive bodies. The old man’s head began to swim and yellow stars turned in his skull. He hardly knew it when all three daughters laid their heads dreamily against his chest. They were cold, and so heavy that his ribs snapped apart like little dry twigs.

Potchikoo’s Life After Death

How They Don’t Let Potchikoo into Heaven

After Old Man Potchikoo died, the people had a funeral for his poor, crushed body, and everyone felt sorry for the things they had said while he was alive. Josette went home and set some bread by the door for him to take on his journey to the next world. Then she began to can a bucket of plums she’d bought cheap, because they were overripe.

As she canned, she thought how it was. Now she’d have to give away these sweet plums since they had been her husband’s favorites. She didn’t like plums. Her tastes ran sour. Everything about her did. As she worked, she cried vinegar tears into the jars before she sealed them. People would later remark on her ingenuity. No one else on the reservation pickled plums.

Now, as night fell, Potchikoo got out of his body, and climbed up through the dirt. He took the frybread Josette had left in a towel, his provisions. He looked in the window, saw she was sleeping alone, and he was satisfied. Of course, since he never could hold himself back, he immediately ate the bread as he walked the long road, a mistake. Two days later, he was terribly hungry, and there was no end in sight. He came to the huge luscious berry he knew he shouldn’t eat if he wanted to enter the heaven all the priests and nuns described. He took a little bite, and told himself he’d not touch the rest. But it tasted so good tears came to his eyes. It took a minute, hardly that, for him to stuff the whole berry by handfuls into his mouth.

He didn’t know what would happen now, but the road was still there. He kept walking, but he’d become so fat from his greed that when he came to the log bridge, a test for good souls, he couldn’t balance to cross it, fell in repeatedly, and went on cold and shivering. But he was dry again, and warmer, by the time he reached the pearly gates.

Saint Peter was standing there, dressed in a long, brown robe, just as the nuns and priests had always said he would be. He examined Potchikoo back and front for berry stains, but they had luckily washed away when Potchikoo fell off the bridge.

“What’s your name?” Saint Peter asked.

Potchikoo told him, and then Saint Peter pulled a huge book out from under his robe. As the saint’s finger traveled down the lists, Potchikoo became frightened to think how many awful deeds would be recorded after his name. But as it happened, there was only one word there. The word Indian.

“Ah,” Saint Peter said. “You’ll have to keep walking.”

Where Potchikoo Goes Next

So he kept on. As he walked, the road, which had been nicely paved and lit when it got near heaven, narrowed and dipped. Soon it was only gravel, then dirt, then mud, then just a path beaten in the grass. The land around it got poor too, dry and rocky. And when Potchikoo got to the entrance of the Indian heaven, it was no gate of pearl, just a simple pasture gate of weathered wood. There was no one standing there to guard it, either, so he went right in.

On the other side of the gate there were no tracks, so Potchikoo walked aimlessly. All along the way, there were chokecherry bushes, not quite ripe. But Potchikoo was so hungry again that he raked them off the stems by the handful and gobbled them down, not even spitting out the pits.

The dreadful stomachaches he got, very soon, were worse than hunger, and every few steps poor Potchikoo had to relieve himself. On and on he went, day after day, eating berries to keep his strength up and staggering from the pain and shitting until he felt so weak and famished that he had to sit down. Some time went by, and then people came to sit around him. They got to talking. Someone built a fire, and soon they were roasting venison.

The taste of it made Potchikoo lonesome. Josette always fried her meat with onions.

“Well,” he said, standing up when he was full, “it’s time to go now.”

The people didn’t say good-bye though—they just laughed. There were no markers in this land, nothing but extreme and gentle emptiness. It was made to be confusing. There were no landmarks, no lookouts. The wind was strong, and the bushes grew quickly, so that every path made was instantly obscured.

But not Potchikoo’s path. At regular intervals new chokecherry bushes had sprung up from the seeds that had passed through his body. So he had no trouble finding his way to the gate, out through it, and back on the road.

Potchikoo’s Detour

Along the way back, he got curious and wondered what the hell for white people was like.

As he passed the pearly gates, Saint Peter was busy checking in a busload of Mormons, and so he didn’t even look up and see Potchikoo take the dark fork in the road.

Walking along, Potchikoo began to think twice about what he was doing. The air felt warm and humid, and he expected it to get worse, much worse. Soon the screams of the damned would ring out and the sky would turn pitch-black. But his curiosity was, as always, stronger than his fear. He kept walking until he came to what looked like a giant warehouse.

It was a warehouse, and it was hell.

There was a little sign above the metal door marked ENTRANCE. HELL. Potchikoo got a thrill of terror in his stomach. He carefully laid his ear against the door, expecting his blood to curdle. But all he heard was the sound of rustling pages. And so, gathering his courage, he bent to the keyhole and looked in to see what it was the white race suffered.

He started back, shook his head, then bent to the keyhole again.

It was worse than flames.

They were all chained, hand and foot and even by the neck, to years and years of mail order catalogues. From the old Sears Roebuck to the Sharper Image, they were bound. Around and around the huge warehouse they dragged the heavy paper books, mumbling, collapsing from time to time to flip through the pages. Each person bent low beneath the weight. Potchikoo had always wondered where the millions of old catalogues went, and now he knew the devil gathered them, that they were instruments of torment.

The words of the damned, thin and drained, rang in his ears all the way home.

Look at that wall unit. What about this here recliner? We could put up that home gym in the basement….

Potchikoo Greets Josette

On his journey through heaven and hell, Potchikoo had been a long time without sex. It was night when he finally got back home, and he could hardly wait to hold Josette in his arms. Therefore, after he had entered the house and crept up to her bed, the first words he uttered to his wife in greeting were, “Let’s pitch whoopee.”

Josette yelled and grabbed the swatter that she kept next to her bed to kill mosquitoes in the dark. She began to lambaste Potchikoo until she realized who it was, and that this was no awful dream.

Then they lay down in bed and had no more thoughts.

Afterward, lying there happily, Potchikoo was surprised to find that he was still passionate. They began to make love again, and still again, and over and over. At first Josette returned as good as Potchikoo gave her, but after a while it seemed that the more he made love, the more need he felt and the more heat he gave off. He was unquenchable fire.

Finally, Josette fell asleep, and let him go on and on. He was so glad to be alive again that he could never remember, afterward, how many times he had sex that night. Even he lost count. But when he woke up late the next day, Potchikoo felt a little strange, as though there was something missing. And sure enough, there was.

When Potchikoo looked under the covers, he found that his favorite part of himself was charred black and thin as a burnt twig.

Potchikoo Restored

It was terrible to have burnt his pride and joy down to nothing. It was terrible to have to face the world, especially Josette, without it. Potchikoo put his pants on and sat in the shade to think. But not until Josette left for daily Mass, and he was alone, did Potchikoo have a good idea.

He went inside and found a block of paraffin wax that Josette used to seal her jars of plum pickles. He stirred the coals in Josette’s stove and melted the wax in an old coffee can. Then he dipped in his penis. It hurt the first time, but after that not so much, and then not at all. He kept dipping and dipping. It got back to the normal size, and he should have been pleased with that. But Potchikoo got grandiose ideas.

He kept dipping and dipping. He melted more wax, more and more, and kept dipping, until he was so large he could hardly stagger out the door. Luckily, the wheelbarrow was sitting in the path. He grabbed the handles and wheeled it before him into town.

There was only one road in the village then. Potchikoo went there with his wheelbarrow, calling for women. He crossed the village twice. Mothers came out in wonder, saw what was in the wheelbarrow, and whisked their daughters inside. Everybody was disgusted and scolding and indignant, except for one woman. She lived at the end of the road. Her door was always open, and she was large.

Even now, we can’t use her name, this Mrs. B. No man satisfied her. But that day, Potchikoo wheeled his barrow in, and then, for once, her door was shut.

Potchikoo and Mrs. B went rolling through the house. The walls shuddered, and people standing around outside thought the whole place might collapse. Potchikoo was shaken from side to side, powerfully, as if he were on a ride at the carnival. But eventually, of course, the heat of their union softened and wilted Potchikoo back to nothing. Mrs. B was disgusted and threw him out back, into the weeds. From there he crept home to Josette, and on the crooked path he took to avoid others, he tried to think of new ways he might please her.

Potchikoo’s Mean Twin

To his relief, nature returned manhood to Potchikoo in several weeks. But his troubles weren’t over. One day, the tribal police appeared. They said Potchikoo had been seen stealing fence posts down the road. But they found no stolen fence posts on his property, so they did not arrest him.

More accusations were heard.

Potchikoo threw rocks at a nun, howled like a dog, and barked until she chased him off. He got drunk and tossed a pool cue out the window of the Stumble Inn. The pool cue hit the tribal chairman on the shoulder and caused a bruise. Potchikoo ran down the street laughing, flung off his clothes, ran naked through the trading store. He ripped antennas from twenty cars. He broke a portable radio that belonged to a widow, her only comfort. If a friendly dog came up to this bad Potchikoo, he lashed out with his foot. He screamed at children until tears came into their eyes, and then he knocked down the one road sign the government had seen fit to place on the reservation.

The sign was red, planted in the very middle of town, and said STOP. People were naturally proud of the sign. So, there was finally a decision to lock Potchikoo in jail, though he was dead. When the police came to get him, he went quite willingly because he was so confused.

But here’s what happened.

While Potchikoo was locked up, under the eyes of the tribal sheriff, his mean twin went out and caused some mischief near the school by starting a grass fire. So now the people knew the trouble wasn’t caused by Old Man Potchikoo. And next time the bad twin was seen, Josette followed him. He ran very fast, until he reached the chain link fence around the graveyard. Josette saw him jump over the fence and dodge among the stones. Then the twin got to the place where Potchikoo had been buried, lifted the ground like a lid, and wiggled under.

How Josette Takes Care of It

So the trouble was that Potchikoo had left his old body in the ground, empty, and something had found a place to live.

The people said the only thing to do was trap the mean twin and then get rid of him. But no one could agree on how to do it. People just talked and planned, no one acted. Finally Josette had to take the matter into her own hands.

One day she made a big pot of stew, and into it she put a bird. Into the roasted bird, Josette put a bit of blue plaster that had fallen off the Blessed Virgin’s robe while she cleaned the altar. She took the stew and left the whole pot just outside the cemetery fence. From her hiding place deep in a lilac bush, she saw the mean twin creep forth. He took the pot in his hands and gulped down every morsel, then munched the bird up, bones and all. Stuffed full, he lay down to sleep. He snored. After a while, he woke and looked around himself, very quietly. That was when Josette came out of the bush.

“In the name of the Holy Mother of God!” she cried. “Depart!”

So the thing stepped out of Potchikoo’s old body, all hairless and smooth and wet and gray. But Josette had no pity. She pointed sternly at the dark stand of pines, where no one went, and slowly, with many a sigh and backward look, the thing walked over there.

Potchikoo’s old body lay, crumpled like a worn suit of clothes, where the thing had stepped out. Right there, Josette made a fire, a little fire. When the blaze was very hot, she threw in the empty skin. It crackled in the flames, shed sparks, and was finally reduced to a crisp of ashes, which Josette brushed carefully into a little sack, and saved in her purse.

Saint Potchikoo

With his old body burnt, Potchikoo existed in his spiritual flesh. Yet having been to the other side of life and back, he wasn’t sure where he belonged. Sometimes he found his heaven with Josette, sometimes he longed for the pasture gate. He became certain that the end of his living days was near, and he felt sorry for himself. He was also very jealous when it came to Josette, and convinced that old men were in love with her, just waiting for him to croak. Therefore, he decided to have himself stuffed and placed in a corner of their bedroom, where he could keep an eye on his widow. He told her of his plan.

“That way, you’ll never forget me,” he crooned in a pathetic voice.

“I’ll never forget you anyway,” said Josette. “Who the hell could?”

Potchikoo sought out a taxidermist in a neighboring town, the sort of person who mounted prize walleyes and the heads of buck deer.

“What about me?” said Potchikoo.

“What about you?” said the taxidermist.

“I’d like to get stuffed,” said Potchikoo.

“You must be dead first,” said the professional.

Oh yes, Potchikoo had forgotten this. Dead first. How to accomplish that? He considered this obstacle as he walked back to his house. Death. Potchikoo thought harder. At last, another option presented itself. Potchikoo decided to spend his golden years carving a lifelike statue of Potchikoo from the tall stump of an old oak tree right outside the door. Thus, once he was gone, he would watch over his love and present a forbidding sight to any akiwenzii who came to court her. Delighted with his notion, he began carving the very same day.

Months passed, a year passed, and Potchikoo’s statue became a legend. His project, begun in jealousy, became through rumor a sign of enormous grace. Divine light had descended on a habitual miscreant. Talk was that the old rascal had converted and was carving the Virgin Mary, or maybe Saint Joseph, or perhaps again the people’s own Blessed Kateri, right in his front yard. Potchikoo put up a canvas screen and worked there every single day. The wrenching sound of his chisel and the tapping of his mallet could be heard at any time, but he allowed no glimpse of his masterwork. He gave no interviews. Just kept working. Not until the statue was finished did he speak, and then it was only a notice of the unveiling. Which would occur on Easter morning.

At least a hundred people gathered after Mass, and another hundred were there already, waiting for the canvas that surrounded the statue to drop. Potchikoo was very pleased, and made a most glorious speech. The speech was long, and very satisfying to Potchikoo, and at the end of it he suddenly pulled the cord that held the curtain before the statue.

Silence. There was a lot of silence from the people. Potchikoo interpreted their silence as awe, and for sure, he felt the awe of it too. For the statue of himself had all of his unmistakable features, including the fantasy of his favorite part of himself at its most commanding. Those who were religious shook their heads and quickly left. Those who weren’t, but who had good taste, left as well. That left only the pagans with bad taste to admire what they saw, but that was enough for Potchikoo. He considered his project a success. During the years of quiet happiness that followed with Josette he never mislaid his hat, as there was a place to hang it right beside the door.

The Butcher’s Wife

The Butcher’s Wife

1

Once, my braids swung heavy as ropes.

Men feared them like the gallows.

Night fell

When I combed them out.

No one could see me in the dark.

Then I stood still

Too long and the braids took root.

I wept, so helpless.

The braids tapped deep and flourished.

A man came by with an ox on his shoulders.

He yoked it to my apron

And pulled me from the ground.

From that time on I wound the braids around my head

So that my arms would be free to tend him.

2

He could lift a grown man by the belt with his teeth.

In a contest, he’d press a whole hog, a side of beef.

He loved his highballs, his herring, and the attentions of women.

He died pounding his chest with no last word for anyone.

The gin vessels in his face broke and darkened. I traced them

Far from that room into Bremen on the Sea.

The narrow streets twisted down to the piers.

And far off, in the black, rocking water, the lights of trawlers

Beckoned, like the heart’s uncertain signals,

Faint, and final.

3

Of course I planted a great, full bush of roses on his grave.

Who else would give the butcher roses but his wife?

Each summer, I am reminded of the heart surging from his vest,

Mocking all the high stern angels

By pounding for their spread skirts.

The flowers unfurl, offering themselves,

And I hear his heart pound on the earth like a great fist,

Demanding another round of the best wine in the house.

Another round, he cries, and another round all summer long,

Until the whole damn world reels toward winter drunk.

That Pull from the Left

Butch once remarked to me how sinister it was

alone, after hours, in the dark of the shop

to find me there hunched over two weeks’ accounts

probably smoked like a bacon from all those Pall-Malls.

Odd comfort when the light goes, the case lights left on

and the rings of baloney, the herring, the parsley,

arranged in the strict, familiar ways.

Whatever intactness holds animals up

has been carefully taken, what’s left are the parts.

Just look in the cases, all counted and stacked.

Step-and-a-Half Waleski used to come to the shop

and ask for the cheap cut, she would thump, sniff, and finger.

This one too old. This one here for my supper.

Two days and you do notice change in the texture.

I have seen them the day before slaughter.

Knowing the outcome from the moment they enter

the chute, the eye rolls, blood is smeared on the lintel.

Mallet or bullet they lunge toward their darkness.

But something queer happens when the heart is delivered.

When a child is born, sometimes the left hand is stronger.

You can train it to fail, still the knowledge is there.

That is the knowledge in the hand of a butcher

that adds to its weight. Otto Kröger could fell

a dray horse with one well-placed punch to the jaw,

and yet it is well known how thorough he was.

He never sat down without washing his hands,

and he was a maker, his sausage was echt

so that even Waleski had little complaint.

Butch once remarked there was no one so deft

as my Otto. So true, there is great tact involved

in parting the flesh from the bones that it loves.

How we cling to the bones. Each joint is a web

of small tendons and fibers. He knew what I meant

when I told him I felt something pull from the left,

and how often it clouded the day before slaughter.

Something queer happens when the heart is delivered.

The Carmelites

They’re women, not like me but like the sun

burning cold on a winter afternoon,

audacious brilliance from a severe height,

living in the center as the town revolves

around them in a mess. Of course

we want to know what gives behind their fence,

behind the shades, the yellow brick

convent huge in the black green pines.

We pass it, every one of us, on rounds

we make our living at. There’s one

I’ve spoken to. Tall, gaunt, and dressed in brown,

her office is to fetch the mail, pay bills,

and fasten wheat into the Virgin’s arms.

I’ve thought of her, so ordinary, rising every night,

scarred like the moon in her observance,

shaved and bound and bandaged

in rough blankets like a poor mare’s carcass,

muttering for courage at the very hour

cups crack in the cupboards downstairs, and Otto

turns to me with urgency and power.

Tremendous love, the cry stuffed back, the statue

smothered in its virtue till the glass corrodes,

and the buried structure shows,

the hoops, the wires, the blackened arcs,

freeze to acid in the strange heart.

Clouds

The furnace is stoked. I’m loaded

on gin. One bottle in the clinkers

hidden since spring

when Otto took the vow

and ceremoniously poured

the rotgut, the red-eye, the bootlegger’s brew

down the scoured steel sink,

overcoming the reek

of oxblood.

That was one promise he kept.

He died two weeks after, not a drop crossed his lips

in the meantime. I know

now he kept some insurance,

one bottle at least

against his own darkness.

I’m here, anyway, to give it some use.

From the doorway the clouds pass me through.

The town stretches to fields. The six avenues

crossed by seventeen streets,

the tick, tack, and toe

of boxes and yards

settle into the dark.

Dogs worry their chains.

Men call to their mothers

and finish. The women sag into the springs.

What kind of thoughts, Mary Kröger, are these?

With a headful of spirits,

how else can I think?

Under so many clouds,

such hooded and broken

old things. They go on

simply folding, unfolding, like sheets

hung to dry and forgotten.

And no matter how careful I watch them,

they take a new shape,

escaping my concentrations,

they slip and disperse

and extinguish themselves.

They melt before I half unfathom their forms.

Just as fast, a few bones

disconnecting beneath us.

It is too late, I fear, to call these things back.

Not in this language.

Not in this life.

I know it. The tongue is unhinged by the sauce.

But these clouds, creeping toward us

each night while the milk

gets scorched in the pan,

great soaked loaves of bread

are squandering themselves in the west.

Look at them: Proud, unpausing.

Open and growing, we cannot destroy them

or stop them from moving

down each avenue,

the dogs turn on their chains,

children feel through the windows.

What else should we feel our way through—

We lay our streets over

the deepest cries of the earth

and wonder why everything comes down to this:

The days pile and pile.

The bones are too few

and too foreign to know.

Mary, you do not belong here at all.

Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town.

Let everything be how it could have been, once:

a land that was empty and perfect as clouds.

But this is the way people are.

All that appears to us empty,

We fill.

What is endless and simple,

We carve, and initial,

and narrow

roads plow through the last of the hills

where our gravestones rear small

black vigilant domes.

Our friends, our family, the dead of our wars

deep in this strange earth

we want to call ours.

Shelter

My four adopted sons in photographs

wear solemn black. Their faces comprehend

their mother’s death, an absence in a well

of empty noise, and Otto strange and lost.

Her name was Mary also, Mary Kröger.

Two of us have lived and one is gone.

Her hair was blond; it floated back in wings,

and still you see her traces in the boys:

bright hair and long, thin, knotted woman’s hands.

I knew her, Mary Kröger, and we were bosom friends.

All graves are shelters for our mislaid twins.

Otto was for many years her husband,

and that’s the way I always thought of him.

I nursed her when she sickened and the cure

fell through at Rochester. The healing bath

that dropped her temperature, I think, too fast.

I was in attendance at her death:

She sent the others out. She rose and gripped my arm

and tried to make me promise that I’d care

for Otto and the boys. I had to turn away

as my own mother had when her time came.

How few do not return in memory

and make us act in ways we can’t explain.

I could not lie to ease her, living, dying.

All graves are full of such accumulation.

And yet, the boys were waiting in New York

to take the first boat back to Otto’s folks

in Germany, prewar, dark powers were at work,

and Otto asked me on the westbound bus

to marry him. I could not tell him no—

We help our neighbors out. I loved him though

It took me several years to know I did

from that first time he walked in to deliver

winter food. Through Father Adler’s kitchen,

he shouldered half an ox like it was bread

and looked at me too long for simple greeting.

This is how our live complete themselves,

as effortless as weather, circles blaze

in ordinary days, and through our waking selves

they reach, to touch our true and sleeping speech.

So I took up with Otto, took the boys

and watched for them, and made their daily bread

from what the grocer gave them in exchange

for helping him. It’s hard to tell you how

they soon became so precious I got sick

from worry, and woke up for two months straight

and had to check them, sleeping, in their beds

and had to watch and see each breathe or move

before I could regain my sleep again.

All graves are pregnant with our nearest kin.

The Slow Sting of Her Company

Otto brought one sister from that town

they never talk about. His father shook

one great red fist, a bludgeon, in the air

behind them as dry sparks released the wheels.

I pictured him, still standing there, now shrunk—

a carved root pickling in its own strong juice.

They speak his name and wipe it from their lips.

Proud Hilda hides his picture

in a drawer with underskirts.

Tall Hilda sniffed and twisted that gold chain

my Otto gave her. Other, lesser men

have gifted her with more impressive things.

She keeps them in a drawer with towels and sheets.

I came upon a sentimental locket,

embossed with words, initials interfixed

within the breasts of dour, molting swans.

Proud Hilda cracked it open,

smiled, and clicked it shut.

How many men had begged her heavy hand

I do not know. I think I loved her too

in ways that I am not sure how to tell—

I reached one day to gather back her hair:

wild marigold. I touched one hidden ear

and drew my fingers, burning, from the stone

that swung a cold light from the polished lobe.

Tall Hilda took my hand in hers and kissed

the palm, and closed that mark inside my fist.

She lived alone and thickened in that town,

refusing company for weeks on end.

We left food at her door; she took it in;

her dull lamp deepened as the night wore on.

I went to her when everything was wrong.

We sat all evening talking children, men.

She laughed at me, and said it was my ruin.

My giving till I dropped.

Live blood let down the drain.

I never let her know how those words cut

me serious—her questioning my life. One night

a slow thing came, provoked by weariness,

to cram itself up every slackened nerve;

as if my body were a whining hive

and each cell groaning with a sweet, thick lead—

I turned and struck at Otto in our bed;

all night, all night the poison, till I swarmed

back empty to his cold

and dreaming arms.

Here Is a Good Word for Step-and-a-Half Waleski

At first we all wondered what county or town

she had come from. Quite soon it was clear to us all

that was better unquestioned, and better unknown.

Who wanted to hear what had happened or failed

to occur. Why the dry wood had not taken fire.

Much less, why the dogs were unspeakably disturbed

when she ground the cold cinders that littered our walk

with her run-to-ground heels. That Waleski approached

with a swiftness uncommon for one of her age.

Even spiders spun clear of her lengthening shadow.

Her headlong occurrence unnerved even Otto

who wrapped up the pork rinds like they were glass trinkets

and saluted her passage with a good stiff drink.

But mine is a good word for Step-and-a-Half Waleski.

Scavenger, bone picker, lived off our alleys

when all we threw out were the deadliest scrapings

from licked-over pots. And even that hurt.

And for whatever one of us laughed in her face,

at least two prayed in secret, went home half afraid

of that mirror, what possible leavings they’d find there.

But mine is a good word, and even that hurts.

A rhyme-and-a-half for a woman of parts,

because someone must pare the fruit soft to the core

into slivers, must wrap the dead bones in her skirts

and lay these things out on her table, and fit

each oddment to each to resemble a life.

Portrait of the Town Leonard

I thought I saw him look my way and crossed

my breast before I could contain myself.

Beneath those glasses, thick as lead-barred windows,

his eyes ran through his head, the double barrels

of an old gun, sick on its load, the trigger held

in place by one thin metal bow.

Going toward the Catholic church, whose twin

white dunce caps speared the clouds for offerings,

we had to pass him on the poured stone bridge.

For nickels we could act as though we’d not

been offered stories. How these all turned out

we knew, each one, just how the river eats

within its course the line of reasoning.

He went, each morning, to the first confession.

The sulking curtains bit their lips behind him.

Still those in closer pews could hear the sweet

and limber sins he’d made up on the spot.

I saw a few consider, and take note—

procedural. They’d try them out at home.

And once, a windless August, when the sun

released its weight and all the crops were burned,

he kept watch as the river thickened. Land

grew visibly and reeked to either side,

till windowed hulks, forgotten death cars reared

where dark fish leapt, and gaped, and snatched the air.

Leonard Commits Redeeming Adulteries with All the Women in Town

When I take off my glasses, these eyes are dark magnets

that draw the world into my reach.

First the needles, as I walk the quiet streets,

work their way from the cushions of dust.

The nails in the rafters twist laboriously out

and the oven doors drop

an inch open.

The sleep smell of yesterday’s baking

rises in the mouth.

A good thing.

The street lamps wink off just at dawn,

still they bend their stiff necks like geese drinking.

My vision is drinking in the star-littered lawn.

When the porch ivy weaves to me—

Now is the time.

Women put down their coffee cups, all over town.

Men drift down the sidewalks, thinking,

What did she want?

But it is too late for husbands.

Their wives do not question

what it is that dissolves

all reserve. Why they suddenly think of cracked Leonard.

They uncross themselves, forsaking

all protection. They long to be opened and known

because the secret is perishable, kept, and desire

in love with its private ruin.

I open my hands and they come to me, now.

In our palms dark instructions that cannot be erased,

only followed, only known along the way.

And it is right, oh women of the town, it is right.

Your mouths, like the seals of important documents

break for me, destroying the ring’s raised signature,

the cracked edges melting to mine.

Unexpected Dangers

I’m much the worse for wear, it’s double true.

Too many incidents

a man might misconstrue—

my conduct, for a lack of innocence.

I seem to get them crazed or lacking sense

in the first place.

Ancient, solid gents

I sit by on the bus because they’re safe,

get me coming, going, with their canes,

or what is worse,

the spreading stains

across the seat. I recognize at once

just what they’re up to, rustling in their coats.

There was a priest,

the calmer sort,

his cassock flowing down from neck to feet.

We got to talking, and I brushed his knee

by accident,

and dutifully,

he took my hand and put it back

not quite where it belonged; his judgment

was not that exact.

I underwent

a kind of odd conversion from his act.

They do call minds like mine one-track.

One track is all you need

to understand

their loneliness, then bite the hand that feeds

upon you, in a terrible blind grief.

My Name Repeated on the Lips of the Dead

Last night, my dreams were full of Otto’s best friends.

I sat in the kitchen, wiping the heavy silver,

and listened to the losses, tough custom, and fouled accounts

of the family bootlegger, county sheriff:

Rudy J. V. Jacklitch, who sat just beside me,

wiping his wind-cracked hands

with lard smeared on a handkerchief.

Our pekinese-poodle went and darkened his best wool trousers,

and he leapt up, yelling for a knife!

These are the kinds of friends

I had to tend in those days:

great, thick men, devouring

Fleisch, Spaetzle, the very special

potato salad for which I dice

onions so fine they are invisible.

Rudy J. V. Jacklitch was a bachelor, but he cared

for his mother, a small spider of a woman—all fingers.

She covered everything, from the kettle to the radio,

with a doily. The whole house

dripped with lace, frosting fell

from each surface in fantastic shapes.

When Otto died, old Rudy came by

with a couple jugs for the mourners’ supper.

He stayed on past midnight, every night the month after

he would bring me a little something

to put the night away.

After a short while I knew his purpose.

His glance slipped as the evening

and the strong drink wore on.

Playing cribbage I always won,

a sure sign he was distracted.

I babbled like a talking bird,

never let him say the words

I knew were in him.

Then one night he came by,

already loaded to the gills,

rifle slung in the back window

of his truck: Going out

to shoot toads. He was peeved

with me. I’d played him all wrong.

He said his mother knew just what I was.

The next thing I heard that blurred night

was that Rudy drove his light truck

through the side of a barn,

and that among the living

he stayed long enough

to pronounce my name, like a curse

through the rage and foam of his freed blood.

So I was sure, for a time and a time after,

that Rudy carried

my name down to hell on his tongue

like a black coin.

I would wake, in the deepest of places,

and hear my name called.

My name like a strange new currency they read:

Mary Kröger

with its ring of the authentic

when dropped

or struck between their fingers.

How I feared to have it whispered in their mouths!

Mary Kröger

growing softer and thinner

till it dissolved

like a wafer under all that polishing.

A Mother’s Hell

The Widow Jacklitch

All night, all night, the cat wants out again.

I’ve locked her in the kitchen where she tears

From wall to wall. Her bullet head leaves marks;

She swings from tablecloths, dislodges pots.

When Rudy was alive the cat was all

You ever could have wanted in a child, it sat so still

And diligently sucked its whiskers clean. I cram

A doily in my mouth to still the scream.

All night the sweethearts dandle in the weeds.

It’s terrible, the little bleats they make

Outside my window. Girls not out of braids

Walk by. I see their fingers hike their skirts

Way up their legs. I say it’s dirt.

The cat’s got rubbage on her brain

As well. She backs on anything that’s stiff.

I try to keep the pencils out of reach.

That Kröger widow practiced what she’d preach

A mile a minute. If she was a cat

I’d drown her in a tub of boiling fat

And nail her up like suet, out in back

Where birds fly down to take their chance.

I don’t like things with beaks. I don’t

like anything that makes a beating sound.

Beat, beat, all night they hammered at the truck

With bats. But he had locked himself

In stubbornly as when a boy; I’d knock

Until my knuckles scabbed and bled

And blue paint scraped into the wounds. He’d laugh

Behind his door. I’d hear him pant and thrill.

A mother’s hell. But I’d feel the good blindness stalk

Us together. Son and mother world without end forever.

Rudy Comes Back

I knew at once, when the lights dimmed.

He was pissing on the works.

The generator fouled a beat

and recovered.

My doors were locked

anyway, and the big white dog

unchained in the yard.

Outside, the wall of hollyhocks

raved for mercy from the wind’s strap.

The valves of the roses opened,

so sheltering his step

with their frayed mouths.

I don’t know how he entered

the dull bitch at my feet.

She rose in a nightmare’s hackles,

glittering, shedding heat

from her mild eyes.

All night we kept watch,

never leaving the white-blue ring

of the kitchen. I could hear him out there,

scratching in the porch hall, cold

and furtive as a cat in winter.

Toward dawn I got the gun.

And he was out there, Rudy J. V. Jacklitch,

the bachelor who drove his light truck

through the side of a barn on my account.

He’d lost flesh. The gray skin of his face dragged.

His clothes were bunched.

He stood reproachful,

in one hand the wooden board

and the pegs, still my crib.

In the other the ruined bouquet

of larkspur I wouldn’t take.

I was calm. This was something I’d foreseen.

After all, he took my name down to hell,

a thin black coin.

Repeatedly, repeatedly, to his destruction,

he called.

And I had not answered then.

And I would not answer now.

The flowers chafed to flames of dust in his hands.

The earth drew the wind in like breath and held on.

But I did not speak

or cry out

until the dawn, until the confounding light.

New Vows

The night was clean as the bone of a rabbit blown hollow.

I cast my hood of dogskin

away, and my shirt of nettles.

Ten years had been enough. I left my darkened house.

The trick was in living that death to its source.

When it happened, I wandered toward more than I was.

Widowed by men, I married the dark firs,

as if I were walking in sleep toward their arms.

I drank, without fear or desire,

this odd fire.

Now shadows move freely within me as words.

These are eternal, these stunned, loosened verbs.

And I can’t tell you yet

how truly I belong

to the hiss and shift of wind,

these slow, variable mouths

through which, at certain times, I speak in tongues.

The Seven Sleepers

Fooling God

I must become small and hide where he cannot reach.

I must become dull and heavy as an iron pot.

I must be tireless as rust and bold as roots

growing through the locks on doors

and crumbling the cinder blocks

of the foundations of his everlasting throne.

I must be strange as pity so he’ll believe me.

I must be terrible and brush my hair so that he finds me attractive.

Perhaps if I invoke Clare, the patron saint of television.

Perhaps if I become the images

passing through the cells of a woman’s brain.

I must be very large and block his sight.

I must be sharp and impetuous as knives.

I must insert myself into the bark of his apple trees,

and cleave the bones of his cows. I must be the marrow

that he drinks into his cloud-wet body.

I must be careful and laugh when he laughs.

I must turn down the covers and guide him in.

I must fashion his children out of Play-Doh, blue, pink, green.

I must pull them from between my legs

and set them before the television.

I must hide my memory in a mustard grain

so that he’ll search for it over time until time is gone.

I must lose myself in the world’s regard and disparagement.

I must remain this person and be no trouble.

None at all. So he’ll forget.

I’ll collect dust out of reach,

a single dish from a set, a flower made of felt,

a tablet the wrong shape to choke on.

I must become essential and file everything

under my own system,

so we can lose him and his proofs and adherents.

I must be a doubter in a city of belief

that hails his signs (the great footprints

long as limousines, the rough print on the wall).

On the pavement where his house begins

fainting women kneel. I’m not among them

although they polish the brass tongues of his lions

with their own tongues

and taste the everlasting life.

The Sacraments

1 Baptism

As the sun dancers, in their helmets of sage,

stopped at the sun’s apogee

and stood in the waterless light,

so, after loss, it came to this:

that for each year the being was destroyed,

I was to sacrifice a piece of my flesh.

The keen knife hovered

and the skin flicked in the bowl.

Then the sun, the life that consumes us,

burst into agony.

We began, the wands and the head crowns of sage,

the feathers cocked over our ears.

When the bird joined the circle and called,

we cried back, shrill breath

through the bones in our teeth.

Her wings closed over us, her dark red

claws drew us upward by the scars,

so that we hung by the flesh

as in the moment before birth

when the spirit is quenched

in whole pain, suspended

until there is no choice, the body

slams to earth,

the new life starts.

2 Communion

It is spring. The tiny frogs pull

their strange new bodies out

of the suckholes, the sediment of rust,

and float upward, each in a silver bubble

that breaks on the water’s surface

to one clear unceasing note of need.

Sometimes, when I hear them,

I leave our bed and stumble

among the white shafts of weeds

to the edge of the pond.

I sink to the throat,

and witness the ravenous trill

of the body transformed at last and then consumed

in a rush of music.

Sing to me, sing to me.

I have never been so cold

rising out of sleep.

3 Confirmation

I was twelve, in my body

three eggs were already marked

for the future.

Two golden, one dark.

And the man,

he was selected from other men,

by a blow on the cheek

similar to mine.

That is how we knew,

from the first meeting.

There was no question.

There was the wound.

4 Matrimony

It was frightening, the trees in their rigid postures

using up the sun,

as the earth tilted its essential degree.

Snow covered everything. Its confusing glare

doubled the view

so that I saw you approach

my empty house

not as one man, but as a landscape

repeating along the walls of every room

papering over the cracked grief.

I knew as I stepped into the design,

as I joined the chain of hands,

and let the steeple of fire

be raised above our heads.

We had chosen the costliest pattern,

the strangest, the most enduring.

We were afraid as we stood between the willows,

as we shaped the standard words with our tongues.

Then it was done. The scenery multiplied

around us and we turned.

We stared calmly from the pictures.

5 Penance

I am sorry I ruined the oatmeal

which must remain in the bowl. Sorry

my breath hardened on the carpet and the slashed fur

climbed, raving, off the wall.

I am sorry for the ominous look, for using tears.

Sorry for the print on the page,

for wearing the shoes of a dead woman

bought at a yard sale.

She still walks, walks

restlessly, treading the mill. I am

sorry I could not lift out the stain

with powerful enzymes, with spit, with vinegar.

Sorry I pickled your underwear

and froze my hands to the knob

so that you had to turn me to gain entrance

to the kingdom without spots or wrinkles.

I am sorry I have failed so I am not allowed

to leave the table, to which my knees are strapped.

Sorry I cannot leave you behind. For you are mine.

You are everything. And I am sorry.

6 Holy Orders

God, I was not meant to be the isolate

cry in this body.

I was meant to have your tongue in my mouth.

That is why I stand by your great plaster lips

waiting for your voice to unfold from its dark slot.

Your hand clenched in the shape of a bottle.

Your mouth painted shut on the answer.

Your eyes, two blue mirrors, in which I am perfectly denied.

I open my mouth and I speak

though it is only a thin sound, a leaf

scraping on a leaf.

7 Extreme Unction

When the blue steam stalls over the land

and the resinous apples

turn to mash, then to a cider whose thin

twang shrivels the tongue,

the snakes hatch

twirling from the egg.

In the shattered teacup, from the silvering

boards of the barn,

in the heat of rotting mulch hay,

they soak up the particles of light

so that all winter

welded in the iron sheath

of sludge under the pond

they continue, as we do,

drawing closer to the source,

their hearts beating slower

as the days narrow

until there is this one pale aperture

and the tail sliding through

then the systole, the blackness of heaven.

The Seven Sleepers

Seven Christian youths of Ephesus, according to legend, hid themselves in a cave in A.D. 250 to escape persecution for their faith. They fell asleep in the cave, their youthfulness was miraculously preserved, and they were discovered by accident some two hundred years later. The Seven Sleepers are the patron saints of insomniacs.

Wandering without sleep I looked for God

and found this moment to praise.

Come with me, impossible night.

I am moving bitterly and far away.

Over vast and open country pulsing with dead light,

over the atomic voids

onto the great plains in massed vapor

in the tumble fever of my dreams,

I seek you,

Nameless one. My god, my leaf.

I seek you in the candles of pine and in the long tongue

furled in sleep. I seek you in the August suspension

of leaves as steps of sunlight

tottering through air.

Drunk beneath the overpass at dawn

passed out in a Hefty bag.

On the hills, the tyrant moon,

and in the faces of my daughters,

I seek you driving prayerfully

as a member of the Sacred Heart Driving Club.

I seek you in the headless black wings of the vulture

Motionless dial, my death.

I seek you full of me, as if I could drink you in

and overcome myself.

I seek you under everything

in parallel faults and shifting plates.

Deadened to myself in the morning

and in the flat thumb of day

I seek you balancing the hammer.

I seek you naked, holding red stones,

as I walk beneath the torn sky, toward home,

where I open my throat to the black river

of my fears, all my fears.

You are faceless in the twig cells dividing upward.

Always to the light.

You lie buried with me twenty days and nights

without a candle, breathing through a straw

and the air is sweet, clear, like food.

From our grave, we can smell the leaves and water,

taste sunlight, taste the chemical structure of night.

I seek you, I find you everywhere, in the white day,

and in the relentless throat call

of physical love.

Our bodies in winter, our skin dry as paper,

we are stroking the urgent message

written in the subskin, the rat-brain, subcortex,

written there in lemon juice that heat of touch

turns visible, written in the print

of a child detective.

Dragging a cart of splinters,

tin nailed to the soles of your feet,

you walk over me. You strike flame from my body.

I burn at the magnetic center as the leaves fall

steps of fire

leading down into the earth.

I find you in my newborn child,

harnessed to my breasts with cotton, small and molten.

Her need for me as pure as my need for you.

I find you in the miraculous dung of the horned beetle

which cures the heart of anguish

I find you in the ash I must become melting in the rain,

new rain, descending.

Call me, speak from the water

lit by spilled oils

Sing to me from the mouth of the fish artfully arranged

on smashed ice.

Sing from the empty seas.

Behind us, before us,

in all things now I praise you.

Gold One. Prime Mover. Boring Prima Facie.

I praise you in Jack Daniel’s at the foot of the bed

and in the isolation of this dream.

Thing of holes, thing of lies, thing of shoulder pads,

thing of beautiful smashed mouth

thing of drenched fabric,

thing unmade by woman in her own body:

I fall face down into the sweet slab of cake

into the roaring flesh, licking crumbs off you

Face down in the yard, in the dust of sexual heat.

I praise you.

In the word

and in the void between words.

You are the pause, the synaptic skip.

You are the meaning between the syllables.

Walking up the water drops until I reach the cloud,

Walking up the leaves

until the crown of the tree is massed

like a cloak around me. Following snow

to the place of snow,

of course I praise you,

there is nothing else,

there is no other task.

When I first began listening to your voice I was huge,

I was a child.

I sat in the ash tree as light froze in the sky

and willed you to leave the kitchen.

Then, suddenly, you were around me in the leaves.

I thought there was laughter in the hissing wind

and I was afraid, I saw

my name written on the dark surface.

Gold One. Mother. Boring Prima Facie.

You and I are dust of cellular radiance,

of intricacy and rushing noise.

Hammer of time, hammer of love.

You rise in the bones of my husband.

You fall in the hands of the silver clock.

You fly off the grasses and you seed the water.

I praise you in the old red-brick house of my childhood

crumbling to rose,

to silver, to agate, to sludge.

Black tar. Deep tar. Cozening preserver.

Steep cliff ignited in the halo

as the sun tips its hood of fire.

I praise you in the cicatrix of sex

and the brilliant umbilical happiness

of sleek, heavy snakes

twining and untwining in the grass.

I praise you in my iron shoes,

magnetized and grounding me.

I praise you in my shoes forged of steam,

in my shoes of dripping felt, my shoes of bottle caps,

my garbage shoes, my shoes of wood ash and velvet,

my uncomplaining shoes, my whore’s shoes

that set me above you.

I praise you underneath me, walking,

my reflection in the unreflecting ground,

moving below me through dirt and ledge.

My twin of the grave.

My death glove. My other.

I praise you in the longing of my infant,

in my children, whom I have brought here to search you out,

who have begun, already, starting with my own face.

God, I have killed you in myself

again, again, dragging you to light by the tail,

I have hammered you to one thin ribbon.

Now I release you!

Blue and coiling in the simple world.

I praise you in the power of these words

to seize your image, to abandon mine.

Every motion of your dance is the dance

of my daily life, and yet you hide yourself.

I praise you in the roaring veil.

How weak I have become walking in my heavy shoes.

You will have to lift me, you will have to be my body.

There is only one perfect love, that between

an infant and its protector.

All else is magical failure.

I sift my thoughts into this perfect zero,

into the silken core between minus and plus.

I walk through the terminal number

backward, into the negative

where deep snow falls.

Again I am a child. I stand in the snow

and all around me is the snow

I stand there until I turn to snow.

And then, for a moment, I know you.

You were made by women.

You were made because we needed someone,

a man, to blame.

You were struck from our hands

and kneaded to your man-shape like dough

Then you rose and rose and doubled to enclose us

in the God-shape, the myth.

Perfect light, manuscript of ions, come toward me.

Advance, shaking, futile.

I remember.

After the rape I went to my chair.

I sat, looking at the carpet.

I felt the angel of forgiveness unfurl her iron wings.

Her feathers ripped through my back like razors

Now, when I close my wings over you—

Know how it is to be a woman,

to fight your way out of the body

only to be cast between the ribs of a man again.

Light of my brain burning day and night,

I praise you as a driver loses the road

in snow and drives across the fields

of snow, the snow absolving human presence.

Star. Failing light. I praise you,

as I’m sitting here, praise you fervently,

and without hope, every day.

The first waves rushed in, immaculate and foaming.

The child was given up to love.

Pressed deeply against the sound of the world,

she breathed the dark spores

of earth, slept underneath the twelve-branched heart.

Let us go down into the earth every night.

Let us bite down,

let us chew the bitter wood to paste

as deer in their winter yards circulate, stripping

everything into themselves

until they drift out,

in spring, wise and ravenous.

I lie down in the grass, watching, and when the coyote turns

her ass to the wind, looks at me across her shoulder,

that is when we regard each other,

as the snow bleeds white around the base of Sweetgrass.

You are everything. There is nowhere

I do not praise you.

In bed, in the body.

You rise toward me in the bones

of my wife, my husband, my lover.

Paging through the white flesh, the black, the brown,

which we wear as we dance the skin dance

Someone please!

Remove my beer-can vest, my skin of vinyl sheet music!

Speak from the water, speak from the fucking.

I praise you in the body out of the body.

Ash I must become in new rain descending.

Child, dear raven’s heart, new messenger.

Hammer of love, hammer of time,

self I’ve killed you in myself,

again, again, dragging you to light by the tail,

pounding you to one thin ribbon.

Now I release you,

blue and coiling in the simple world.

How sad I have become walking in my heavy shoes.

You will have to kill me, you will have to be my body.

Our love like all love is magical failure.

Perfect light, manuscript of ions.

I write your praises

on my own skin

with the stylus of a sharpened nail.

I wake in the blue hours once again,

my whole life spilling through me,

as loons pour

the cold green tea of their laughter

across the rose-slabbed lakes of Ontario.

I am one thing. I am nothing you can name.

I pray in the woods, begging to be taken,

the way leaves and stones are

whirled into your rushing mouth.

River of snow, river of twinned carp,

Sky of three holes, sky of white paper.

I praise you the way shadows

of deer move beyond the cut lawn

stripping everything into them, flowers, bark,

the frail blossoms of the poke, the weeds,

yew trees, cedar, lythrum, tender new labia of phlox.

Shadow of my need, shadow of hunger,

shadow infinite and made of gesture,

my god, my leaf,

graceful, ravenous, moving in endless circles

as the sweet seeds hang waxen yellow in the maple.

Avila

Teresa of Avila’s brother, Rodrigo, emigrated to America in 1535 and died in a fight with Natives on the banks of the Rio de la Plata.

—Footnote to The Life of Teresa of Jesus, translated and edited by E. Allison Peers

Sister, do you remember our cave of stones,

how we entered from the white heat of afternoons,

chewed seeds, and plotted one martyrdom

more cruel than the last?

You threw your brown hair back

and sang Pax Vobiscum to the imaginary guard,

a leopard on the barge of Ignatius.

Now I see you walking toward me, discalced like the poor,

as the dogwood trees come into blossom.

Their centers are the wounds of nails,

deep and ragged. The spears of heaven

bristle along the path you take,

turning me aside.

Dear sister, as the mountain grows out of the air,

as the well of fresh water

is sunk in the grinding sea,

as the castle within rises stone upon stone,

I still love you. But that is only

the love of a brother for a sister, after all,

and God has nothing to do with it.

Saint Clare

She refused to marry when she was twelve and was so impressed by a Lenten sermon of Saint Francis in 1212 that she ran away from her home in Assisi, received her habit, and took the vow of absolute poverty. Since Francis did not yet have a convent for women, he placed her in the Benedictine convent near Basia, where she was joined by her younger sister, Agnes. Her father sent twelve armed men to bring Agnes back, but Clare’s prayers rendered her so heavy they were unable to budge her.

—John H. Delaney,

Pocket Dictionary of Saints

1 The Call

First I heard the voice throbbing across the river.

I saw the white phosphorescence of his robe.

As he stepped from the boat, as he walked

there spread from each footfall a black ripple,

from each widening ring a wave,

from the waves a sea that covered the moon.

So I was seized in total night

and I abandoned myself in his garment

like a fish in a net. The slip knots

tightened on me and I rolled

until the sudden cry hauled me out.

Then this new element, a furnace of mirrors,

in which I watch myself burn.

The scales of my old body melt away like coins,

for I was rich, once, and my father

had already chosen my husband.

2 Before

I kept my silver rings in a box of porphyrite.

I ate salt on bread. I could sew.

I could mend the petals of a rose.

My nipples were pink, my sister’s brown.

In the fall we filled our wide skirts with walnuts

for our mother to crack with a wooden hammer.

She put the whorled meats into our mouths,

closed our lips with her finger

and said Hush. So we slept

and woke to find our bodies arching into bloom.

It happened to me first,

the stain on the linen, the ceremonial

seal which was Eve’s fault.

In the church at Assisi I prayed. I listened

to Brother Francis and I took his vow.

The embroidered decorations at my bodice

turned real, turned to butterflies and were dispersed.

The girdle of green silk, the gift from my father

slithered from me like a vine,

so I was something else that grew from air,

and I was light, the skeins of hair

that my mother had divided with a comb of ivory

were cut from my head and parceled to the nesting birds.

3 My Life as a Saint

I still have the nest, now empty,

woven of my hair, of the hollow grass,

and silken tassels at the ends of seeds.

From the window where I prayed,

I saw the house wrens gather

dark filaments from air

in the shuttles of their beaks.

Then the cup was made fast

to the body of the tree,

bound with the silver excrescence of the spider,

and the eggs, four in number,

ale gold and trembling,

curved in a thimble of down.

The hinged beak sprang open, tongue erect,

screaming to be fed

before the rest of the hatchling emerged.

I did not eat. I smashed bread to crumbs upon the sill

for the parents were weary as God is weary.

We have the least mercy on the one

who created us,

who introduced us to this hunger.

The smallest mouth starved and the mother

swept it out like rubbish with her wing.

I found it that dawn, after lauds,

already melting into the heat of the flagstone,

a transparent teaspoon of flesh,

the tiny beak shut, the eyes still sealed

within a membrane of the clearest blue.

I buried the chick in a box of leaves.

The rest grew fat and clamorous.

I put my hands through the thorns one night and felt the bowl,

the small brown begging bowl,

waiting to be filled.

By morning, the strands of the nest disappear

into each other, shaping

an emptiness within me that I make lovely

as the immature birds make the air

by defining the tunnels and the spirals

of the new sustenance. And then,

no longer hindered by the violence of their need,

they take to other trees, fling themselves

deep into the world.

4 Agnes

When you entered the church at Basia

holding the scepter of the almond’s

white branch, and when you struck

the bedrock floor, how was I to know

the prayer would be answered?

I heard the drum of hooves long in the distance,

and I held my forehead to the stone of the altar.

I asked for nothing. It is almost

impossible to ask for nothing.

I have spent my whole life trying.

I know you felt it, when his love spilled.

That ponderous light.

From then on you endured

happiness, the barge you pulled

as I pull mine. This

is called density of purpose.

As you learned, you must shed everything else

in order to bear it.

That is why, toward the end of your life

when at last there was nothing I could not relinquish,

I allowed you to spring forward without me.

Sister, I unchained myself. For I was always

the heaviest passenger,

the stone wagon of example,

the freight you dragged all the way to heaven,

and how were you to release yourself

from me, then, poor mad horse,

except by reaching the gate?

Mary Magdalene

I wash your ankles

with my tears. Unhem

my sweep of hair

and burnish the arch of your foot.

Still your voice cracks

above me.

I cut off my hair and toss it across your pillow.

A dark towel

like the one after sex.

I’m walking out,

my face a dustpan,

my body stiff as a new broom.

I will drive boys

to smash empty bottles on their brows.

I will pull them right out of their skins.

It is the old way that girls

get even with their fathers—

by wrecking their bodies on other men.

Christ’s Twin

He was formed of chicken blood and lightning.

He was what fell out when the jug tipped.

He was waiting at the bottom

of the cliff when the swine plunged over.

He tore out their lungs with a sound like ripping silk.

He hacked the pink carcasses apart, so that the ribs spread

like a terrible butterfly, and there was darkness.

It was he who turned the handle and let the dogs

rush from the basements. He shoved the crust

of a volcano into his roaring mouth.

He showed one empty hand. The other gripped

a crowbar, a monkey wrench, a crop

which was the tail of the ass that bore them to Egypt,

one in each saddlebag, sucking twists

of honeyed goatskin, arguing

already over a woman’s breasts.

He understood the prayers that rose

in every language, for he had split the human tongue.

He was not the Devil nor among the Fallen—

it was just that he was clumsy, and curious,

and liked to play with knives. He was the dove

hypnotized by boredom and betrayed by light.

He was the pearl in the mouth, the tangible

emptiness that saints seek at the center of their prayers.

He leaped into a shadow when the massive stone

rolled across the entrance, sealing him with his brother

in the dark as in the beginning.

Only this time he emerged first, bearing the self-inflicted wound, both brass halos

tacked to the back of his skull.

He raised two crooked fingers; the extra die

tumbled from his lips when he preached

but no one noticed. They were too busy

clawing at the hem of his robe and planning

how to sell him to the world.

Orozco’s Christ

Who rips his own flesh down the seams and steps

forth flourishing the ax,

who chops down his own cross,

who straddles it,

who stares like a cat,

whose cheeks are the gouged blue of science,

whose torso springs out of wrung cloth

blazing ocher, blazing rust, whose blood

cools to black marble in his fist,

who makes his father kneel,

who makes his father say,

“You want her? Take her.”

Who rolls the stone from the entrance over his mother,

who pulls her veil out from under it,

who ties the stained cloth around his hips

and starts out,

walking toward Jerusalem

where they are gathering in his name.

The Savior

When the rain began to fall, he rolled back

into the clouds and slept again.

Still it persisted, beating at every surface,

until it entered his body

as the sound of prolonged

human weeping.

So he was broken.

His first tears dissolved

the mask of white stone.

As they traveled through the bones of his arms,

his strength became a mortal strength,

subject to love.

On earth, when he heard the first rain

tap through the olive leaves,

he opened his eyes and stared at his mother.

As his father, who had made the sacrifice,

stood motionless in heaven,

his son cried out to him:

I want no shelter, I deny

the whole configuration.

I hate the weight of earth.

I hate the sound of water.

Ash to ash, you say, but I know different.

I will not stop burning.

The Buffalo Prayer

Our Lady of the Buffalo Bones, pray for us.

Our Lady of the bales of skins and rotting hulks

from which our tongues alone were taken,

pray for us, Our Lady of the Poisoned Meat

and of the wolves who ate

and whose tongues swelled until they burst.

Our Lady of the Eagles Dropping from the Sky,

Our Lady of the Sick Fox and of the Lurching Hawk

and of the hunters at the edge of Yellowstone Park waiting

to rain thunder on the last of us.

Pray for us, Our Lady of Polaris.

Our Lady of the Sleek Skidoo.

Our Lady of Destruction Everywhere

Our bones were ground into fertilizer

for the worn-out eastern earth.

Our bones were burned to charcoal

to process sugar and to make glue

for the shoe soles of your nuns and priests.

Our Lady of the Testicle Tobacco Pouch

Our Lady of the Box Cars of Skulls,

pray for us whose bones have nourished

the ordered cornfields that have replaced

the random grass

which fed and nurtured and gave us life.

Rez Litany

Let us now pray to those beatified

within the Holy Colonial church

beginning with Saint Assimilus,

patron of residential and of government

boarding schools, whose skin was dark

but who miraculously bled white milk

for all to drink.

To cure the gut aches that resulted

as ninety percent of Native children are

lactose intolerant, let us now pray to the

patron saint of the Indian Health Service,

who is also guardian of slot machines,

Our Lady of Luck, she who carries

in one hand mistaken blood tests and botched

surgeries and in the other hand the heart

of a courageous doctor squeezed dry.

Let us pray for the sacred hearts of all good doctors

and nurses, whose tasks are manifold and made more difficult

by the twin saints of commodity food,

Saint Bloatinus and Saint Cholestrus,

who were martyred at the stake of body fat

and who preside now in heaven

at the gates of the Grand Casino Buffet.

Saint Macaronia and Saint Diabeta, hear our prayer.

It is terrible to be diminished toe by toe.

Good Saint Pyromane,

Enemy of the BIA,

Deliver us from those who seek to bury us

in files and triplicate documents and directives.

Saint Quantum, Martyr of Blood

and Holy Protector of the Tribal Rolls,

assist us in the final shredding which shall proceed

on the Day of Judgment so we may all rain down

in a blizzard of bum pull tabs

and unchosen lottery tickets, which represent

the souls of the faithfully departed

in your name.

Your name written in the original fire

we mistook so long ago for trader’s rum.

Pray for us, all you saints of white port

four roses old granddad and night train.

Good Saint Bingeous who fell asleep upside down on the cross

and rose on the third day without even knowing he had died.

Saint Odium of the hundred-proof blood

and Saint Tremens of the great pagan spiders

dripping from the light fixtures.

You powerful triumvirate, intercede for us

drunks stalled in the bars,

float our asses off the cracked stools

and over to the tribal college,

where the true saints are ready to sacrifice their brain cells

for our brain cells, in that holy exchange which is called learning.

Saint Microcephalia, patron of huffers and dusters,

you of the cooked brain and mean capacity, you

of the simian palm line and poor impulse control,

you of the Lysol-soaked bread, you sleeping with the dogs

underneath the house, hear our prayers

which we utter backwards and sideways

as nothing makes sense

least of all your Abstinence Campaign

from which Oh Lord Deliver Us.

Saints Primapara, Gravida, and Humpenenabackseat,

you patrons of unsafe teenage sex

and fourteen-year-old mothers,

pray for us now and at the hour of our birth,

amen.

Original Fire

The Fence

Then one day the gray rags vanish

and the sweet wind rattles her sash.

Her secrets bloom hot. I’m wild for everything.

My body is a golden armor around my unborn child’s body,

and I’ll die happy, here on the ground.

I bend to the mixture of dirt, chopped hay,

grindings of coffee from our dark winter breakfasts.

I spoon the rich substance around the acid-loving shrubs.

I tear down last year’s drunken vines,

pull the black rug off the bed of asparagus

and lie there, knowing by June I’ll push the baby out

as easily as seed wings fold back from the cotyledon.

I see the first leaf already, the veined tongue

rigid between the thighs of the runner beans.

I know how the shoot will complicate itself

as roots fill the trench.

Here is the link fence, the stem doubling toward it,

and something I’ve never witnessed.

One moment the young plant trembles on its stalk.

The next, it has already gripped the wire.

Now it will continue to climb, dragging rude blossoms

to the other side

until in summer fruit like green scimitars,

the frieze of vines, and then the small body

spread before me in need

drinking light from the shifting wall of my body,

and the fingers, tiny stems wavering to mine,

flexing for the ascent.

Ninth Month

This is the last month, the petrified forest

and the lake which has long since turned to grass.

The sun roars over, casting its light and absence

in identical seams. One day. Another.

The child sleeps on in its capsized boat.

The hull is weathered silver and our sleep is green and dark.

Dreams of the rower, hands curled in the shape of oars,

listening for the cries of the alabaster birds.

All is silent, the animals hurled into quartz.

Our bed is the wrecked blue island of time and love.

Black steeples, black shavings of magnetized iron,

through which the moon parades her wastes,

drawing the fruit from the female body,

pulling water like blankets up other shores.

Then slowly the sky is colored in, the snow

falls evenly into the blackness of cisterns.

The steel wings fan open that will part us from each other

and the waves break and fall according to their discipline.

Breath that moves on the waters.

Small boat, small rower.

Birth

When they were wild

When they were not yet human

When they could have been anything,

I was on the other side ready with milk to lure them,

And their father, too, each name a net in his hands.

New Mother

1

I am here to praise this body

on loan from the gods

by which we know the god in us

and see the god made earth,

pulled out blue and stunned into the lights.

2

Sometimes in the frenzy of first events

there comes to me a strange

declamatory awareness

as though my consciousness has stirred

from the heap of broken toys

and new toys

that is my baby’s existence.

When I look into her eyes I see below

the surface of things

into the water of the other surface

through the layers of that surface

to the original fire.

3

When you wake sometimes, crying

in the pure desolation of the newly realized,

I dream you are drifting off

in your little boat.

I crawl to you like swimming and hold you in my arms

and then I wonder if it was cruel, yes, cruel,

to force you with such violence through my body.

To bring you here.

That is why, when I find you,

I lay my hands upon you

in so tender a way

that you do not feel me quite at first.

I draw you back and you are calmed.

That is why I touch you with a lightness

I can repeat nowhere else.

That is why these anxious pictures

of you, larger every month, and why I call

your name continually,

throwing it out like an anchor.

Sorrows of the Frog Woman

“Her fear was for her child. Searching all around, she saw the footprints of an enormous frog and with them, the tracks of the little dog, as if he had been dragged along on his paws. She knew then that it was the Frog Woman who had stolen her baby and knew by the tracks that the little dog had tried to hold back the cradle board with his teeth.”

——from “Wampum Hair,” a story told by Nawaquay-geezhik (Charles Kawbawgam)

1 Transformation

My husband was a prince who kissed me

until my eyes bulged and my skin

melted to a green film on my bones.

My mouth split my face

and I croaked, take me, oh take me.

So I was, deeper

into my startling new body.

As I sank back onto the wet springs

of my haunches, as I powerfully gathered

my tongue unfolded in a blur,

a sticky lasso,

and plucked a fly from his lapel—

my last wifely act.

2 Control

At first, I hated this body,

my lung-thin skin, my temptress spots.

I wanted red silk and you gave me this!

Advantages—my bones are bendable straws

through which I drink sun,

golden yolk, food of inner life, heat, tremendous wish.

And there is night and the many voices

seething delirium

universal mirrors that are my eyes

implacable gold

What you change cannot love you.

I told him that. He kissed me anyway.

3 Origin

I was hungry, so the author of all things

gave me the flies of sorrow to eat.

Gave me the underslung heroic couplets

of a man’s breast to drink from.

Gave me the perfect nothing

of my own original soul

to dive and dive in never touching bottom.

Sometimes I have the memory of what it was like

to be truly lovely

to dance by candlelight and tear the filmy cotton lace

off my nipples and draw you in.

Sometimes I have the memory of what it was like

to be another kind of food.

4 King Black Snake

My god, my predator,

to get away from you I change shapes.

I become the laughter at my core.

Time

My breasts are soft.

My hair is dull.

I am growing into the body

of the old woman who will bear me

toward my death,

my death which will do me no harm.

Every day the calico cat returns from the fields

with a mouse in her jaws.

After every bite of the tender lawn, the ground squirrel

jerks and flinches,

but no hawk drops out of the sky.

The fat creature continues to eat, nervously

stuffing itself with pleasure.

I watch him as I drink from a bottle of grassy wine.

Why do I long

to be devoured and to forget

in life rather than in death?

What is the difference?

Spring Evening on Blind Mountain

I won’t drink wine tonight

I want to hear what is going on

not in my own head

but all around me.

I sit for hours

outside our house on Blind Mountain.

Below this scrap of yard

across the ragged old pasture,

two horses move

pulling grass into their mouths, tearing up

wildflowers by the roots.

They graze shoulder to shoulder.

Every night they lean together in sleep.

Up here, there is no one

for me to fail.

You are gone.

Our children are sleeping.

I don’t even have to write this down.

Blue

I have moved beyond my life

into the blueness of the tiny flower

called Sky Pilot.

The sheer stain of the petals

fills the sky in my heart.

Over the field,

two bluebirds pause

on shivering wings.

They could as well have been a less glorious

color, and the flowers too.

Why were we given this unearthly radiance, this blueness,

if not to seek it out, to love it with all our hearts?

Thistles

for Persia

Under ledge, under tar, under fill

under curved blue stone of doorsteps,

under the aggregate of lakebed rock,

under loss and under hard words,

under steamrollers

under your heart,

it doesn’t matter. They can live forever.

The seeds of thistles

push from nowhere, forming a rose of spikes

that spreads all summer until it

stands in a glory of

needles, blossoms, blazing

purple clubs and fists.

Best Friends in the First Grade

I’m brave.

I’m kind.

These are our powers.

Boys are coming!

How about we lead them into a trap and run?

We’re both the bravest twins.

Identicals.

Only you like blue.

And I like orange.

Remember you have to act like

me and I have to act like you?

Don’t kill the spider.

I forgot the crocodile hole!

We both can’t die.

Our special rope tells us what to do.

I got you. I won’t let you fall.

I’ll shoot the jump rope over to the other side.

The king is chasing.

The rainstorm has heard our plan. Oh,

they are following us. We will have no choice

but to marry now. You will be a daughter.

I will be the rainstorm’s wife.

But watch out.

The king has poisonous teeth.

Little Blue Eyeglasses

for Aza

Little blue eyeglasses,

I give you the honored task

of assisting my youngest daughter

in her work, which is to see not only

general shapes but specific details

and minute variations in the color and texture

of objects ranging from immense

(Ocean. Sky.) To very tiny.

(Invertebrate hidden at edge of carpet)

Little blue eyeglasses,

I charge you with the solemn responsibility

of depth perception. Guide her steps

through dim corridors

and allow her to charge down

the staircase into my arms

without injury. Above all,

little blue eyeglasses,

train her eyes upon the truth

and let her eyes rest in the truth

and help her see within the truth the strength

to bear the truth.

Grief

Sometimes you have to take your own hand

as though you were a lost child

and bring yourself stumbling

home over twisted ice.

Whiteness drifts over your house.

A page of warm light

falls steady from the open door.

Here is your bed, folded open.

Lie down, lie down, let the blue snow cover you.

Wood Mountain

for Abel

The sky glows yellow over the tin hump

of Mount Anaeus, and below on the valley floor

the fog cracks and lifts.

Beyond it the throat of the river flares.

The river shakes its body

of terminal mirrors.

I saw you walk down the mountain yesterday.

You were wearing your stained blue jacket,

your cheap, green boots.

You disappeared into a tree

the way you always did, in grief.

I went looking for you.

In the orchard floored with delicate grass,

I lay down with the deer.

A sweet, smoky dust rose

from the dead silver of firs.

When I stand in the circle of their calm black arms

I talk to you. I tell you everything.

And you do not weep.

You accept

how it was

night came down.

Ice formed on your eyelids.

How the singing began, that was not music

but the cold heat of stars.

Wind runs itself beneath the dust like a hand

lifting a scarf.

Mother, you say, and I hold you.

I tell you I was wrong, I am sorry.

So we listen to the coyotes.

And their weeping is not of this earth

where it is called sorrow, but of another earth

where it is known as joy,

and I am able

to walk into the tree of forgiveness with you

and disappear there

and know myself.

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.

Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator

and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.

Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.

Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.

Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.

Don’t even sew on a button.

Let the wind have its way, then the earth

that invades as dust and then the dead

foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.

Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.

Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles

or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry

who uses whose toothbrush or if anything

matches, at all.

Except one word to another. Or a thought.

Pursue the authentic—decide first

what is authentic,

then go after it with all your heart.

Your heart, that place

you don’t even think of cleaning out.

That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth

or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner

again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,

or weep over anything at all that breaks.

Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons

in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life

and talk to the dead

who drift in through the screened windows, who collect

patiently on the tops of food jars and books.

Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything

except what destroys

the insulation between yourself and your experience

or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters

this ruse you call necessity.

Morning Fire

My baby, eating rainbows of sun

focused through a prism in my bedroom window,

puts her mouth to the transparent fire,

and licks up the candy colors

that tremble on the white sheets.

The stain spreads across her face.

She has only one tooth,

a grain of white rice

that keeps flashing.

She keeps eating as the day begins

until the rainbows are all inside of her.

And then she smiles

and such a light pours over me.

It is not that white blaze

that strikes the earth all around you

when you learn of the death

of one you love. Or the next light

that strips away your skin.

Not the radiance

that unwraps you to the bone.

Soft and original fire,

allow me to curl around you in the white sheets

and keep feeding you the light

from my own body

until we drift into the deep

of our being.

Air, fire, golden earth.

Asiniig

The Ojibwe word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are alive. They are addressed as grandmothers and grandfathers. The universe began with a conversation between stones.

1

A thousand generations of you live and die

in the space of a single one of our thoughts.

A complete thought is a mountain.

We don’t have very many ideas.

When the original fire which formed us

subsided,

we thought of you.

We allowed you to occur.

We are still deciding whether that was

wise.

2 Children

We have never denied you anything

you truly wanted

no matter how foolish

no matter how destructive

but you never seem to learn.

That which you cry for,

this wish to be like us,

we have tried to give it to you

in small doses, like a medicine, every day

so you will not be frightened.

Still, when death comes

you weep,

you do not recognize it

as the immortality you crave.

3 The Sweat Lodge

We love it when you sing to us,

and speak to us,

and lift us from the heart of the fire

with the deer’s antlers, and place us

in the center of the lodge.

Then we are at our most beautiful,

Powerful red blossoms,

we are breathing.

We can reach through your bones

to where you hurt.

You call us grandfather, grandmother.

You scatter bits of cedar, sage, wikenh, tobacco

and bear root over us,

and then the water

which cracks us to the core.

When we break ourselves open—

that is when the healing starts.

When you break yourselves open—

that is how the healing continues.

4 Love

If only you could be more like us

when it comes to the affections.

Have you ever seen a stone

throw itself?

On the other hand

whose idea do you think it is

to fly through the air?

Mystery is not a passive condition.

To see a thing so perfectly what it is—

doesn’t it make you

want to hold it,

to marvel, to touch

its answered question?

5 Gratitude

You have no call to treat us this way.

We allow you to put us to every use.

Yet, when have you ever

stopped in the street to lay your forehead

against the cool, black granite facade

of some building, and ask the stone

to bless you?

We are not impartial.

We acknowledge some forms

of consideration.

We open for those

who adhere to our one rule

endure.

6 Infinite Thought

Listen, there is no consciousness

before birth or

after death

except the one you share

with us.

So you had best learn

how to speak to us now

without the use of signs.

Remember, there will be no hands,

except remembered hands.

No lips, no face,

except remembered face.

No legs and in fact no

appendages, except

the remembered ones,

which always hurt

as consciousness hurts.

Now do you understand what it is?

Your consciousness

is the itch, the ghost of consciousness,

remembered

from how it felt

to be one of us.

About the Author

LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of ten novels, as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

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Books by Louise Erdrich

NOVELS

The Round House

Love Medicine

The Beet Queen

Tracks

The Crown of Columbus (with Michael Dorris)

The Bingo Palace

Tales of Burning Love

The Antelope Wife (1997; revised edition, 2012)

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

The Master Butchers Singing Club

Four Souls

The Painted Drum

The Plague of Doves

Shadow Tag

STORIES

The Red Convertible: New and Selected Stories, 1978–2008

POETRY

Jacklight

Baptism of Desire

Original Fire

FOR CHILDREN

Grandmother’s Pigeon

The Birchbark House

The Range Eternal

The Game of Silence

The Porcupine Year

Chickadee

NONFICTION

The Blue Jay’s Dance

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

Copyright

The author would like to thank and acknowledge the editors of Georgia Review, in which “Time” originally appeared in slightly different form.

ORIGINAL FIRE. Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition December 2013 ISBN 9780061751400

09072018

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 0-06-093534-0

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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