Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

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.

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.

Little Blue Eyeglasses

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.