Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.