Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

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 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 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.