Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

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.

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.

The Strange People

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.

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.

Thistles

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Wood Mountain

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.