Louise Erdrich - Original Fire - Selected and New Poems

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.