Louise Erdrich - Original Fire - Selected and New Poems

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