Louise Erdrich: Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

as the well of fresh water

is sunk in the grinding sea,

as the castle within rises stone upon stone,

I still love you. But that is only

the love of a brother for a sister, after all,

and God has nothing to do with it.

I’m brave.

I’m kind.

These are our powers.

Boys are coming!

How about we lead them into a trap and run?

We’re both the bravest twins.

Identicals.

Only you like blue.

And I like orange.

Remember you have to act like

me and I have to act like you?

Don’t kill the spider.

I forgot the crocodile hole!

We both can’t die.

Our special rope tells us what to do.

I got you. I won’t let you fall.

I’ll shoot the jump rope over to the other side.

The king is chasing.

The rainstorm has heard our plan. Oh,

they are following us. We will have no choice

but to marry now. You will be a daughter.

I will be the rainstorm’s wife.

But watch out.

The king has poisonous teeth.

When they were wild

When they were not yet human

When they could have been anything,

I was on the other side ready with milk to lure them,

And their father, too, each name a net in his hands.

I have moved beyond my life

into the blueness of the tiny flower

called Sky Pilot.

The sheer stain of the petals

fills the sky in my heart.

Over the field,

two bluebirds pause

on shivering wings.

They could as well have been a less glorious

color, and the flowers too.

Why were we given this unearthly radiance, this blueness,

if not to seek it out, to love it with all our hearts?

He (my captor) gave me a bisquit, which I put in my pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fearing he had put something in it to make me love him.

— From the narrative of the captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, who was taken prisoner by the Wampanoag when Lancaster, Massachusetts, was destroyed, in the year 1676

The stream was swift, and so cold

I thought I would be sliced in two.

But he dragged me from the flood

by the ends of my hair.

I had grown to recognize his face.

I could distinguish it from the others.

There were times I feared I understood

his language, which was not human,

and I knelt to pray for strength.

We were pursued by God’s agents

or pitch devils, I did not know.

Only that we must march.

Their guns were loaded with swan shot.

I could not suckle and my child’s wail

put them in danger.

He had a woman

with teeth black and glittering.

She fed the child milk of acorns.

The forest closed, the light deepened.

I told myself that I would starve

before I took food from his hands

but I did not starve.

One night

he killed a deer with a young one in her

and gave me to eat of the fawn.

It was so tender,

the bones like the stems of flowers,

that I followed where he took me.

The night was thick. He cut the cord

that bound me to the tree.

After that the birds mocked.

Shadows gaped and roared

and the trees flung down

their sharpened lashes.

He did not notice God’s wrath.

God blasted fire from half-buried stumps.

I hid my face in my dress, fearing He would burn us all

but this, too, passed.

Rescued, I see no truth in things.

My husband drives a thick wedge

through the earth, still it shuts

to him year after year.

My child is fed of the first wheat.

I lay myself to sleep

on a Holland-laced pillowbeer.

I lay to sleep.

And in the dark I see myself

as I was outside their circle.

They knelt on deerskins, some with sticks,

and he led his company in the noise

until I could no longer bear

the thought of how I was.

I stripped a branch

and struck the earth,

in time, begging it to open

to admit me

as he was

and feed me honey from the rock.

He was formed of chicken blood and lightning.

He was what fell out when the jug tipped.

He was waiting at the bottom

of the cliff when the swine plunged over.

He tore out their lungs with a sound like ripping silk.

He hacked the pink carcasses apart, so that the ribs spread

like a terrible butterfly, and there was darkness.

It was he who turned the handle and let the dogs

rush from the basements. He shoved the crust

of a volcano into his roaring mouth.

He showed one empty hand. The other gripped

a crowbar, a monkey wrench, a crop

which was the tail of the ass that bore them to Egypt,

one in each saddlebag, sucking twists

of honeyed goatskin, arguing

already over a woman’s breasts.

He understood the prayers that rose

in every language, for he had split the human tongue.

He was not the Devil nor among the Fallen—

it was just that he was clumsy, and curious,

and liked to play with knives. He was the dove

hypnotized by boredom and betrayed by light.

He was the pearl in the mouth, the tangible

emptiness that saints seek at the center of their prayers.

He leaped into a shadow when the massive stone

rolled across the entrance, sealing him with his brother

in the dark as in the beginning.

Only this time he emerged first, bearing the self-inflicted wound, both brass halos

tacked to the back of his skull.

He raised two crooked fingers; the extra die

tumbled from his lips when he preached

but no one noticed. They were too busy

clawing at the hem of his robe and planning

how to sell him to the world.

The furnace is stoked. I’m loaded

on gin. One bottle in the clinkers

hidden since spring

when Otto took the vow

and ceremoniously poured

the rotgut, the red-eye, the bootlegger’s brew

down the scoured steel sink,

overcoming the reek

of oxblood.

That was one promise he kept.

He died two weeks after, not a drop crossed his lips

in the meantime. I know

now he kept some insurance,

one bottle at least

against his own darkness.

I’m here, anyway, to give it some use.

From the doorway the clouds pass me through.

The town stretches to fields. The six avenues

crossed by seventeen streets,

the tick, tack, and toe

of boxes and yards

settle into the dark.

Dogs worry their chains.

Men call to their mothers

and finish. The women sag into the springs.

What kind of thoughts, Mary Kröger, are these?

With a headful of spirits,

how else can I think?

Under so many clouds,

such hooded and broken

old things. They go on

simply folding, unfolding, like sheets

hung to dry and forgotten.

And no matter how careful I watch them,

they take a new shape,

escaping my concentrations,

they slip and disperse

and extinguish themselves.

They melt before I half unfathom their forms.

Just as fast, a few bones

disconnecting beneath us.

It is too late, I fear, to call these things back.

Not in this language.

Not in this life.

I know it. The tongue is unhinged by the sauce.

But these clouds, creeping toward us

each night while the milk

gets scorched in the pan,