Louise Erdrich: Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

great soaked loaves of bread

are squandering themselves in the west.

Look at them: Proud, unpausing.

Open and growing, we cannot destroy them

or stop them from moving

down each avenue,

the dogs turn on their chains,

children feel through the windows.

What else should we feel our way through—

We lay our streets over

the deepest cries of the earth

and wonder why everything comes down to this:

The days pile and pile.

The bones are too few

and too foreign to know.

Mary, you do not belong here at all.

Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town.

Let everything be how it could have been, once:

a land that was empty and perfect as clouds.

But this is the way people are.

All that appears to us empty,

We fill.

What is endless and simple,

We carve, and initial,

and narrow

roads plow through the last of the hills

where our gravestones rear small

black vigilant domes.

Our friends, our family, the dead of our wars

deep in this strange earth

we want to call ours.

August and the drive-in picture is packed.

We lounge on the hood of the Pontiac

surrounded by the slow-burning spirals they sell

at the window, to vanquish the hordes of mosquitoes.

Nothing works. They break through the smoke screen for blood.

Always the lookout spots the Indians first,

spread north to south, barring progress.

The Sioux or some other Plains bunch

in spectacular columns, ICBM missiles,

feathers bristling in the meaningful sunset.

The drum breaks. There will be no parlance.

Only the arrows whining, a death-cloud of nerves

swarming down on the settlers

who die beautifully, tumbling like dust weeds

into the history that brought us all here

together: this wide screen beneath the sign of the bear.

The sky fills, acres of blue squint and eye

that the crowd cheers. His face moves over us,

a thick cloud of vengeance, pitted

like the land that was once flesh. Each rut,

each scar makes a promise: It is

not over, this fight, not as long as you resist.

Everything we see belongs to us.

A few laughing Indians fall over the hood

slipping in the hot spilled butter.

The eye sees a lot, John, but the heart is so blind.

Death makes us owners of nothing.

He smiles, a horizon of teeth

the credits reel over, and then the white fields

again blowing in the true-to-life dark.

The dark films over everything.

We get into the car

scratching our mosquito bites, speechless and small

as people are when the movie is done.

We are back in our skins.

How can we help but keep hearing his voice,

the flip side of the sound track, still playing:

Come on, boys, we got them

where we want them, drunk, running.

They’ll give us what we want, what we need.

Even his disease was the idea of taking everything.

Those cells, burning, doubling, splitting out of their skins.

Ray’s third new car in half as many years.

Full cooler in the trunk, Ray sogging the beer

as I solemnly chauffeur us through the bush

and up the backroads, hardly cowpaths and hub-deep in mud.

All day the sky lowers, clears, lowers again.

Somewhere in the bush near Saint John

there are uncles, a family, one mysterious brother

who stayed on the land when Ray left for the cities.

One week Ray is crocked. We’ve been through this before.

Even, as a little girl, hands in my dress,

Ah punka, you’s my Debby, come and ki me .

Then the road ends in a yard full of dogs.

Them’s Indian dogs, Ray says, lookit how they know me.

And they do seem to know him, like I do. His odor—

rank beef of fierce turtle pulled dripping from Metagoshe,

and the inflammable mansmell: hair tonic, ashes, alcohol.

Ray dances an old woman up in his arms.

Fiddles reel in the phonograph and I sink apart

in a corner, start knocking the Blue Ribbons down.

Four generations of people live here.

No one remembers Raymond Twobears.

So what. The walls shiver, the old house caulked with mud

sails back into the middle of Metagoshe.

A three-foot-long snapper is hooked on a fishline,

so mean that we do not dare wrestle him in

but tow him to shore, heavy as an old engine.

Then somehow Ray pries the beak open and shoves

down a cherry bomb. Lights the string tongue.

Headless and clenched in its armor, the snapper

is lugged home in the trunk for tomorrow’s soup.

Ray rolls it beneath a bush in the backyard and goes in

to sleep his own head off. Tomorrow I find

that the animal has dragged itself off.

I follow torn tracks up a slight hill and over

into a small stream that deepens and widens into a marsh.

Ray finds his way back through the room into his arms.

When the phonograph stops, he slumps hard in his hands

and the boys and their old man fold him into the car

where he curls around his bad heart, hearing how it knocks

and rattles at the bars of his ribs to break out.

Somehow we find our way back. Uncle Ray

sings an old song to the body that pulls him

toward home. The gray fins that his hands have become

screw their bones in the dashboard. His face

has the odd, calm patience of a child who has always

let bad wounds alone, or a creature that has lived

for a long time underwater. And the angels come

lowering their slings and litters.

I must become small and hide where he cannot reach.

I must become dull and heavy as an iron pot.

I must be tireless as rust and bold as roots

growing through the locks on doors

and crumbling the cinder blocks

of the foundations of his everlasting throne.

I must be strange as pity so he’ll believe me.

I must be terrible and brush my hair so that he finds me attractive.

Perhaps if I invoke Clare, the patron saint of television.

Perhaps if I become the images

passing through the cells of a woman’s brain.

I must be very large and block his sight.

I must be sharp and impetuous as knives.

I must insert myself into the bark of his apple trees,

and cleave the bones of his cows. I must be the marrow

that he drinks into his cloud-wet body.

I must be careful and laugh when he laughs.

I must turn down the covers and guide him in.

I must fashion his children out of Play-Doh, blue, pink, green.

I must pull them from between my legs

and set them before the television.

I must hide my memory in a mustard grain

so that he’ll search for it over time until time is gone.

I must lose myself in the world’s regard and disparagement.

I must remain this person and be no trouble.

None at all. So he’ll forget.

I’ll collect dust out of reach,

a single dish from a set, a flower made of felt,

a tablet the wrong shape to choke on.

I must become essential and file everything

under my own system,

so we can lose him and his proofs and adherents.

I must be a doubter in a city of belief

that hails his signs (the great footprints

long as limousines, the rough print on the wall).

On the pavement where his house begins

fainting women kneel. I’m not among them

although they polish the brass tongues of his lions