Louise Erdrich: Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

“Ah,” Saint Peter said. “You’ll have to keep walking.”

Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.

Boxcars stumbling north in dreams

don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run.

The rails, old lacerations that we love,

shoot parallel across the face and break

just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars

you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross.

The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark

less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards

as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts

to be here, cold in regulation clothes.

We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun

to take us back. His car is dumb and warm.

The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums

like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts

of ancient punishments lead back and forth.

All runaways wear dresses, long green ones,

the color you would think shame was. We scrub

the sidewalks down because it’s shameful work.

Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs

and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear

a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark

face before it hardened, pale, remembering

delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.

We watched from the house

as the river grew, helpless

and terrible in its unfamiliar body.

Wrestling everything into it,

the water wrapped around trees

until their life-hold was broken.

They went down, one by one,

and the river dragged off their covering.

Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,

snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:

a whole forest pulled through the teeth

of the spillway. Trees surfacing

singly, where the river poured off

into arteries for fields below the reservation.

When at last it was over, the long removal,

they had all become the same dry wood.

We walked among them, the branches

whitening in the raw sun.

Above us drifted herons,

alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,

settling their beaks among the hollows.

Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people

moving among us, unable to take their rest.

Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.

Their long wings are bending the air

into circles through which they fall.

They rise again in shifting wheels.

How long must we live in the broken figures

their necks make, narrowing the sky.

The same Chippewa word is used both for flirting and hunting game, while another Chippewa word connotes both using force in intercourse and also killing a bear with one’s bare hands.

— R. W. Dunning, Social and Economic Change Among the Northern Ojibwa (1959)

We have come to the edge of the woods,

out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,

out of knotted twigs, out of leaves creaked shut,

out of hiding.

At first the light wavered, glancing over us.

Then it clenched to a fist of light that pointed,

searched out, divided us.

Each took the beams like direct blows the heart answers.

Each of us moved forward alone.

We have come to the edge of the woods,

drawn out of ourselves by this night sun,

this battery of polarized acids,

that outshines the moon.

We smell them behind it

but they are faceless, invisible.

We smell the raw steel of their gun barrels,

mink oil on leather, their tongues of sour barley.

We smell their mothers buried chin-deep in wet dirt.

We smell their fathers with scoured knuckles,

teeth cracked from hot marrow.

We smell their sisters of crushed dogwood, bruised apples,

of fractured cups and concussions of burnt hooks.

We smell their breath steaming lightly behind the jacklight.

We smell the itch underneath the caked guts on their clothes.

We smell their minds like silver hammers

cocked back, held in readiness

for the first of us to step into the open.

We have come to the edge of the woods,

out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,

out of leaves creaked shut, out of hiding.

We have come here too long.

It is their turn now,

their turn to follow us. Listen,

they put down their equipment.

It is useless in the tall brush.

And now they take the first steps, now knowing

how deep the woods are and lightless.

How deep the woods are.

When I take off my glasses, these eyes are dark magnets

that draw the world into my reach.

First the needles, as I walk the quiet streets,

work their way from the cushions of dust.

The nails in the rafters twist laboriously out

and the oven doors drop

an inch open.

The sleep smell of yesterday’s baking

rises in the mouth.

A good thing.

The street lamps wink off just at dawn,

still they bend their stiff necks like geese drinking.

My vision is drinking in the star-littered lawn.

When the porch ivy weaves to me—

Now is the time.

Women put down their coffee cups, all over town.

Men drift down the sidewalks, thinking,

What did she want?

But it is too late for husbands.

Their wives do not question

what it is that dissolves

all reserve. Why they suddenly think of cracked Leonard.

They uncross themselves, forsaking

all protection. They long to be opened and known

because the secret is perishable, kept, and desire

in love with its private ruin.

I open my hands and they come to me, now.

In our palms dark instructions that cannot be erased,

only followed, only known along the way.

And it is right, oh women of the town, it is right .

Your mouths, like the seals of important documents

break for me, destroying the ring’s raised signature,

the cracked edges melting to mine.

Little blue eyeglasses,

I give you the honored task

of assisting my youngest daughter

in her work, which is to see not only

general shapes but specific details

and minute variations in the color and texture

of objects ranging from immense

(Ocean. Sky.) To very tiny.

(Invertebrate hidden at edge of carpet)

Little blue eyeglasses,

I charge you with the solemn responsibility

of depth perception. Guide her steps

through dim corridors

and allow her to charge down

the staircase into my arms

without injury. Above all,

little blue eyeglasses,

train her eyes upon the truth

and let her eyes rest in the truth

and help her see within the truth the strength

to bear the truth.

Once there was a girl who died in a fire in this house, here on Bidwell road. Now she keeps coming back, trying to hitch a ride out of here. Watch out for her at night and do not stop.

— Mary Lou Fox

Each night she waits by the road

in a thin, white dress

embroidered with fire.

It has been twenty years

since her house surged and burst in the dark trees.

Still, nobody goes there.

The heat charred the branches

of the apple trees,

but nothing can kill that wood.