Louise Erdrich: Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

She will climb into your car

but not say where she is going

and you shouldn’t ask.

Nor should you try to comb the blackened nest of hair

or press the agates of tears

back into her eyes.

First the orchard bowed low and complained

of the unpicked fruit,

then the branches cracked apart and fell.

The windfalls sweetened to wine

beneath the ruined arms and snow.

Each spring now, in the grass, buds form on the tattered wood.

The child, the child, why is she so persistent

in her need? Is it so terrible

to be alone when the cold white blossoms

come to life and burn?

I wash your ankles

with my tears. Unhem

my sweep of hair

and burnish the arch of your foot.

Still your voice cracks

above me.

I cut off my hair and toss it across your pillow.

A dark towel

like the one after sex.

I’m walking out,

my face a dustpan,

my body stiff as a new broom.

I will drive boys

to smash empty bottles on their brows.

I will pull them right out of their skins.

It is the old way that girls

get even with their fathers—

by wrecking their bodies on other men.

My baby, eating rainbows of sun

focused through a prism in my bedroom window,

puts her mouth to the transparent fire,

and licks up the candy colors

that tremble on the white sheets.

The stain spreads across her face.

She has only one tooth,

a grain of white rice

that keeps flashing.

She keeps eating as the day begins

until the rainbows are all inside of her.

And then she smiles

and such a light pours over me.

It is not that white blaze

that strikes the earth all around you

when you learn of the death

of one you love. Or the next light

that strips away your skin.

Not the radiance

that unwraps you to the bone.

Soft and original fire,

allow me to curl around you in the white sheets

and keep feeding you the light

from my own body

until we drift into the deep

of our being.

Air, fire, golden earth.

Last night, my dreams were full of Otto’s best friends.

I sat in the kitchen, wiping the heavy silver,

and listened to the losses, tough custom, and fouled accounts

of the family bootlegger, county sheriff:

Rudy J. V. Jacklitch, who sat just beside me,

wiping his wind-cracked hands

with lard smeared on a handkerchief.

Our pekinese-poodle went and darkened his best wool trousers,

and he leapt up, yelling for a knife!

These are the kinds of friends

I had to tend in those days:

great, thick men, devouring

Fleisch, Spaetzle, the very special

potato salad for which I dice

onions so fine they are invisible.

Rudy J. V. Jacklitch was a bachelor, but he cared

for his mother, a small spider of a woman — all fingers.

She covered everything, from the kettle to the radio,

with a doily. The whole house

dripped with lace, frosting fell

from each surface in fantastic shapes.

When Otto died, old Rudy came by

with a couple jugs for the mourners’ supper.

He stayed on past midnight, every night the month after

he would bring me a little something

to put the night away.

After a short while I knew his purpose.

His glance slipped as the evening

and the strong drink wore on.

Playing cribbage I always won,

a sure sign he was distracted.

I babbled like a talking bird,

never let him say the words

I knew were in him.

Then one night he came by,

already loaded to the gills,

rifle slung in the back window

of his truck: Going out

to shoot toads. He was peeved

with me. I’d played him all wrong.

He said his mother knew just what I was.

The next thing I heard that blurred night

was that Rudy drove his light truck

through the side of a barn,

and that among the living

he stayed long enough

to pronounce my name, like a curse

through the rage and foam of his freed blood.

So I was sure, for a time and a time after,

that Rudy carried

my name down to hell on his tongue

like a black coin.

I would wake, in the deepest of places,

and hear my name called.

My name like a strange new currency they read:

Mary Kröger

with its ring of the authentic

when dropped

or struck between their fingers.

How I feared to have it whispered in their mouths!

Mary Kröger

growing softer and thinner

till it dissolved

like a wafer under all that polishing.

1

I am here to praise this body

on loan from the gods

by which we know the god in us

and see the god made earth,

pulled out blue and stunned into the lights.

2

Sometimes in the frenzy of first events

there comes to me a strange

declamatory awareness

as though my consciousness has stirred

from the heap of broken toys

and new toys

that is my baby’s existence.

When I look into her eyes I see below

the surface of things

into the water of the other surface

through the layers of that surface

to the original fire.

3

When you wake sometimes, crying

in the pure desolation of the newly realized,

I dream you are drifting off

in your little boat.

I crawl to you like swimming and hold you in my arms

and then I wonder if it was cruel, yes, cruel,

to force you with such violence through my body.

To bring you here.

That is why, when I find you,

I lay my hands upon you

in so tender a way

that you do not feel me quite at first.

I draw you back and you are calmed.

That is why I touch you with a lightness

I can repeat nowhere else.

That is why these anxious pictures

of you, larger every month, and why I call

your name continually,

throwing it out like an anchor.

The night was clean as the bone of a rabbit blown hollow.

I cast my hood of dogskin

away, and my shirt of nettles.

Ten years had been enough. I left my darkened house.

The trick was in living that death to its source.

When it happened, I wandered toward more than I was.

Widowed by men, I married the dark firs,

as if I were walking in sleep toward their arms.

I drank, without fear or desire,

this odd fire.

Now shadows move freely within me as words.

These are eternal, these stunned, loosened verbs.

And I can’t tell you yet

how truly I belong

to the hiss and shift of wind,

these slow, variable mouths

through which, at certain times, I speak in tongues.

This is the last month, the petrified forest

and the lake which has long since turned to grass.

The sun roars over, casting its light and absence

in identical seams. One day. Another.

The child sleeps on in its capsized boat.

The hull is weathered silver and our sleep is green and dark.

Dreams of the rower, hands curled in the shape of oars,

listening for the cries of the alabaster birds.

All is silent, the animals hurled into quartz.

Our bed is the wrecked blue island of time and love.