Louise Erdrich - Original Fire - Selected and New Poems

and over to the tribal college,

where the true saints are ready to sacrifice their brain cells

for our brain cells, in that holy exchange which is called learning.

Saint Microcephalia, patron of huffers and dusters,

you of the cooked brain and mean capacity, you

of the simian palm line and poor impulse control,

you of the Lysol-soaked bread, you sleeping with the dogs

underneath the house, hear our prayers

which we utter backwards and sideways

as nothing makes sense

least of all your Abstinence Campaign

from which Oh Lord Deliver Us.

Saints Primapara, Gravida, and Humpenenabackseat,

you patrons of unsafe teenage sex

and fourteen-year-old mothers,

pray for us now and at the hour of our birth,

amen.

I knew at once, when the lights dimmed.

He was pissing on the works.

The generator fouled a beat

and recovered.

My doors were locked

anyway, and the big white dog

unchained in the yard.

Outside, the wall of hollyhocks

raved for mercy from the wind’s strap.

The valves of the roses opened,

so sheltering his step

with their frayed mouths.

I don’t know how he entered

the dull bitch at my feet.

She rose in a nightmare’s hackles,

glittering, shedding heat

from her mild eyes.

All night we kept watch,

never leaving the white-blue ring

of the kitchen. I could hear him out there,

scratching in the porch hall, cold

and furtive as a cat in winter.

Toward dawn I got the gun.

And he was out there, Rudy J. V. Jacklitch,

the bachelor who drove his light truck

through the side of a barn on my account.

He’d lost flesh. The gray skin of his face dragged.

His clothes were bunched.

He stood reproachful,

in one hand the wooden board

and the pegs, still my crib.

In the other the ruined bouquet

of larkspur I wouldn’t take.

I was calm. This was something I’d foreseen.

After all, he took my name down to hell,

a thin black coin.

Repeatedly, repeatedly, to his destruction,

he called.

And I had not answered then.

And I would not answer now.

The flowers chafed to flames of dust in his hands.

The earth drew the wind in like breath and held on.

But I did not speak

or cry out

until the dawn, until the confounding light.

She refused to marry when she was twelve and was so impressed by a Lenten sermon of Saint Francis in 1212 that she ran away from her home in Assisi, received her habit, and took the vow of absolute poverty. Since Francis did not yet have a convent for women, he placed her in the Benedictine convent near Basia, where she was joined by her younger sister, Agnes. Her father sent twelve armed men to bring Agnes back, but Clare’s prayers rendered her so heavy they were unable to budge her.

— John H. Delaney,

Pocket Dictionary of Saints

1 The Call

First I heard the voice throbbing across the river.

I saw the white phosphorescence of his robe.

As he stepped from the boat, as he walked

there spread from each footfall a black ripple,

from each widening ring a wave,

from the waves a sea that covered the moon.

So I was seized in total night

and I abandoned myself in his garment

like a fish in a net. The slip knots

tightened on me and I rolled

until the sudden cry hauled me out.

Then this new element, a furnace of mirrors,

in which I watch myself burn.

The scales of my old body melt away like coins,

for I was rich, once, and my father

had already chosen my husband.

2 Before

I kept my silver rings in a box of porphyrite.

I ate salt on bread. I could sew.

I could mend the petals of a rose.

My nipples were pink, my sister’s brown.

In the fall we filled our wide skirts with walnuts

for our mother to crack with a wooden hammer.

She put the whorled meats into our mouths,

closed our lips with her finger

and said Hush. So we slept

and woke to find our bodies arching into bloom.

It happened to me first,

the stain on the linen, the ceremonial

seal which was Eve’s fault.

In the church at Assisi I prayed. I listened

to Brother Francis and I took his vow.

The embroidered decorations at my bodice

turned real, turned to butterflies and were dispersed.

The girdle of green silk, the gift from my father

slithered from me like a vine,

so I was something else that grew from air,

and I was light, the skeins of hair

that my mother had divided with a comb of ivory

were cut from my head and parceled to the nesting birds.

3 My Life as a Saint

I still have the nest, now empty,

woven of my hair, of the hollow grass,

and silken tassels at the ends of seeds.

From the window where I prayed,

I saw the house wrens gather

dark filaments from air

in the shuttles of their beaks.

Then the cup was made fast

to the body of the tree,

bound with the silver excrescence of the spider,

and the eggs, four in number,

ale gold and trembling,

curved in a thimble of down.

The hinged beak sprang open, tongue erect,

screaming to be fed

before the rest of the hatchling emerged.

I did not eat. I smashed bread to crumbs upon the sill

for the parents were weary as God is weary.

We have the least mercy on the one

who created us,

who introduced us to this hunger.

The smallest mouth starved and the mother

swept it out like rubbish with her wing.

I found it that dawn, after lauds,

already melting into the heat of the flagstone,

a transparent teaspoon of flesh,

the tiny beak shut, the eyes still sealed

within a membrane of the clearest blue.

I buried the chick in a box of leaves.

The rest grew fat and clamorous.

I put my hands through the thorns one night and felt the bowl,

the small brown begging bowl,

waiting to be filled.

By morning, the strands of the nest disappear

into each other, shaping

an emptiness within me that I make lovely

as the immature birds make the air

by defining the tunnels and the spirals

of the new sustenance. And then,

no longer hindered by the violence of their need,

they take to other trees, fling themselves

deep into the world.

4 Agnes

When you entered the church at Basia

holding the scepter of the almond’s

white branch, and when you struck

the bedrock floor, how was I to know

the prayer would be answered?

I heard the drum of hooves long in the distance,

and I held my forehead to the stone of the altar.

I asked for nothing. It is almost

impossible to ask for nothing.

I have spent my whole life trying.

I know you felt it, when his love spilled.

That ponderous light.

From then on you endured

happiness, the barge you pulled

as I pull mine. This

is called density of purpose.

As you learned, you must shed everything else

in order to bear it.

That is why, toward the end of your life

when at last there was nothing I could not relinquish,

I allowed you to spring forward without me.

Sister, I unchained myself. For I was always

the heaviest passenger,

the stone wagon of example,

the freight you dragged all the way to heaven,

and how were you to release yourself