Louise Erdrich: Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

Leave the dishes.

Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator

and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.

Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.

Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.

Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.

Don’t even sew on a button.

Let the wind have its way, then the earth

that invades as dust and then the dead

foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.

Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.

Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles

or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry

who uses whose toothbrush or if anything

matches, at all.

Except one word to another. Or a thought.

Pursue the authentic — decide first

what is authentic,

then go after it with all your heart.

Your heart, that place

you don’t even think of cleaning out.

That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth

or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner

again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,

or weep over anything at all that breaks.

Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons

in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life

and talk to the dead

who drift in through the screened windows, who collect

patiently on the tops of food jars and books.

Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything

except what destroys

the insulation between yourself and your experience

or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters

this ruse you call necessity.

The Widow Jacklitch

All night, all night, the cat wants out again.

I’ve locked her in the kitchen where she tears

From wall to wall. Her bullet head leaves marks;

She swings from tablecloths, dislodges pots.

When Rudy was alive the cat was all

You ever could have wanted in a child, it sat so still

And diligently sucked its whiskers clean. I cram

A doily in my mouth to still the scream.

All night the sweethearts dandle in the weeds.

It’s terrible, the little bleats they make

Outside my window. Girls not out of braids

Walk by. I see their fingers hike their skirts

Way up their legs. I say it’s dirt.

The cat’s got rubbage on her brain

As well. She backs on anything that’s stiff.

I try to keep the pencils out of reach.

That Kröger widow practiced what she’d preach

A mile a minute. If she was a cat

I’d drown her in a tub of boiling fat

And nail her up like suet, out in back

Where birds fly down to take their chance.

I don’t like things with beaks. I don’t

like anything that makes a beating sound.

Beat, beat, all night they hammered at the truck

With bats. But he had locked himself

In stubbornly as when a boy; I’d knock

Until my knuckles scabbed and bled

And blue paint scraped into the wounds. He’d laugh

Behind his door. I’d hear him pant and thrill.

A mother’s hell. But I’d feel the good blindness stalk

Us together. Son and mother world without end forever.

The Ojibwe word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are alive. They are addressed as grandmothers and grandfathers. The universe began with a conversation between stones.

1

A thousand generations of you live and die

in the space of a single one of our thoughts.

A complete thought is a mountain.

We don’t have very many ideas.

When the original fire which formed us

subsided,

we thought of you.

We allowed you to occur.

We are still deciding whether that was

wise.

2 Children

We have never denied you anything

you truly wanted

no matter how foolish

no matter how destructive

but you never seem to learn.

That which you cry for,

this wish to be like us,

we have tried to give it to you

in small doses, like a medicine, every day

so you will not be frightened.

Still, when death comes

you weep,

you do not recognize it

as the immortality you crave.

3 The Sweat Lodge

We love it when you sing to us,

and speak to us,

and lift us from the heart of the fire

with the deer’s antlers, and place us

in the center of the lodge.

Then we are at our most beautiful,

Powerful red blossoms,

we are breathing.

We can reach through your bones

to where you hurt.

You call us grandfather, grandmother.

You scatter bits of cedar, sage, wikenh, tobacco

and bear root over us,

and then the water

which cracks us to the core.

When we break ourselves open—

that is when the healing starts.

When you break yourselves open—

that is how the healing continues.

4 Love

If only you could be more like us

when it comes to the affections.

Have you ever seen a stone

throw itself?

On the other hand

whose idea do you think it is

to fly through the air?

Mystery is not a passive condition.

To see a thing so perfectly what it is—

doesn’t it make you

want to hold it,

to marvel, to touch

its answered question?

5 Gratitude

You have no call to treat us this way.

We allow you to put us to every use.

Yet, when have you ever

stopped in the street to lay your forehead

against the cool, black granite facade

of some building, and ask the stone

to bless you?

We are not impartial.

We acknowledge some forms

of consideration.

We open for those

who adhere to our one rule

endure .

6 Infinite Thought

Listen, there is no consciousness

before birth or

after death

except the one you share

with us.

So you had best learn

how to speak to us now

without the use of signs.

Remember, there will be no hands,

except remembered hands.

No lips, no face,

except remembered face.

No legs and in fact no

appendages, except

the remembered ones,

which always hurt

as consciousness hurts.

Now do you understand what it is?

Your consciousness

is the itch, the ghost of consciousness,

remembered

from how it felt

to be one of us.

Teresa of Avila’s brother, Rodrigo, emigrated to America in 1535 and died in a fight with Natives on the banks of the Rio de la Plata.

— Footnote to The Life of Teresa of Jesus , translated and edited by E. Allison Peers

Sister, do you remember our cave of stones,

how we entered from the white heat of afternoons,

chewed seeds, and plotted one martyrdom

more cruel than the last?

You threw your brown hair back

and sang Pax Vobiscum to the imaginary guard,

a leopard on the barge of Ignatius.

Now I see you walking toward me, discalced like the poor,

as the dogwood trees come into blossom.

Their centers are the wounds of nails,

deep and ragged. The spears of heaven

bristle along the path you take,

turning me aside.

Dear sister, as the mountain grows out of the air,