Original Fire (2 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

One sister wore the eyes of an old man

around her neck.

Scratched porcelain

washed down

with the hot lye of his breath.

One sister rode love

like a ship in light wind.

The sails of her body

unfurled at a touch.

No man could deny her

safe passage, safe harbor.

The youngest was shut like a bell.

The white thorns of silence

pricked in each bush

where she walked,

and the grass stopped growing where she stood.

One year the three sisters came out of their rooms,

swaying like the hot roses

that papered their walls.

They walked, full grown, into the heart of our town.

Young men broke their eyes

against their eyes of stone,

and singed their shy tongues

on the stunned flames of their mouths.

It was in late August in the long year of drought.

The pool halls were winnowed

and three men drew lots

to marry the sisters, all six in a great house.

On the night of the wedding

the wind rose on a glass stem.

The trees bowed. The clouds knocked.

We tethered our dogs.

Some swore they saw a hoop

of lightning dance down in their yard.

We felt the weight toward dawn

of lead sinkers in our bones,

walked out, and caught the first, fast drops on our tongues.

All autumn, black plums

split and dropped from the boughs.

We gathered the sweetness

and sealed it in jars,

loading the cupboards and cellar.

At night we went under the bedclothes, laden

beyond what the arms were meant to carry alone,

and we dreamed that with our shirts off

in the quarry, the cool water

came under to bear us away.

That season our sleep grew around us

as if from the walls

a dense snow fell and formed

other bodies, and the voices

of men who melted into us,

and children who drifted, lost, looking for home.

After the long rains, the land gone bare,

we walked out again to the windbreaks.

White crown of the plum trees

were filling the purple throats of the iris.

We lay in the grass,

the bees drinking in tongues,

and already the brittle hum of the locust

in the red wheat, growing.

Again, the year come full circle, the men

came knocking in the fields,

headfuls of blackened seeds,

and the husking, scorched mountains of sunflowers.

We went closed, still golden, among the harvesters.

Shifting the load from arm to arm,

they drove us into town.

We shook out our dresses and hair, oh then

There was abundance come down

in the face of the coming year.

We held ourselves into

the wind, our bodies

broke open, and the snow began falling.

It fell until the world was filled up, and filled again,

until it rose past all the limits we could have known.

Wind has stripped

the young plum trees

to a thin howl.

They are planted in squares

to keep the loose dirt from wandering.

Everything around me is crying to be gone.

The fields, the crops humming to be cut and done with.

Walking in the breakdown lane, margin of gravel,

between the cut swaths and the road to Fargo,

I want to stop, to lie down

in standing wheat or standing water.

Behind me thunder mounts as trucks of cattle

roar over, faces pressed to slats for air.

They go on, they go on without me.

They pound, pound and bawl,

until the road closes over them farther on.

We heard them when they left the hills,

Low hills where they used to winter and bear their young.

Blue hills of oak and birch that broke the wind.

They swung their heavy muzzles, wet with steam,

And broke their beards of breath to breathe.

We used to hunt them in our red-wheeled carts.

Frenchmen gone
sauvage
, how the women burned

In scarlet sashes, black wool skirts.

For miles you heard the ungreased wood

Groan as the load turned.

Thunder was the last good hunt.

Great bales of skins and meat in iron cauldrons

Boiling through the night. We made our feast

All night, but still we could not rest.

We lived headlong, taking what we could

But left no scraps behind, not like the other

Hide hunters, hidden on a rise,

Their long-eyes brought herds one by one

To earth. They took but tongue, and you could walk

For miles across the strange hulks.

We wintered in the hills. Low huts of log

And trampled dirt, the spaces tamped with mud.

At night we touched each other in our dreams

Hearing, on the wind, their slow hooves stumbling

South, we said at first, the old ones knew

They would not come again to the low hills.

We heard them traveling, heard the frozen birches

Break before their long retreat

Into the red sleep.