Published Writings
Racism (All in One Moment)
I have learned some things
slowly. I guess this is better
than not learning them
at all. But when the
guy spits
“NIGGER MOTHER FUCKER”
at the black train conductor,
the world screeches past my ears
like the
standing dumbfounded
on the platform. And all in one moment,
I become that sailor who
bagged the last dodo:
I have something new,
but I have lost something,
too.
To Kahnesatake, my Unseen Homeland
I have a name, and a dream of a
name.
I could answer to them both when
called,
but don’t—
Little White Dove flies only
in my heart, and in the hearts of my people,
who dream with me this name
each night.
My people, this clan:
they have a name, and a dream of a name,
also, two things akin but not alike.
Not the way we wear our hair, or
the markings on our skin. Two titles
at two poles of one world,
one green world which has been split by greed
into fractions and fine print:
Paper names meaning nothing
save the changing of money between hands,
and the death and destruction of our lands.
Lands which have a name, and a
dream of a name:
Kanehsatake, and the three misty peaks
where Little White Dove flies into the glow of the rising sun,
away from deeds
and seeds that do not take to dusty soil
and people who name
before knowing.
The Mystery of the Boy
The mystery of the boy is this:
I picture him often, but am unsure
when that began: Before I bathed myself
in the white light of his smile, or after,
when I had thought on him awhile, and worked him into something
my heart wrapped around to contain,
precious. Or does it matter that I leapt into longing
before my faith in it was certain?
That is the mystery of the boy.
That he could do this,
and he not know how, and I not know when,
and neither knowing what to do
next.
Antidote to Love
There is little turbulence
as the plane passes over the Bitterroots, eastbound.
She thinks of how she took him like a bitter root,
wild antidote to the pit of lonesome
in her stomach. But after all those
miles put into “us” and “we,”
in the end, she was still going home, alone:
Round trip to
nowhere.
She remembers the last walk they
took,
in the park. Just after she reached
to kiss him goodbye, a bird landed, briefly,
on his shoulder. They
laughed,
but was it really surprising? He always was
unmoving.
The Spanish Pants (Barcelona, circa 1997)
The whole world stopped for my
hips—
Look at them shake! You should
have,
everybody else was…everybody else,
And that one man, with the blue,
blue shirt, up against
His hot dark skin—and mine of
course:
of course!
If I had been older it would have been sex,
right there, some unlawful act of carnal knowledge
of that nameless man who just happened
to go dancing for a night with some friends. “From Roma.”
Hell, yeah, honey: Roma. How’d they
like thata,
back at homa?
But I’m not back at homa, not yeta, so I’m going
to keep on moving with the music, disco beat, blazing lights.
And this man. My man, first
one, looked at me like
a woman,
a woman who can really—truly—
move those hips.
Falling Autumn Leaves
Dreams and dreams
Fall flitting down
Like feathers loosened from the V
of geese
And all around the orange hills
The past is creeping pace on pace
To rest its chin like the fuzzy
muzzle
Of a favorite
hunting hound.
Down in the valley
Where the echoes still reach,
Of a sweet baying sadness in the
night
And the hollow chopping of
woodstove wood,
Time is trapped in the timbers
Of the trees that softly sway
On those age-worn
hills.
Age on age
Rippling outward as the rings
That tell the tales of those tall trees,
Still a fortress standing strong,
Some ancient bastion built of
spirits
Of all those lives that circle
through
From air to
ground and back again.
Dream on dream
Like year on year,
Built into my bones those curves
Of bird-flight and smoke-spiral and
falling-leaf,
Those hill-hues in the slanting sun
And the smile of year after year
That echoes in my heart like the
hush
Of falling autumn leaves.
Sonnet to a Loved One
How sweet are Shakespeare’s
graceful words to hear
Which capture love and beauty at
their peak;
There is no sound more pleasant to
the ear
And such perfection poets lifelong
seek.
What inspiration must his muse have
sent
Or else what beauty Shakespeare
must have seen,
For to his words such loveliness is
lent
That makes all other verse
imperfect seem.
But there’s one thing that
Shakespeare could not see:
The beauty of your form, your
voice, your mind
What a pity he could not have
studied thee:
No better subject could a poet
find.
While
I know that Shakespeare has far greater lines,
I
also know the better subject’s mine.
Waiting
How do you learn to hold the present
and in that present a body
of a person always changing, always moving,
always flowing forth into the future,
never here and now between these sievish
hands?
There is no estimate of every
movement
one’s mind must make in seconds,
parts of seconds, no time at all for the body
but an eternity of comprehension
and all you can do is try to hold on
to this traveling being flying forth,
sliding like water over the rocks--
and just as hard to detain from that inevitable journey,
South, east,
wherever the wind blows.
Come back, time.
I have not yet felt, though my heart
is open.
what is lost
strip poker seems sexy
til you’re the one losing.
and if your morals are on the line
as well as your clothes, well, then,
you’re doubly screwed
since even contemplation of the act
proves you’ve been wooed and wilded
by promiscuity: it’s so easy, don’t you know,
to be winning one second,
fucking the next; naked,
then clothed in the smell of his cologne,
a scent that will cloud around you later
like he’s still there, touching your bare
breast with the hand that held straight flush.
as the basket flies hellward
posthaste, as this sexcopulationtransmogrification
occurs,
you feel like laughing, you amoral slut,
because you had the ace up your sleeve all along
but never played it.
or did you? did you play it before he
even opened the door,
before he thought
to make the bid for your young body,
before he ever knew
you like to lose things?
All the colors
The day I lost my virginity,
I wore a gray dress to town.
A gray dress,
and red underwear.
All the colors of that day have run
together
til all I can remember
is the dress, and the underwear,
though I do recall it was summer, warm enough
for farm boys to street-cruise in their pickups,
windows rolled down enough
to shout out at me as I walked the hot cement
in sandals, sipping a smoothie,
feeling as though I should commemorate this event,
this morning of “becoming a woman”
with someone I would briefly love
and never truly escape,
someone who probably can’t even recall
what he wore to work this morning,
much less what he wore
the day he labored over my naked curves
as I tearlessly endeavored
to be awed by the gravity of “growing up.”
I Will Sing (For my people)
The father of my Mohawk blood
stands next to Train No. 33, circa 1869. He is frozen in time, wrapped in
starched American textiles, conductor’s cap slightly askew as he holds a silver
waist-band-bound watch in his hand. It is a brown hand, like his brown eyes,
which seem to regard the world from a great distance, over jutting cheekbones
seen mostly now on reservations, in movies, in other sepia stills.
When his body had stilled and was
recycled into the earth, where did it go? Not into steel for train track rails, or cotton for fabrics made by white hands, but into a
sassafras or a lily, green friends that speak to me in quiet Appalachian
sunlight. Does he watch me now, from his seat around the council fire, and
wonder why it took three embarrassed generations for
someone who listens to be born again?
Regardless, I watch him now, and
wonder why three embarrassed generations ago he
stepped out of sassafras stands in northern
I feel it is time to listen again.
The owl flies through my sleep, calling, and the southbound river gurgles my
name over the
As the daughter of a father of a
daughter of a father who was one-half something wild, I question why three
generations did not listen, why I feel I must.
I hear the father of my Mohawk blood chanting into the smoke that blows
off the council fire: He changed his clothes but he couldn’t change his
blood. Every time Tonniataren:ton calls across the lake, I hear him; every
rustling of leaves holds his voice: He sings the war-song, the
love-song, the life-song: These days they are all one melody, which I will sing
too. My blood may be quiet, but my voice is not.
Sassafras
My people used to have a tale
about a tree with leaves like hands:
three fingers, two fingers, one.
When I was a girl I knew the story
by heart. It had something to do
with something undying—love or spirit,
or maybe faith. A topic
along those lines,
inspirational. But I forgot the rhythm
of the words, and then the words themselves, until
all I could do
was look at this tree, and wonder: Sassafras
albidum, cinnamonwood, smelling-stick
tree
with omnipotent roots, how did my people
come to know you? How did they come
to thin their winter thickness
with your brew? The insects flee from your oil
but I could lie in your arms all night,
trying to remember
our past.
One Last Gift
Jimi Hendrix once said, “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful.
It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
I verified this wisdom recently as
I sat by the side of a dying Delmarva fox squirrel, an endangered North
American species native only to the Delmarva Peninsula of Maryland. The
squirrel, whose species is known to be heavier, slower, and less agile than the
more frequently seen gray squirrel, seemed to have fallen to the ground while
edging along a high branch, or possibly while trying to jump from one tree to
another. If this squirrel had been attempting acrobatics not natural to his
body type, he surely was paying the heaviest price.
Clearly, the animal had at least
one broken leg and possibly a broken back.
When I approached he only lay panting and could barely drag himself a couple of inches away as he tried to escape. Soon
he gave up and simply stared at me as I pondered what to do.
I had been conducting bird surveys
in the forest, working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to ascertain the
population numbers and breeding activities of forest-dwelling bird species in
the region. It was ironic to me that while I was attempting to record evidence
of breeding and new young in one species, I ran across evidence of activity at
the other end of the life spectrum in another species.
The circumstance made me consider
the difficulties of being a field biologist, of seeing first hand the cycles of
life and death. Invariably, when thinking about this issue, I am reminded of
the one time I killed an animal with my car (aside from the thousands of
insects I must squash on my windshield). It was during a trip between study
sites while I worked as a bird bander. As I came over a rise I surprised a male
cardinal that had been eating in the middle of the road. I barely had time to
register the presence of this vibrant animal before I abruptly ended his
life—I, the birder, the naturalist, who will not even kill flies when they
appear in my house.
Animal death was a dilemma for me
as well, since the mist-netting process inevitably produces a few casualties:
Hummingbirds sometimes are eaten out of the nets by deer, the sensitive
juveniles have a tendency to quickly die of stress, and very infrequently birds
tangle themselves so badly in the nets that strangulation results. Yet for the
few birds that die, hundreds more are banded (and later recaptured), yielding
land-usage and breeding data that are useful to conservation groups who go on
to protect and save thousands (millions?) more birds.
All birders will eventually locate
nestlings that have apparently been abandoned, newly-fledged young that seem
lethargic from hunger and fear, or birds that are injured in some form or
another that may allow them to survive (I recently saw a one-footed snowy egret
that seemed perfectly happy) or may eventually result in death. At what point,
if any, do we interfere? How much of what we see is the natural process of
death, part of a careful balance in the wild that protects our animals from
overpopulation and the painful process of starvation
as supplies run out due to overfeeding?
At the refuge where I work, a
mother and her son brought in a white-tailed deer fawn this summer, having
found it bedded down in a field outside their home. They did not realize that
the fawn’s mother was likely nearby, eating food and keeping a distantly
watchful eye on her young. If they returned the newborn to its spot in the
field, they ran the risk of having imprinted it with the belief that humans,
not deer, are its caregivers. Yet if they took it to a rehabilitation facility,
there was the equal risk of exposing the animal to chronic wasting disease or
confining it to a captive lifestyle.
Having decided to attempt locating
a wildlife rehabilitation center (or even a generous local veterinarian) for the
treatment of my fox squirrel, I gently lifted it to carry it back to my truck.
Through the soft fur, I could feel its tiny, frail ribcage and its
widely-spaced shallow breaths. As I walked, the animal barely made a peep,
seeming to understand that a potential predator was the least of its problems
at the moment. It did not take me long to realize that this squirrel was not
merely injured. It was dying.
For over twenty minutes, I sat and
watched this representative of an endangered species alternately go rigid and
relax, struggle for breath, and finally die. I wondered about humans and their
relationship to wild animals and considered my own inability to do the most
humane thing possible and put the poor animal out of its misery. As kind as it
would have been to end the squirrel’s suffering, I simply could not fathom
causing the death of another animal. I hoped (in some silly, anthropomorphic
way) that my presence was of some comfort to the animal during its painful last
minutes.
Once the squirrel had gone limp for
the last time and its eyes assumed the far-off look that I had read about but
never seen in actuality, I curled the beautiful silver body in my hand, folding
the bushy foot-long tail across the squirrel’s stomach, and carried it to a
stand of trees to lay it to rest. I had pondered taking it to the refuge
office, for autopsy or freezing or stuffing, but ultimately I figured that the
one thing I could do was allow the natural cycle of life to continue, and place
the body where it could provide nourishment for other animals, insects, and
plants.
I happened to glance into the
forest, where I saw a female wood duck leading her five young chicks to their
first foray in the flooded mud-flats of the refuge. Here they might be eaten by
hawks or snapping turtles, or might survive all the perils and one day reproduce, themselves. I was struck by the amazing
circularity of it all: One animal perishes, another is born. I wondered if I,
myself, was simply superfluous in this natural scene, and although I felt
saddened and touched at the squirrel’s death, I thought perhaps it was just a
painful but necessary part of the world around me.
The thought reminded me of other
wise words, this time from Steven Coallier: “Attack
life; it’s going to kill you anyway.” So it was that the
squirrels and the wood ducks had more to offer me than I ever could
reciprocate: a reminder that Nature has things under control, though we humans
might sometimes forget it.