Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

—in borrowed language in honor and memory of Bill Ice Like a horse’s tail so thick, black down past his waist beautiful.    Wanyaka. Chemotherapy— white man’s man-made cancer . . . doesn’t distinguish between good or bad cells . . . just kills. The spirit is connected to the hair at the crown—pahin hocoka. The hair falls the spirit goes, the will is connected no more. Leukemia— cancer of the White Blood Cell. Lakota wicasa Oglala wica Ha Luta Oyate    wicozani sni Kuja, unsika Canku Wakan o mani ma wanagi o mani wasigla ceya wokiksuye wokiksuye wopilamaye miksuya Canku Luta o mani Canku Waste o mani wohitika iyomakpi, iyomakpi ake—anpetu anpetu waste I knew him well.

Underneath ice caps, once glacial peaks deer, elk, vixen begin to ascend. Free creatures camouflaged as waves and waves receding far from plains pulling upward slopes and faraway snow dusted mountains. On spotted and clear cut hills robbed of fir, high above wheat tapestried valleys, flood plains up where headwaters reside. Droplets pound, listen. Hoofed and pawed mammals pawing and hoofing themselves up, up. Along rivers dammed by chocolate beavers, trailed by salamanders—mud puppies. Plunging through currents, above concrete and steel man-made barriers these populations of plains, prairies, forests flee in such frenzy, popping splash dance, pillaging cattail zones, lashing lily pads— the breath of life in muddy ponds, still lakes. Liquid beads slide on windshield glass along cracked and shattered pane, spider-like with webs and prisms. “Look, there, the rainbow touched the ground both ends down!” Full arch seven colors showered, heed what Indigenous know, why long ago, they said no one belongs here, surrounding them, that this land was meant to be wet with waters of nearby not fertile to crops and domestic graze. The old ones said, “When the animals leave this place the waters will come again. This power is beyond the strength of man. The river will return with its greatest force.” No one can stop her. She was meant to be this way. Snakes in honor, do not intrude. The rainbow tied with red and green like that on petal rose, though only momentarily. Colors disappear like print photographs fade. They mix with charcoal surrounding. A flurry of fowl follow like strands, maidenhair falls, from blackened clouds above swarming inward covering the basin and raising sky. Darkness hangs over the hills appear as black water crests, blackness varying shades. The sun is somewhere farther than the farthest ridge . Main gravel crossroads and back back roads slicken to mud, clay. Turtles creep along rising banks, snapping jowls. Frogs chug throaty songs. The frogs only part of immense choir heralding the downpour, the falling oceans. Over the train trestle, suspension bridge with current so slick everything slides off in sheets. Among rotten stumps in black bass ponds, somewhere catfish reel in fins and crawl, walking whiskers to higher waters. Waters above, below the choir calling it forth. Brightly plumed jays and dull brown-headed cowbirds fly as if hung in one place like pinwheels. They dance toward the rain crest, the approaching storm beckoning, inviting, summoning. A single sparrow sings the stroke of rain past the strength of sunlight. The frog chorus sings refrain, melody drumming thunder, evoked by beasts and water creatures wanting their homes. Wanting to return to clearings and streams where ash, or white birch woods rise,    tower over, quaking aspen stand against storm shown veils—sheeting rains crossing pasture, meadow, hills, mountain. Sounds erupt. Gathering clouds converge, push, pull, push, pull forcing lightning back and forth shaping windy, sculptured swans, mallard ducks, and giants from stratocumulus media. As if they are a living cloud chamber, As if they exist only in the heavens. Air swells with dampness. It has begun.

The problem— it’s not been written yet, the omens: the headless owl, the bobcat struck, the red wolf where she could not be. None of it done and yet it’s over. Nothing yet of night     when she called me closer asked me to bring her crow painting to stay straight across from her feet so she could waken into it, remember her friend. Of Old Chief alongside her shoulder still watching over her just as the mountain had done throughout her Alberta childhood. The Pendleton shroud bearing our braids, her figure in flaming pyre. The cards, the notes, the tasks the things undone,     not done and she with us        faraway as this has always been    and ever will continue. We meet we leave we meld and vaporize from whatever it was that held us human in this life. And all the beautiful things that lead our thoughts and give us reason remain despite the leaving and all I know         is what you know when it is over said and done it was a time and there was never enough of it.

Feet firmly perch thinnest stalks, reeds, bulrush. Until all at once, they attend my female form, streaked throat, brownness. Three fly equidistant around me, flashing. Each, in turn, calls territorial trills, beckons ok-a-li, ok-a-li! Spreads his wings, extends inner muscle quivering red epaulet bands uniquely bolden. Turn away each suitor, mind myself my audience. Select another to consider, He in turn quiver thrills. Leave for insects. Perhaps one male follows. Maybe a few brood of young, line summertime. Silver Maple samaras wing wind, spread clusters along with mine, renewing Prairie. As summer closes, I leave dragonflies, damselflies, butterflies, mosquitoes, moths, spiders, crickets for grain, see, Sunflower; join thousands to flock Sky— grackles, blackbirds, cowbirds,     starlings— Swarming like distant smoke clouds, rising.

—for Travis and Vaughan and all the St. Catherine’s Indian School kids dust, leaves twirling whirlpool up off road under wheels undercarriage automotive    winds turning,    lifting giving force to such delicate    particles ends attached in former position to branch soft paper thin petal- like reds and golds much as the mane swings blows back    from higher plane winds    Percheron    gold mane    that red Percheron on the right the north side you’ve seen her in the early morning when it’s snowing she raises her dignity laughing at motorists distressed by ice and Pueblo patrol cars we catch in peripheral focus    signal    turn the halogens off and on on and off    until they code the signal distress signal approaching tribal police traffic trap commuting    the 35 mph racket through Nambe Pojoaque turn    50 Tesuque Bingo/Pull-Tabs long before the lodge turned stone    near Camel Rock before the Congested Area in approach to the “City of the Oldest Catholic Church in North America” we convey these danger signs    to local yokels    perhaps even tourists    if we’re in the mood consideration strange nation neither of us belong though    we do stay in close    proximity to these other    Native peoples very different than where we come from    still the same only sometimes though they know the patrol man he’s their cousin all of theirs they know this whirl these leaves    rising now before our heated grill Chevy 4x    ’91 they know the Percheron she steals the scenery easily with her laughter and turn pitching hoof and tail in mockery    indispensable humor she takes this morning under gray the shade of nickel to cloud the stress enabling me to speak to you of beauty

It wasn’t socks missing from his feet, not elbow cloth unraveled unilaterally, not equal displacement of chin and brow, nor the eye that sat a bit lower on the right, it was his knuckle that made me weep, clove corners gone wayside, like minuscule meat hooks clawed away bits of him each shift he made, invisible a timeliness unfurled. It was his muscle torn through, festering, the prosthetic hand, finger- width dismay all across his attempted grin, left there just like that, for anyone to see—it was his mercy. In the end we’re rarely beautiful, mostly placed away from compromising situations into poses offsetting what has become of us in some gawker’s unnerving eyes. Yet, he was, is, still here in mine, and I’m human because of it. Maybe only. Maybe.

Thirteen years ago,    before bulk barns    and fifth gear diesel tractors,    we rode royal blue tractors with toolboxes big enough    to hold a six pack on ice. In the one hundred fifteen degree    summer heat    with air    so thick with moisture you drink as you breathe. Before the year dusters sprayed malathion over our clustered bodies,    perspiring while we primed bottom lugs, those ground level leaves of tobacco, and it clung to us with black tar so sticky we rolled eight-inch balls off our arms at night    and Cloroxed our clothes for hours and hours. Before we were poisoned    and the hospital thought we had been burned in fires, at least to the third degree, when the raw, oozing hives that covered ninety-eight percent of our bodies from the sprays ordered by the FDA and spread by     landowners, before anyone had seen automated machines that top and prime. While we topped the lavender blooms of many tiny flowers gathered into one,    gorgeous. By grasping hold below the petals with our bare, calloused hands and twisting downward, quick, hard, only one time,    snapped them off. Before edgers and herbicides took what they call weeds, when we walked for days through thirty acres    and chopped them out with hoes. Hoes,    made long before    from wood and steel and sometimes (even longer ago) from wood and deer scapula. Before the bulk primers came and we primed all the leaves by hand, stooped over at the waist for the lower ones    and    through the season gradually    rising higher     until    we stood and worked simultaneously, as married to the fields as we were to each other, carrying up to fifty pounds of fresh leaves under each arm    and    sewing them onto sticks four feet long on a looper under the shade of a tin-roofed barn,    made of shingle, and poking it up through the rafters inside to be caught by a hanger    who poked it up higher in the rafters    to another who held a higher position and    so    they filled the barn. And the leaves hung down like butterfly wings,    though sometimes the color of luna moths,    or Carolina parakeets,    when just an hour ago    they had been laid upon    the old wooden cart trailers pulled behind the orange Allis-Chalmers tractor with huge, round fenders and only a screwdriver and salt in the toolbox, picked by primers    so hot we would race through the rows to reach the twenty-five gallon jugs of water placed throughout the field to encourage    and    in attempt to satisfy our insatiable thirsts from drinking air    which poured through our pores without breaking through to our need    for more water    in the sun. Sun we imagined to disappear yet respected    for growing all things on earth when quenched with rains called forth by our song     and drumming. Leaves, which weeks later,    would be taken down and the strings pulled like string on top of a large dog-food bag and sheeted up into burlap sheets that bundled over a hundred pounds when we smashed down with our feet, but gently smashing, then thrown up high    to a catcher    on a big clapboard trailer pulled behind two-ton trucks and taken to market in Fuquay-Varina and sold to Philip Morris    and Winston-Salem    for around    a buck a pound. Leaves cured to a bright leaf, a golden yellow with the strongest aroma of tobacco barn curing and hand grown quality before the encroachment of big business in the Reagan era and the slow murder of method from a hundred years before. When the loons cried out in laughter by the springs and the bass popped the surface on the pond, early on, next to the fields, before that time when it was unfashionable to transplant each individual baby plant, the infant tobacco we nurtured, to transplant those seedlings to each hill in the field, the space for that particular plant and we watched    as    they would grow. Before all of this new age, new way, I was a sharecropper in Willow Springs, North Carolina, as were you    and we were proud to be Tsa la gi wishing for winter    so we could make camp at Qualla Boundary    and Oconaluftee would be free of tourists and filled with snow and those of us who held out forever and had no CIBs would be home again with our people, while the BIA forgot to watch. When we still remembered before even the Europeans, working now shoulder to shoulder with descendants of their slaves they brought from Africa when they sold our ancestors as slaves in the Middle East, that then the tobacco was sacred to all of us and we prayed whenever we smoked and did not smoke for pleasure    and I    was content and free. Then they came and changed things and you left me for a fancy white girl and I waited on the land until you brought her back in that brand new white Trans Am, purchased from our crop,    you gave her and left her waiting in a motel. The nearest one was forty miles away, but    near enough    for you and    for her    and I knew    though I never spoke a word to you about it,    I knew and I kept it to myself    to this day    and time    and I never let on until I left    on our anniversary. I drove the pick-up down the dirt path    by the empty fields and rented a shack for eighty dollars, the one with cardboard windows and a Gillespie house floor design, with torn and faded floral paper on walls and linoleum so thin over rotted board that the floor gave if you weighed over a hundred pounds.    I did not. And with no running water of any kind,    or bathroom. The one at hilltop,    where I could see out across all the fields and hunt for meat when I wanted and find peace. I heard you remarried and went into automated farming and kept up with America. I watched all of you    from the hill and I waited for the lavender blooms to return    and when it was spring even the blooms    had turned white. I rolled up my bedroll,    remembering before, when the fields were like waves on a green ocean, and turned away,    away from the change and corruption    of big business on small farms of traditional agricultural people,    and sharecroppers. Away,    so that I could always    hold this concise image of before    that    time    and it floods    my memory.

for Phil Young and my father Robert Hedge Coke; for Whitman and Hughes America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in. Sing back the moment you cherished breath. Sing you home into yourself and back to reason. Before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep, held her cradleboard, wept her into day. My song gave her creation, prepared her delivery, held her severed cord beautifully beaded. My song helped her stand, held her hand for first steps, nourished her very being, fed her, placed her three sisters strong. My song comforted her as she battled my reason broke my long-held footing sure, as any child might do. As she pushed herself away, forced me to remove myself, as I cried this country, my song grew roses in each tear’s fall. My blood-veined rivers, painted pipestone quarries circled canyons, while she made herself maiden fine. But here I am, here I am, here I remain high on each and every peak, carefully rumbling her great underbelly, prepared to pour forth singing— and sing again I will, as I have always done. Never silenced unless in the company of strangers, singing the stoic face, polite repose, polite while dancing deep inside, polite Mother of her world. Sister of myself. When my song sings aloud again. When I call her back to cradle. Call her to peer into waters, to behold herself in dark and light, day and night, call her to sing along, call her to mature, to envision— then, she will quake herself over. My song will make it so. When she grows far past her self-considered purpose, I will sing her back, sing her back. I will sing. Oh I will—I do. America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.