Diane Glancy

It was a life of exile under the trees. My father came to the stockyards. My mother from a farm. In 1952 or 2 my parents flew from Kansas City to Indianapolis to look for a house when my father was transferred. I think of them far above me small as birds when they flew, and the earth to them was a sandbox in our backyard where I made roads to a house I never found. I often think of wives in tract houses. The cows and pigs my father yarded before they walked up the ramp to the kill. Sometimes I thought we were together because of something terrible we had done. My father's Cherokee heritage tucked under some sort of shame. The past _______ What was it? I call to them above me no larger than a leaf.

Is it only when you’re little you know tigers live in your closet— one with your shoes on his two ears, another with your umbrella tied to his tail; the rest wearing your red coat and blue trousers with the red buttons? Is it only when you’re little the dustballs have mountainous shadows in the crack of light under the door? Or is it also NOW you fear that tigers will eat you— when you wake in the middle of the night and don’t know where you are, nor remember how far you’ve come. Your nose hurts like a plowed field, your fingers stiff— Then somehow, you remember what you’ve accomplished. The sewing is finished— The red buttons threaded to the blue pants and the little coat with its sleeves. And you know you have given them to the tigers (so they won’t eat you). But they chased themselves around a tree and melted into butter. NOW you can pick up your coat and trousers, your shoes and umbrella. Soon, even, you can start your car and go— The promise of dawn already on the face of the clock-radio.

When he movd into the house he wanted us to stomp & pray out the evil spirits just in case they’d be there. How cld they when a medicine woman lived on the place & left it to the church when she went to happier grounds? But a truck hauling brush turnd on the road & he jumped up screaming— deer prowler at the antlered beast. We danced out the spirits he carried on the place. How now pow wow he jumps in the sow-yard with the bow- wow cow. We passed the spirits to chickens to peck their legs— Eeeeevil spirits pock-marked as the dartboard. W/ marbles shooting rabbit eyes we stompd wild fires he once built in his head, still haunted him as though evil spirits could open a medicine woman’s door, climb in her unpainted windows, crawl through yellowed wallpaper armoured w/ prayer-chants. We whooped & hawed until he sd nuf. The house barricaded from deer prowlers from under his headband.

I. We hang clothes on the line. His wide trousers and shirt, wind-beat, roar small thunder from one prairie cloud. The same rapple of flag on its pole. Half in fear, half in jest, we laugh. He calls us crow women. Our black hair shines in the sun and in the light from school windows. He drives his car to town, upsets the dust on buckboard hills. We sit on the fence when he is gone. Does he know we speak of thunder in his shirts? We cannot do well in his school. He reads from west to east, The sun we follow moves the other way. Crowbar. Our eyes come loose from words on the page in narrow rooms of the reservation school. He perceives and deciphers at once. For us written letters will not stay on the page, but fall like crows from the sky and hit against the glass windows of the school. Our day is night when we sit in rows of the classroom. Leaves in a whirlwind from sumac groves. Flock of crows are black starts on a white night. II. On the porch of the reservation school the blackbirds walk around our feet, fly into our head. They call our secret name. Dark corridors linger in our mind We whisper the plains to one another. We do not talk of what we cannot understand. Black and white fleckered dresses. Our face like our fathers. The sun is no enemy to the eye looking west. The brush thin as hair of old ones. It blinds the eye, makes fire on fields, flashes against windows like silver ribbons on burial robes. Hot late into the fall, windy, ready for cold to sweep in. The heat seems solid, but totters on the brink of winter. We laugh to ourselves when he returns to the reservation school for girls. Take his clothes from the line. Set the table with salt and pepper, spoon, knives. Cattails and milk-pods in a jar. We get lard from the basement, rub a place in the dusty window like a moon in the ancient sky. III. One hill larger than the others: an old buffalo with heavy head and whiskers nods at the ground, grazes in my dreams, one blade at a time. We stay in our stiff white-sheeted beds in the dormitory room. Buffalo wander in our dreams. White night-dresses. Black pods suspended in sumac groves like crows. In the sweat lodge of sleep we make our vision quest, black as pitch in crevice between crow feathers. We hang his thunder clothes in sleep, arms reach above our beds like willows blowing slowly by the creek. Quietly we choke, hold our wounded arms like papooses. Clothes beat on lines. Sumac groves and whirl of leaves: a shadow of our fathers at council fires. Red leaves, waxy as hay on fields. We dream of schoolrooms. Written letters on the wind. He reads crow-marks on the page but does not know crow.

This prairie holds us with its plainness. An ugly wife. We would not stay but children comfort us and we need this flatness. On our table a carp with a tumor on its lip, larva eating its side. An old man laughs, one silver tooth in his head like a galvanized watertank. We are driven back into the land, our raccoon faces banded around the eyes with motorcycle goggles. Every car we had rusting in the yard. We saddle the buffalo and say we are captives. This barrenness holds us down like a wife.

Well, jipes! I floored the Chevy/ fishtailed all over the soft-tarred road Old women babbling by the church shit no one with balls goes to flea markets the road festered at Pelsor curves at sixty-two overturned once on these roads still don’t know how I got out.

It’s mostly the same here slow as melonvines in an arctic sun where the great ball of the plane went down in nineteen thirty-five & an eskimo with a camera took a picture that stayed in his camera twenty-one years & by some chance he told an explorer who bought the film & found the crash & the bodies under tarp looking like two seals on the ice, the crumpled plane with oversized pontoons, the propeller as though it could turn again— the men, Wiley Post & Will Rogers, still twelve miles southwest of Barrow, Alaska.

I Back in time car in yard shutters at windows paint on gray boards old man, old woman their children gone then man and woman younger with young children west wing not yet built on house one wagon, horse arrive untended land back too far young man, woman with eyes like bright baubles holding space one shutter closes on another. II Grizzled, unpossessed on the ledge of plains factional roof meager walls written upon like points of long prairie grass the house stares across the highway as though remembering a fir tree carried on horseback through blinding snow. III Survival of facade when content does not endure one part has nothing to do with the others all is hollow ramshackled but house still stands on prairie customs still leap on points of delicate prairie grass where the bright bauble of the eye blinked once too often.

There’s a farm auction up the road. Wind has its bid in for the leaves. Already bugs flurry the headlights between cornfields at night. If this world were permanent, I could dance full as the squaw dress on the clothesline. I would not see winter in the square of white yard-light on the wall. But something tugs at me. The world is at a loss and I am part of it migrating daily. Everything is up for grabs like a box of farm tools broken open. I hear the spirits often in the garden and along the shore of corn. I know this place is not mine. I hear them up the road again. This world is a horizon, an open sea. Behind the house, the white iceberg of the barn.

Hunted and sung unhunted / unsung clump of loghouse / chaxed hill unuttered / unstrung clistered bow hunted and unsung hunted / strung hunted / sung.