Eric Gansworth

I used to think that if I loved hard enough and long enough passion would always win out like the way I loved cologne, venturing teenaged into congested malls, abusing testers only a salesperson surly enough inquiring if he or she could help me in any way, spitting the prices of even the smallest bottles of the scents I had slathered on, forcing me out in a cloud of confidence that I was the Calvin Klein Man, not the Old Spice Man, not the Zest Man, and certainly not the My Drafty House Is Warmed Badly by Kerosene Heaters Man impervious to my real life where I would sneak down in the middle of the night, passing snow collecting on the inside of the window sill, trying to descend the stairs silently to complete the night lying before the stove’s vents blowing sooty warm air deep into my sleeping lungs, clutching a broken lacrosse stick to intimidate rats so brazen our housecats accepted them as equal occupants until I exit those automatic doors, leave fountains where just out of range I envy white families tossing entire cigarette packs’ worth of what they call spare change, wishing for things they could already buy if they wanted laughing as those presidential faces fall sometimes up and sometimes down, all drowning in three inches of chlorinated well water return to the reservation where my sister- in-law embraces me later the same day, drawing deeply, saying she loves the scent of burned heating oil on men, that it reminds her of when she and my brother dated and she would hold him long in those last moments before allowing him to walk out her door, meander through snowy grooves, finding his way home while she looked out windows where ice crystals gathered on the proper side of the pane holding her breath as long as she dared, letting his presence seep out only when she could no longer bear, leaving him to be a vapor ghost on her window, a fog sure to vanish even before she turned from the window and here I am years later living in that same state, you miles away and I, knowing how presence disperses into air, wonder how long I can hold my breath.

1 I don’t understand this kindergarten assignment: “Draw Your Clan.” The three letters live in abstraction. A friend suggests mine looks like his, minus legs, and that day I believe my clan is a species of amputee Snipes, birds forced to fly the skies forever, and I wonder if we are meant to symbolize endurance or something beyond my five-year-old comprehension. 2 My mother explains we are not legless birds and if she had a more worldly vocabulary she would have suggested we were ambiguous, not quite a fish, more than a water snake, but she says we are among the few. The last Tuscarora Eel died out a generation ago, so we are left Onondaga Eels among the Tuscarora, voiceless as well as legless. 3 I find an encyclopedia photo, see jagged rows of razor teeth in a mouth perpetually grinning and when I show it to her, she says clans are a system to keep track of families, so we don’t inadvertently marry our relatives, and that we have no more affinity with eels than anyone else on the reservation has with their animals. 4 “If I threw you in the dike,” she says “you’d drown as fast as anyone else,” done with this lesson. I remember older cousins, swimming between my legs, and suddenly I am rising, their hands grabbing my knees as my balls collide with the backs of their necks, and they break the surface, toss me into deeper water, probably watching to make sure I surface, after they’ve had some amusement at my struggle. 5 In wet darkness, I imagine opening my eyes and mouth, taking water in, filling my lungs, discovering gills like Aquaman or Namor, the Sub-mariner. Knowing I had better odds of dying, face down, no voice to call out for help, I am never quite brave enough to try it, not daring enough, even, to open my eyes when my face breaks the stillness of river water contained. 6 But I flip on my back, ears below the surface, listen to mysteries, breathe shallowly at that level, and float, wondering what it would be like to glide the depths on fins, knowing if I were there, I would desire legs and lungs, and then I fill my chest to capacity, and dive, loving and begrudging the ache I find there, the throbbing of my chest begging for release, and I swim back up, eyes still closed, wondering how long it will take to find the surface again.

I stood in a longhouse with a woman who may or may not be Mohawk. Some shift their opinions about her like meteorologists, as if her blood were a storm system tracked in its comings and goings. But the father of her two sons was, without question, Seneca. We knew that, in Haudenosaunee country, a father is to some degree irrelevant, that her own shifting identity would impact her sons’ lives like a gene vulnerable to betrayal, causing certain, terminal conditions. She waited on an elder she called Steam (warning I was not to call the elder woman by that name). Steam (not Steam) would observe the boys, understand their natures, give them their Creator names defining their lives during the next ceremony. I confessed my namelessness, confessed my longhouse- and fluency- deficient community, and confessed that my clan mother, three hours away, did not know me well enough to give me a name, confessed my community followed a more casual ceremony. You find your name after a social misstep, a dubious facial feature, a birth defect. Names offer the name-givers comfort, that your challenge is harder than theirs, no matter the truth. Our names are a convoluted toughening of our skins. My name is not like Steam (no one is forbidden to use it). No one calls me Batman because of my status, my utility belt, my impressive batpole, my agility, my muscles, my profile in spandex, my virtues, but because I wore the cape to an older age than I should have, and could continue to wear it now, as that shit is not going away any time soon. Even kids who only know Christian Bale or Michael Keaton, lurking in latex and leather hood, still think Batman is my name. And this is why I have no memory for when or how you became the Bumblebee, what it means, beyond the literal. You soar in gardens, spend days ensuring growth, and if metaphors are at work here, this one seems true enough to keep you in amber wings, fuzzy yellow rings, black lacquer torso, and sensitive antennae. What metaphor suits the night I left on the Amtrak for Chicago, past 1:00 a.m., while you stood on the platform, watching those cars pull out, the night I wanted to leap from the train, stay? I cannot invent new names for the ways we slow, struggle, attempt to maintain the illusion of futures without measure, defy actuary numbers and because I have gone closer to the light than you have, the story is easier to craft and finesse than it should be. Pollination trails are smaller than those I’m forced to fly in, and lying in Little Rock, Santa Fe, Manhattan, Minneapolis, Seattle, hotel rooms, the ellipse of your name trail winds me home, waiting, dusted in pollen and history.