Linda Hogan

When the body wishes to speak, she will reach into the night and pull back the rapture of  this growing root which has little faith in the other planets of the universe, knowing only one, by the bulbs of the feet, their branching of toes. But the feet have walked with the bones of their ancestors over long trails leaving behind the roots of forests. They walk on the ghosts of all that has gone before them, not just plant, but animal, human, the bones of even the ones who left their horses to drink at the spring running through earth’s mortal body which has much to tell about what happened that day. When the body wishes to speak from the hands, it tells of  how it pulled children back from death and remembered every detail, washing the children’s bodies, legs, bellies, the delicate lips of the girl, the vulnerable testicles of  the son, the future of my people who brought themselves out of the river in a spring freeze. That is only part of  the story of  hands that touched the future. This all started so simply, just a body with so much to say, one with the hum of  her own life in a quiet room, one of the root growing, finding a way through stone, one not remembering nights with men and guns nor the ragged clothing and broken bones of my body. I must go back to the hands, the thumb that makes us human, but then don’t other creatures use tools and lift what they need, intelligent all, like the crows here, one making a cast of earth clay for the broken wing of  the other, remaining until it healed, then broke the clay and flew away together. I would do that one day, but a human can make no claims better than any other, especially without wings, only hands that don’t know these lessons. Still, think of  the willows made into a fence that began to root and leaf, then tore off the wires as they grew. A human does throw off   bonds if  she can, if  she tries, if  it’s possible, the body so finely a miracle of  its own, created of  the elements and anything that lived on earth where everything that was still is.

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body. Sometimes the way in is a song. But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding, and beauty. To enter stone, be water. To rise through hard earth, be plant desiring sunlight, believing in water. To enter fire, be dry. To enter life, be food.

In the dark evening, my father and I walk down the road to the old house where my grandmother lived, and we see through the door an old woman's feet lifted up, tired, on a footstool, still in her thick stockings, the feet with legs and stockings looking just like Grandma's after bearing nine children who lived, standing, working all day, the kind of woman who made stacks of toast, platters of eggs for all of us each hot morning, did laundry, then lunch, supper, and worked with the animals or cleaning fish the rest of the day. I want to go open that door as I did so many times in the past, remembering not to slam the screen, as everyone would yell although I am now also older and finite, the seams of myself coming apart. How I wish I could go to that woman with her legs up and rub her feet, put liniment on her legs. Years have passed through the doors of that house, of memory, doors of the past and my father's eyes are sad, looking in, his own memories, not mine, thinking maybe of his mother and some of his old belongings, the stolen Colt of his own father, the bracelet he gave me with his R.A. number. Her memories are unremembered, as my grandfather's, as those before them, I think of what this poem is about, only partly about memory, our many losses. And walking with my father I walk with my grandparents, among the first to be numbered: #1556, #1555.

The weight of a man on a woman is like falling into the river without drowning. Above, the world is burning and fighting. Lost worlds flow through others. But down here beneath water’s skin, river floor, sand, everything is floating, rocking. Water falls through our hands as we fall through it. And when a woman and a man come up from water they stand at the elemental edge of difference. Mirrored on water’s skin, they are fired clay, water evaporating into air. They are where water turns away from land and goes back to enter a larger sea. A man and a woman are like those rivers, entering a larger sea greater than the sum of all its parts.

With lines unseen the land was broken. When surveyors came, we knew what the prophet had said was true, this land with unseen lines would be taken. So, you who live there now, don't forget to love it, thank it the place that was once our forest, our ponds, our mosses, the swamplands with birds and more lowly creatures. As for us, we walked into the military strength of hunger and war for that land we still dream. As the ferry crossed the distance, or as the walkers left behind their loved ones, think how we took with us our cats and kittens, the puppies we loved. We were innocent of what we faced, along the trail. We took clothing, dishes, thinking there would be something to start a new life, believing justice lived in the world, and the horses, so many, one by one stolen, taken by the many thieves So have compassion for that land at least. Every step we took was one away from the songs, old dances, memories, some of us dark and not speaking English, some of us white, or married to the dark, or children of translators the half-white, all of us watched by America, all of us longing for trees for shade, homing, rooting, even more for food along the hunger way. You would think those of us born later would fight for justice, for peace, for the new land, its trees being taken. You would think the struggle would be over between the two worlds in this place that is now our knowledge, our new belonging, our being, and we'd never again care for the notion of maps or American wars, or the god of their sky, thinking of those things we were forced to leave behind, living country, stolen home, the world measured inch by inch, mile by mile, hectares, all measurements, even the trail of our tears. With all the new fierce light, heat, drought the missing water, you'd think in another red century, the old wisdom might exist if we considered enough that even before the new beliefs we were once whole, but now our bodies and minds remain the measured geography.

To be held by the light was what I wanted, to be a tree drinking the rain, no longer parched in this hot land. To be roots in a tunnel growing but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves and the green slide of mineral down the immense distances into infinite comfort and the land here, only clay, still contains and consumes the thirsty need the way a tree always shelters the unborn life waiting for the healing after the storm which has been our life.

It was the time before I was born. I was thin. I was hungry. I was only a restlessness inside a woman’s body. Above us, lightning split open the sky. Below us, wagon wheels cut land in two. Around us were the soldiers, young and afraid, who did not trust us with scissors or knives but with needles. Tear dresses they were called because settler cotton was torn in straight lines like the roads we had to follow to Oklahoma. But when the cloth was torn, it was like tears, impossible to hold back, and so they were called by this other name, for our weeping. I remember the women. Tonight they walk out from the shadows with black dogs, children, the dark heavy horses, and worn-out men. They walk inside me. This blood is a map of the road between us. I am why they survived. The world behind them did not close. The world before them is still open. All around me are my ancestors, my unborn children. I am the tear between them and both sides live.

The language of cranes we once were told is the wind. The wind is their method, their current, the translated story of life they write across the sky. Millions of years they have blown here on ancestral longing, their wings of wide arrival, necks long, legs stretched out above strands of earth where they arrive with the shine of water, stories, interminable language of exchanges descended from the sky and then they stand, earth made only of crane from bank to bank of the river as far as you can see the ancient story made new.

Some of us are like trees that grow with a spiral grain as if prepared for the path of  the spirit’s journey to the world of all souls. It is not an easy path. A dog stands at the opening constellation past the great helping hand. The dog wants to know, did you ever harm an animal, hurt any creature, did you take a life you didn’t eat? This is the first on your map. There is another my people made of  the great beyond that lies farther away than this galaxy. It is a world that can’t be imagined by ordinary means. After this first one, the next could be a map of  forever. It could be a cartography shining only at some times of  the year like a great web of finery some spider pulled from herself to help you recall your true following your first white breath in the cold. The next door opens and Old Woman counts your scars. She is interested in how you have been hurt and not in anything akin to sin. From between stars are the words we now refuse; loneliness, longing, whatever suffering might follow your life into the sky. Once those are gone, the life you had against your own will, the hope, even the prayers take you one more bend around the river of sky.

How something is made flesh no one can say. The buffalo soup becomes a woman who sings every day to her horses or summons another to her private body saying come, touch, this is how it begins, the path of a newly born who, salvaged from other lives and worlds, will grow to become a woman, a man, with a heart that never rests, and the gathered berries, the wild grapes enter the body, human wine which can love, where nothing created is wasted; the swallowed grain takes you through the dreams of another night, the deer meat becomes hands strong enough to work. But I love most the white-haired creature eating green leaves; the sun shines there swallowed, showing in her face taking in all the light, and in the end when the shadow from the ground enters the body and remains, in the end, you might say, This is myself still unknown, still a mystery.