M.L. Smoker

The unsympathetic wind, how she has evaded me for years now, leaving a guileless shell and no way to navigate. Once when I stood on a plateau of earth just at the moment before the dangerous, jutting peaks converged upon the lilting sway of grasslands, I almost found a way back. There, the sky, quite possibly all the elements, caused the rock and soil and vegetation to congregate. Their prayer was not new and so faint I could hardly discern. Simple remembrances, like a tiny, syncopated chorus calling everyone home: across a thousand eastward miles, and what little wind was left at my back. But I could not move. And then the music was gone. All that was left were the spring time faces of mountains, gazing down, their last patches of snow, luminous. I dreamed of becoming snow melt, gliding down the slope and in to the valley. With the promise, an assurance, that there is always a way to become bird, tree, water again.

Several of my cousins lean up against the house, taking long drags from the pack of Marlboros we share. We have always been this way —addicted and generous. A pow wow tape plays from inside the open garage where two old uncles are thinking to themselves in the safety of its shadows. Our aunties are in the kitchen, preparing the boiled meat and chokecherry soup and laughing about old jokes they still hang onto because these things are a matter of survival. Outside, we ask about who was driving around with who last night, where so-and-so got beat up, whose girlfriend left him for someone else. (But she’ll go back to him, we all think to ourselves.) Aunties carry the full pots and pans to the picnic table, an uncle prays over our food in Assiniboine. We all want to forget that we don’t understand this language, we spend lots of time trying to forget in different ways. No one notices that the wild turnips are still simmering in a pot on the stove.

For James Welch The first harvest of wheat in flatlands along the Milk startled me into thoughts of you and this place we both remember and also forget as home. Maybe it was the familiarity or maybe it was my own need to ask if you have ever regretted leaving. What bends, what gives? And have you ever missed this wind?—it has now grown warm with late summer, but soon it will be as dangerous as the bobcat stalking calves and pets just south of the river. Men take out their dogs, a case of beer and wait in their pickups for dawn, for a chance with their rifles. They don’t understand that she isn’t going to make any mistakes. With winter my need for an answer grows more desperate and there are only four roads out. One is the same cat hunters drive with mannish glory and return along, gun still oil-shined and unshot. Another goes deeper into Assiniboine territory: This is the one I should talk myself into taking next. I haven’t much traveled the third except to visit a hospital where, after the first time, my mother had refused chemotherapy. And the last road you know as well as I do— past the coral-painted Catholic church, its doors long ago sealed shut to the mouth of Mission Canyon, then south just a ways, to where the Rockies cut open and forgive. There you and I are on the ascent. After that, the arrival is what matters most.

The time is important here—not because this has been a long winter or because it is my first at home since childhood—but because there is so much else to be unsure of. We are on the brink of an invasion. At a time like this how is it that when I left only a week ago there was three feet of snow on the ground, and now there is none, not even a single patch on in the shadow of the fence-line. And to think I paid a cousin twenty dollars to shovel the walk. He and two of his buddies, still smelling of an all-nighter, arrived at 7 am to begin their work. When I left them a while later and noticed their ungloved hands, winter made me feel selfish and unsure. This ground seems unsure of itself for its own reasons and we do not gauge enough of our lives by changes in temperature. When I first began to write poems I was laying claim to battle. It started with a death that I tried to say was unjust, not because of the actual dying, but because of what was left. What time of year was that? I have still not yet learned to write of war. I have friends who speak out—as is necessary— with subtle and unsubtle force. But I am from this place and a great deal has been going wrong for some time now. The two young Indian boys who almost drowned last night in the fast-rising creek near school are casualties in any case. There have been too many just like them and I have no way to fix these things. A friend from Boston wrote something to me last week about not having the intelligence to take as subject for his poems anything other than his own life. For a while now I have sensed this in my own mood: This poem was never supposed to mention itself, other writers, or me. But I will not regret that those boys made it home, or that the cousins used the money at the bar. Still, there are no lights on this street. Still, there is so much mud outside that we carry it indoors with us.