Roberta Hill

“It isn’t a game for girls,” he said, grabbing a fifth with his right hand, the wind with his left. “For six days I raced Jack Daniels. He cheated, told jokes. Some weren’t even funny. That’s how come he won. It took a long time to reach this Yellow River. I’m not yet thirty, or is it thirty-one? Figured all my years carried the same hard thaw. Out here, houselights hid deep inside the trees. For awhile I believed this road cut across to Spring Creek and I was trucking home. I could kid you now, say I ran it clean, gasping on one lung, loaded by a knapsack of distrust and hesitation. I never got the tone in all the talk of cure. I sang Honor Songs, crawled the railroad bridge to Canada. Dizzy from the ties, I hung between both worlds. Clans of blackbirds circled the nearby maple trees. The dark heart of me said no days more than these. As sundown kindled the sumacs, stunned by the river’s smile, I had no need for heat, no need to feel ashamed. Inside me then the sound of burning leaves. Tell them I tumbled through a gap on the horizon. No, say I stumbled through a hummock and fell in a pit of stars. When rain weakened my stride, I heard them singing in a burl of white ash, took a few more days to rave at them in this wood. Then their appaloosas nickered in the dawn and they came riding down a close ravine. Though the bottle was empty, I still hung on. Foxtails beat the grimace from my brow until I took off my pain like a pair of old boots. I became a hollow horn filled with rain, reflecting everything. The wind in my hand burned cold as hoarfrost when my grandfather nudged me and called out my Lakota name.” In memory of Mato Heholgeca’s grandson

I In the cubbyhole entrance to Cornell and Son, a woman in a turquoise sweater curls up to sleep. Her right arm seeks a cold spot in the stone to release its worry and her legs stretch against the middle hinge. I want to ask her in for coffee, to tell her go sleep in the extra bed upstairs, but I’m a guest, unaccustomed to this place where homeless people drift along the square bordering Benjamin Franklin Parkway. From her portrait on the mantel, Lucretia Mott asks when will Americans see how all forms of oppression blight the possibilities of a people. The passion for preserving Independence Square should reach this nameless woman, settling in the heavy heat of August, exposed to the glare of every passerby. What makes property so private? A fence? No trespassing signs? Militia ready to die for it and taxes? Lights in the middle storeys of office buildings blaze all night above me. Newspapers don’t explain how wealth is bound to these broken people. North of here, things get really rough. Longshoremen out of work bet on eddies in the Schuylkill River. Factories collapse to weed and ruptured dream. Years ago, Longhouse sachems rode canoes to Philadelphia, entering these red brick halls. They explained how the law that kept them unified required a way to share the wealth. Inside the hearths of these same halls, such knowledge was obscured, and plans were laid to push all Indians , west. This city born of brotherly love still turns around this conflict. Deeper in the dusk, William Penn must weep from his perch on top of City Hall. Our leaders left this woman in the lurch. How can there be democracy without the means to live? II Every fifteen minutes a patrol car cruises by. I jolt awake at four a.m. to sirens screeching and choppers lugging to the hospital heliport someone who wants to breathe. The sultry heat leads me to the window. What matters? This small square of night sky and two trees bound by a wide brick wall. All around, skyscrapers are telling their stories under dwindling stars. The girders remember where Mohawk ironworkers stayed that day they sat after work on a balcony, drinking beer. Below them, a film crew caught some commercials. In another room above a mattress caught fire and someone flung it down into the frame. A woman in blue sashayed up the street while a flaming mattress, falling at the same speed as a flower, bloomed over her left shoulder. Every fifteen minutes a patrol car cruises by. The men inside mean business. They understood the scene. A mattress burning in the street and business deadlocked. Mohawks drinking beer above it all. They radioed insurrection, drew their guns, then three-stepped up the stairs. Film crews caught the scene, but it never played. The Mohawks didn’t guess a swat team had moved in. When policemen blasted off their door, the terrified men shoved a table against the splintered frame. They fought it out. One whose name meant Deer got shot again and again. They let him lie before they dragged him by his heels down four flights of stairs. At every step, he hurdled above his pain until one final leap gained him the stars. The news reported one cop broke his leg. The film’s been banished to a vault. There are no plaques. But girders whisper at night in Philadelphia. They know the boarding house, but will not say. They know as well what lasts and what falls down. III Passing Doric colonnades of banks and walls of dark glass, passing press-the-button-visitors-please Liberty Townhouses, I turned up Broad Street near the Hershey Hotel and headed toward the doorman outside the Bellevue. Palms and chandeliers inside. A woman in mauve silk and pearls stepped into the street. I was tracking my Mohawk grandmother through time. She left a trace of her belief somewhere near Locust and Thirteenth. I didn’t see you, tall, dark, intense, with three bouquets of flowers in your hand. On Walnut and Broad, between the Union League and the Indian Campsite, you stopped me, shoving flowers toward my arm. “At least, I’m not begging,” you cried. The desperation in your voice spiraled through my feet while I fumbled the few bucks you asked for. I wanted those flowers— iris, ageratum, goldenrod and lilies— because in desperation you thought of beauty. I recognized the truth and human love you acted on, your despair echoing my own. Forgive me. I should have bought more of those Philadelphia flowers, passed hand to hand so quickly, I was stunned a block away. You had to keep your pride, as I have done, selling these bouquets of poems to anyone who’ll take them. After our exchange, grandmother’s tracks grew clearer. I returned for days, but you were never there. If you see her — small, dark, intense, with a bun of black hair and the gaze of an orphan, leave a petal in my path. Then I’ll know I can go on. IV Some days you get angry enough to question. There’s a plan out east with a multitude of charts and diagrams. They planned to take the timber, the good soil. Even now, they demolish mountains. Next they’ll want the water and the air. I tell you they’re planning to leave our reservations bare of life. They plan to dump their toxic wastes on our grandchildren. No one wants to say how hard they’ve worked a hundred years. What of you, learning how this continent’s getting angry? Do you consider what’s in store for you?

—for Melissa L. Whiteman “Hi, guy,” said I to a robin perched on a pole in the middle of the garden. Pink and yellow firecracker zinnias, rough green leaves of broccoli, and deep red tomatoes on dying stems frame his still presence. “I’ve heard you’re not THE REAL ROBIN. Bird watchers have agreed,” I said. “ THE REAL ROBIN lives in England. They claim your are misnamed and that we ought to call you ‘a red-breasted thrush’ because you are indigenous.” He fluffed up. “Am I not Jis ko ko?” he cried, “that persistent warrior who carries warmth northward every spring?” He seemed so young, his red belly a bit light and his wings, still faded brown. He watched me untangling the hose to water squash. “Look who’s talking!” he chirruped. “Your people didn’t come from Europe or even India. The turtles say you’re a relative to red clay on this great island.” Drops of crystal water sparkled on the squash. “Indigenous!” he teased as he flew by.

“The experience of truth is indispensible for the experience of beauty and the sense of beauty is guided by a leap in the dark.” Arthur Koestler I. Stoplights edged the licorice street with ribbon, neon embroidering wet sidewalks. She turned into the driveway and leaped in the dark. A blackbird perched on the bouncing twig of a maple, heard her whisper, “Stranger, lover, the lost days are over. While I walk from car to door, something inward opens like four o’clocks in rain. Earth, cold from autumn, pulls me. I can’t breathe the same with dirt for marrow and mist for skin, blurring my vision, my vision’s separate self. I stand drunk in this glitter, under the sky’s grey shelter. The city maple, not half so bitter, hurls itself in two directions, until both tips darken and disappear, as I darken my reflection in the smoking mirror of my home. How faint the sound of dry leaves, like the clattering keys of another morning, another world.” II. She looked out the window at some inward greying door. The maple held her glance, made ground fog from her cigarette. Beyond uneven stairs, children screamed, gunned each other down. Then she sealed her nimble dreams with water from a murky bay. “For him I map this galaxy of dust that turns without an answer. When it rains, I remember his face in the corridor of a past apartment and trace the anguish around his mouth, his wrinkled forehead, unguarded eyes, the foreign fruit of an intricate sadness. With the grace that remains, I catch a glint around a door I cannot enter. The clock echoes in dishtowels; I search love’s center and bang pans against the rubble of my day, the lucid grandeur of wet ground, the strangeness of a fatal sun that makes us mark on the margin of our loss, trust in the gossamer of touch, trust in the late-plowed field.” III. When the sun opened clouds and walked into her mongrel soul, she chopped celery into rocky remnants of the sea, and heard fat sing up bread, a better dying. The magnet in each seed of the green pepper kept her flying, floating toward memories that throb like clustered stars: the dark water laughter of ducks, a tangle of November oaks, toward sudden music on a wheel of brilliant dust where like a moon she must leap back and forth from emptiness. “I remember the moon shimmering loss and discovery along a water edge, and skirting a slice of carrot, I welcome eternity in that sad eye of autumn. Rare and real, I dance while vegetables sing in pairs. I hug my death, my chorus of years, and search and stretch and leap, for I will be apprentice to the blood in spite of the mood of a world that keeps rusting, rusting the wild throats of birds.” IV. In lamplight she saw the smoke of another’s dream: her daughter walk woods where snow weighs down pine, her son cry on a bridge that ends in deep-rooted dark, her man, stalled on a lonely road, realize his torque was alcohol and hatred. “Hungry for silence, I listen to wind, to the sound of water running down mountain, my own raw breath. Between the sounds, a seaborn god plays his reed in the caverns of my being. I wear his amethyst, let go my dreams: Millars, Lacewings, and Junebugs scatter, widen and batter the dark, brightening this loud dust with the fever of their eyes. Oh crazy itch that grabs us beyond loss and lets us forgive, so that we can answer birds and deer, lightning and rain, shadow and hurricane. Truth waits in the creek, cutting the winter brown hills. It sings with needles of ice, sings because of its scar.”

I scratch earth around timpsila on this hill, while below me, hanging in still air, a hawk searches the creekbed for my brothers. Squat leaves, I’ll braid your roots into such long ropes, they’ll cover the rump of my stallion. Withered flower, feed us now buffalo rot in the waist-high grass. Hear my sisters laugh? They dream of feasts, of warriors to owl dance with them when this war is over. They don’t see our children eating treebark, cornstalks, these roots. Their eyes gleam in shallow cheeks. The wagon people do not think relationship is wealth. Sisters, last night the wind returned my prayer, allowing me to hear Dog Soldiers singing at Ash Hollow. I threw away my blanket stained with lies. Above the wings of my tipi, I heard the old woman in Maka Sica sigh for us. Then I knew the distance of High Back Bone’s death- fire from another world away. Even they may never stop its motion. Yesterday at noon, I heard my Cheyenne sister moan as she waded through deep snow before soldiers cut up her corpse to sell as souvenirs. Are my brothers here? Ghosts bring all my joy. I walk this good road between rock and sky. They dare not threaten with death one already dead.

House of five fires, you never raised me. Those nights when the throat of the furnace wheezed and rattled its regular death, I wanted your wide door, your mottled air of bark and working sunlight, wanted your smokehole with its stars, and your roof curving its singing mouth above me. Here are the tiers once filled with sleepers, and their low laughter measured harmony or strife. Here I could wake amazed at winter, my breath in the draft a chain of violets. The house I left as a child now seems a shell of sobs. Each year I dream it sinister and dig in my heels to keep out the intruder banging at the back door. My eyes burn from cat urine under the basement stairs and the hall reveals a nameless hunger, as if without a history, I should always walk the cluttered streets of this hapless continent. Thinking it best I be wanderer, I rode whatever river, ignoring every zigzag, every spin. I’ve been a fragment, less than my name, shaking in a solitary landscape, like the last burnt leaf on an oak. What autumn wind told me you’d be waiting? House of five fires, they take you for a tomb, but I know better. When desolation comes, I’ll hide your ridgepole in my spine and melt into crow call, reminding my children that spiders near your door joined all the reddening blades of grass without oil, hasp or uranium.

White horses, tails high, rise from the cedar. Smoke brings the fat crickets, trembling breeze. Find that holy place, a promise. Embers glow like moon air. I call you back from the grasses. Wake me when sand pipers fly. They fade, and new sounds flutter. Cattails at sunrise. Hair matted by sleep. Sun on the meadow. Grey boughs lie tangled. The ground I was born to wants me to leave. I’ve searched everywhere to tell you my eyes are with the hazels. Wind swells through fences, drones a flat ache for hours. At night, music would echo from your womanless bedroom. Far down those bleaching cliffs, roses shed a torrent. Will you brush my ear? An ice bear sometimes lumbers west. Your life still gleams, the edge melting. I never let you know. You showed me and how under snow and darkness, the grasses breathe for miles.