Wendy Rose

making promises they can’t keep. For you, Grandmother, I said I would pull each invading burr and thistle from your skin, cut out the dizzy brittle eucalypt, take from the ground the dark oily poison– all to restore you happy and proud, the whole of you transformed and bursting into tomorrow. But where do I cut first? Where should I begin to pull? Should it be the Russian thistle down the hill where backhoes have bitten? Or African senecio or tumbleweed bouncing above the wind? Or the middle finger of my right hand? Or my left eye or the other one? Or a slice from the small of my back, a slab of fat from my thigh? I am broken as much as any native ground, my roots tap a thousand migrations. My daughters were never born, I am as much the invader as the native, as much the last day of life as the first. I presumed you to be as bitter as me, to tremble and rage against alien weight. Who should blossom? Who should receive pollen? Who should be rooted, who pruned, who watered, who picked? Should I feed the white-faced cattle who wait for the death train to come or comb the wild seeds from their tails? Who should return across the sea or the Bering Strait or the world before this one or the Mother Ground? Who should go screaming to some other planet, burn up or melt in a distant sun? Who should be healed and who hurt? Who should dry under summer’s white sky, who should shrivel at the first sign of drought? Who should be remembered? Who should be the sterile chimera of earth and of another place, alien with a native face, native with an alien face?

The song is Gaelic now, peridot words the color of fresh timothy gathered by red-haired women; or the song is the bony white oak and rhythm of Miwu, a knowing that breathes against angles of granite and meets the ground in a flurry of sound. Or the song rides down from a star over burgundy boulders beneath a dazzling blue sky to find the old words buried deep in the earth. But this heart listens. This song.Hi-tsah-tsi-nah, the precious rain awakening. On this you come as a prayer in the flesh, on this you ride with the roll and rollick of rattlesnake. On this you sing volcanic birthing words and obsidian cools where the blood bubbles down. Oh look, a little girl is lost although she stands close to her mother’s heart. With great energy she scrapes the missionaries from her ribs. Shoulder blades curve around the spine and the pestle dances, acorns flying, and dust collects in the creases of her hands. Or she is kneeling in a small room at the edge of the mesa, polished black bone of earth, cherished piki stone, moving back and forth this act of love, grinding the corn until it is dark, brushing the white cornmeal into one basket, the blue into another, thinking already of the daughters she will bear glowing in the sun. Or she is standing at the bog inside a mountain meadow, hands raised up to tie back her hair with a thin red rag; seeds loosen and cling to her shoes, her stockings, her long skirt, her skin. She fearlessly walks through gold fiddleneck, small mountain lupines, clouds of white popcorn flowers fallen upward out of the ground to cover the hillside like snow. Or a woman gathers loop after loop of heavy rope to guide the head of the horse she straddles and sometimes she is the mare and the soft sandstone and the hot rocks rolling in acorn soup, trying to heal the gash spread across her path where the crescent moon has sliced the earth. Ocean to mountain to mesa, the bundle she carries is a sacred memory, a rainbow that arches from one side of the sky to the other. Or a woman is closing a steamer trunk, has to sit on it hard to get the latch through and the leather buckled; seagulls dive outside the wall of the ship, she hears their demands, maybe one has come inside to brush her cheek with its pointed wing or maybe just another tear warmed by cooling blood. How she aches in the cold, she is so thin; and when she pulls the blanket around her and lies down on the floor, she is no more than a pile of old rags, a few sticks of firewood, a broken broom. Steady against the roll of the sea she is patient as the rocks that wait for the ship along a northern corridor, angry as the storms midway across the Atlantic that shake their fists at those who must leave home, and as deeply hidden as the icebergs that threaten to disembowl. She has already seen the world dissolve; now she feels the breaking of one last thread to ancestral land, feels the very break of it.

Noon, March 6, 1997 From morning’s mouth the bones emerge, a prayer is whispered over rounded horns; the prairie is beyond the quivering hump and holy smoke sparkles released in the breath. Braided sweetgrass, be about their hooves; although the grip of hunger lies heavy on the land, let endless native grasses grow among the yellow stones and between the stars. Even if only one man had begun to sing, actually it was thousands, She who came to Wisconsin farmers and transformed their lives, She who brought her blessing in the form of being newborn, She whom they named the Miracle, White Buffalo Calf Maiden must return amid the fast firing of bullets, along the most perilous of paths. Rock stars, millionaires, they all offered millions of dollars to struggling white farmers but she had begun her transformation and her prophecy by touching them and they came to understand if not the actual words to the prayers at least the reverence, the need to protect, to keep the doors open. Like it was a hundred years ago bounties are gathered from death; trains, buses, cars, planes carry the segmented body of the terrible worm across the land and the screams of the hunted split the sun awake. It is time to restore the stolen beads and shards, the bones and knives to every grave. And the graves are graves no longer but wombs; the bounties burn their hands and bones come flowing from museum shelves to dance in the rippling grass, rebuilding lungs, starting hearts. There must be a hundred men and a hundred men’s worth of heartlessness; wished they could find Indians to kill but now that is illegal so they make up some excuse to raise their rifles and take aim, not hearing the rumble of buffalo prayer, not feeling tomorrow tremble or the prophecy of Miracle, and smile as they see the legs give way, the horns gouge open the prairie ground, Earth betrayed again.

September 11, 2001 They walk past you weeping for the leaves that burnt & fell, the wood exposed like bone, sculpture that suddenly emerges from white haze. You old fortune-teller, you could have told them in their vibrant grief whispering through the night wind your breath held in your heart like the trembling promise of tomorrow, just before dawn there was no pain you are the wood not the leaf, falling is not falling but offering.