96 Memory poems

All the old photographs, hidden like buried Treasure. Broken prayer sticks under my dreams And my worn mattress. Each one like a postcard sent back Home; wonders only seen in slick travel magazines. Boxed up under my bed, colored souls on Kodak paper— I can still see Grandma’s smile next to her resting sheep dog. Like a blue lightning strike over the northern sky, Over two black houses, I pull the first leaf out, at random. A picture-flash: Tom and Susie Worker are sitting together On a couch covered with a large Navajo Chief’s blanket woven By her brown hands and sheep’s wool. The pattern of stripes— Blue to black to white, shifting like rain clouds to clear skies. My grandparents look tired. The day was Christmas 1992, With a little bit of snow on the Earth. Tired from traveling Over 100 miles away from their painted desert To the city, tired from raising eleven children of the Deer Spring before the Depression, before Roosevelt, Before the World Wars, before computers, before Satellite phones and televisions . . . . Outside, the north wind Was blowing Tuba City away. But, Grandma’s and Grandpa’s Eyes are glazed red from happiness. Outside, The clouds swelled full of snow and ice. A blue lightning flash, another photograph, another place: New York, 1985: I see the Statue of Liberty, tiny, like a pin Stuck in the gray ocean, surrounded by the wrought metal Edges of Gotham City. It was the only picture I took: The dollar-bill green lady holding her torch, guiding Moths, reality, men and ferries. As she stood in iconic Pose, Grandma flooded back, quickly: strong in her own green Velvet dress, she stretched dough over her palms, making frybread. A foghorn wailed just past the Emerald City’s fiery torch. My mind refocused on the warm glow of a new moon. The Lady’s light filled the starless sky like Grandma’s teardrop Turquoise and silver brooch. Made from a thousand tiny Kingman Nuggets, its shine captured in a perfect burst— A sunflower high on a green stem. Each seed a raindrop Made of smooth sky. When the sun touched the brooch, It was blinding. A perfect mosaic of water-light-sky stones. A blue strike—bright from a cigarette—steals Lady Liberty’s light. The Staten Island ferry moves on to Crow Agency, Montana. At Custer Battlefield, my cousins smile for a picture, tourists Next to Custer’s grave. Defiant, wearing dark shades, They hold up cans of Coors Light waiting for Custer to rise Again so they can take up their bows, arrows, uzis. Warriors, Proud and ready to hide deep in the yellowtail prairie grass. Their women and children safe in tipi camps by the Little Bighorn River. I know they would die again and again. Rise Again and again to put up more white marble tombstones. They would do this to save our future children, to save our Grandmas—Mary Black Eagle, Susie Worker, Great Great Great Grandmother Lefthand . . . . They would save our grandfathers too— Sonny Black Eagle, Tom Worker, the horned toad . . . . Lodge Grass Indians, the high school basketball team, plays A few miles from Mary’s block house and her ten grazing horses. Her basketball team is waiting for the final winning basket To end time, an orange ball to shoot dead the visiting team From Billings. Another war of Savages versus Whites. Won this time by the “Skins”—Class “B” State Champs again. Two Leggings, a ’49, a warrior’s party. The tranquil dark Raven feathers, a deep cold night fueled by a bonfire and beer. Victory runs hot, steaming piss into the trout-filled river Lined by a hundred cars, nights caws, and some more tame Drinking brawls. All night long, the happy Indian basketball Warriors sing ’49 songs:We won, but my dark-hair girlfriend Left with one of the blue-eyed. He na ya na

I found it in the wash, the orange shell I picked up on the beach that last time. One of my girls— the one named after you— must have found it in my room and wanted it. Clean calcareous curve, a palm open to nothing, reeking of sunshine and your death. For years I didn't know what to do with it. You would have liked this story: how a child slips grief into a careless pocket. Breaks it to pieces. Lets it go.

Far in a western brookland That bred me long ago The poplars stand and tremble By pools I used to know. There, in the windless night-time, The wanderer, marvelling why, Halts on the bridge to hearken How soft the poplars sigh. He hears: long since forgotten In fields where I was known, Here I lie down in London And turn to rest alone. There, by the starlit fences, The wanderer halts and hears My soul that lingers sighing About the glimmering weirs.

The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across that threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the weeds. Loren Eiseley A door opens in the wilderness. People cross through it–bloused women families Acquaintances friends all the ones I have loved Sleep-walkers night-walkers each dazed and shorn– Street aurous with ice, a snowfall scratched into Moons–and everything I’d known– Inside the bleak floating light of my lungs In the capillaries of my eyes a blood Glancing through the hatches– If I said I would always be grateful If I lied or touched with spite If night is just a foamline of shadows Though we were both lost–the door Opening–the fear of being shown Whole to the one who must love you still– And stopped as if on a walk to say Look at that and what matters what really counts And I’ll tell you everything if you promise I promise I stood at door and behind me heard Snow-plows scrape against roads At the center of night–unknown to yourself And the word I said out-loud to no one That meant it was all to no purpose The word for the desire inside destruction For everything that can never be brought back– Loose snow blown hard to each bank And the common reel of those who To avoid one extreme rush toward its opposite– Snow blasted to piles–and never opened up to Anything that could reach me until you reached me– Which hours belonged to us When was I unknowingly alone Why did you always return to walk here a path Behind my closed eyes shedding salt Dry snowfall and sticks–still were you here With me I might say The moon rose in the casement window The red-haired boy across the street has learned to ride his bike There are still picnics there are fountains And the world I am leaving behind says One learns to see one learns to be kind– I closed my eyes I closed my hands I shut down the fields in my arms The cattle on the plains veins ditches Blue ravines a gray bird Sailing through a poplar brake kids Throwing snow I closed the last swinging juncos Sheep wool caught on barbed wire I closed Fumes and clear patches of sky I seized The river the town I shut down The hard muscles of sleep farmlands Warming under midnight salt-lights scruff-pines On the ridge animals scattering across slopes I closed The smooth bone of evening a storm On the hills white and noiseless spindled Prairies where I was born I shut I seized The clouds I closed in ager–fervor–ardor

By the river years ago, recursive in memory, a finite moment, the past ended. Future began. The river flowed south. You were a man’s face floating among stones. By a river in autumn, willow leaves were yellow whisks in updrafts. We were not alone. Cottonwood boles twisted against banks, turtles dozed in the roots, bark slivered into water. The river sounded the swish of its name. You waded the Neosho as it meandered east. Two sandhill cranes fly overhead. Their legs stretch straight behind as they swim through air. Their grace is the river’s. No one saw flood-seined silt, gravel, broken mussel pearls. I stayed, you left. By the river I met you each day. I meet you each day. I will be meeting you in invariant futures. By the river leaves turn. Mud cracks pentagonal shapes. You return and leave. The river remains. By the river I was a child, I am grown. I remember water pooled, not moving.

Rings possess fingers. Fingers remember what the eyes have blocked. The blindness in this case is figurative. The figure in this case is curvaceous. ) Milled, folded, soldered. Inlaid omen. Mokume gane. Ifs as hinges. Ands as pins. Rings as reunions. ) In some remote pre-dawn eye slit the horizon largely the same the cinquefoils still chirpy and obliging the ox-eyed daisies and the daisies fleabane and the worts and weeds the thistles and yarrows still healing and exotic in their ways— Weeds bind. Tongues beard. Thimbles berry. Balms bee. Flags blue. ) Rain clarifies colors— colors reveal the brief ambition of these provincial weeds. In gullies, mosses soft, mosses bright as dyed suede feel rich beneath scrubbed feet. Rain—nature’s iteration— light paradiddles on the surface of the creek. How free-making this word (penniless) before a judge!

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill with a morning light so bright you can’t see beyond its windows into the afternoon. A kitchen falling through time with its things in their places, the dishes jingling up in the cupboard, the bucket of drinking water rippled as if a truck had just gone past, but that truck was thirty years. No one’s at home in this room. Its counter is wiped, and the dishrag hangs from its nail, a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist, blue aprons of rain, my grandmother moved through this life like a ghost, and when she had finished her years, she put them all back in their places and wiped out the sink, turning her back on the rest of us, forever.

I remember rooms that have had their part In the steady slowing down of the heart. The room in Paris, the room at Geneva, The little damp room with the seaweed smell, And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide— Rooms where for good or for ill—things died. But there is the room where we (two) lie dead, Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed Out there in the sun—in the rain.

There are rooms that know you, rooms you know & can name, rooms that rise & stutter into view if you stare long enough. Rooms where nothing happened but in your head, where the world went on apart from you, you trying to rise to it. Rooms with walls of white blocks, one window, the only sound the bang bang banging of the headboard against the wall, your bed still. The room where the bed fell on you, the room where the hand going down was not your own, the groping tongue the proof. The room you talked your way out of, four men of monosyllables, thick arms & necks flushed pink, closing in, emptying the air between. The room where you were walked in on, the room where you were the walker, both times the last time in that room. The room with no door, a woman across the threshold, you crawling to her, over her to the bathroom to press your cheek against the white, your name an indictment among the stalls. The room the sun never touched, the sound of cars dropping you to sleep, your pupils large & hungry for light.

A photograph on the back of a hand mirror resembles someone you knew who sang themselves utterly away. It cannot touch you or the sound of the rapids. Leave it, and walk farther crawling up my leg to find me all smiles attached to nothing. You and I can stay in the morning dew. My little telephone in the mulberry fields going unanswered on that blade of grass.