The doves were cooing in abundance when I returned from my quick, six-day trip to Durham, North Carolina. I don't know if the doves have any significance, but in Colorado June is a flighty month. You go away for a week or less, and when you come back, the terrain has changed again: more yellow wildflowers, purple and yellow columbines and many more doves. Do the new wildflowers signal the doves or do the doves signal the flowers? But the disturbing change has been the creepy sound of invisible insects. When I stepped out onto my front porch the morning after I got home, I thought I had entered into some ancient Biblical land. A plague is upon us, I thought, biblically. But I think it's bark beetles. Not quite sure, but I know they're headed this way because I saw their mess up at Jewell Lake this past weekend—brown trees everywhere, dried yellow pus overflowing from the places where the trees tried to expunge the parasite that ate them alive.
I searched the internet for bark beetle sounds and on one site it did say that they make clicking sounds. This is what I'm hearing everyday now. It's so loud that it drowns the other soft, morning sounds that I really want to hear: hummingbirds, perhaps a less voracious insect. If you stand beneath a tree, you feel like you've stepped in some hyper, surround-sound theater. And you can't see them. I just keep praying for a plague of rain that might tear their little beetle bodies to pieces.
It was quieter in North Carolina on the Duke University Campus so I didn't need to think of beetle bodies. The grasses were not green though because the state has been suffering from drought, but the Southern magnolia trees had me captivated. I've always loved the star magnolias, but these were trees that made me feel queenly when I walked by them. Their gigantic, closed, bulb-like blossoms sat heavily on slick, dark green leaves and then there were of course the opened blossoms as huge as water lilies that I've seen up in Rocky Mountain National Park. Every morning on my walk across campus to breakfast and small-group sessions, I passed beneath the mimosa trees too and breathed in their pink scent. They are the happiest trees alive, I'm convinced.
My students (only eight) this year were wonderful. They represented many tribes: Native Hawaiian, Santa Clara Pueblo, Tohono O'odham, Navajo, Haliwa-Saponi and Colville. Each had written an application essay that needed editing, which is why I have been going to these College Horizon programs for almost 10 years. I get to work one-on-one with each of the students to make their essays really shine. I love to read their stories about their families, their tribes, their land, their grandmothers, their sisters and brothers. And they are so eager to learn to write well. I am sad every year at the end of the program. I miss being around Indian people. I've worked now for almost 15 years with Winds of Change magazine. I am not a "wannabe." I don't wear Indian jewelry. I don't go to Santa Fe to buy Indian art (who can afford it?). I am just a little sad every year at the end of these summer sessions. At the Raleigh/Durham airport, a lot of our students were stranded because of cancelled or delayed flights. I passed groups of the students as we walked up and down the terminals. They smiled and waved and called out to me to tell me their woes of waiting. It was if I would see them again the following week. It is always like a dream, these programs, where you feel as though you will go on seeing these children forever. And then you don't see them again. Sometimes you do, years later, at some other Native event, but if I were to stop writing for Winds of Change tomorrow, I would never see them again.
I was thinking about all of this as I waited approximately four hours because my own flight had been delayed. On the plane, the plot thickened. I switched seats with a woman who wanted to sit with her husband only to find myself in the last row over the loud engine. Then, we sat for an hour while a mechanic tried to fix a broken seat that an overweight man somehow managed to crush (!). This delay caused 26 people to miss their connecting flights in Denver. Two people had to get off. Someone vomited in the aisle and I was seated next to two, overweight women. My little, dystonia-cramped body was not happy. I think I'll drive from now on. Flying has a way of stealing away the most delicate of memories. Especially now. The essence of a trip dissolves into the loud, chaotic rush of the airport. Much later, when I was laying in my bed at home, I had to make myself go back to soft, shadowy nights in North Carolina, sitting on a stoop on campus, every living thing around me slowly cooling, sounds of the students in the dorms laughing, Grandma Grace Settler, the Yakama elder who did the blessings and claimed she could heal people sitting next to me, smoking her evening cigarette, telling me her stories. And I listen, I listen.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Friday, June 6, 2008
Copper Nickel's Women Writing the West
For several days now, we have been struggling to pull up water from our well. Our pump burned out, literally. It's always been that way with us up here. Either not enough water and you've got to fracture the well, or your pump burns out. So, we've been heaving buckets of water up from the neighbor's house that my husband and sons are remodeling. Mark, the owner, doesn't mind. I used his dishwasher today and felt a quirky sense of thankfulness for clean dishes that had piled up. Mark stopped in and watched me scrub out his sink and we lazily chatted about whether he would sell this second home or move back up. He wants to be up here; his wife fears the twisty roads in winter.
The other day I got a pleasant note from an editor at the literary journal Copper Nickel. They have accepted two of my poems for their special edition of Women Writing the West. Copper Nickel is published out of University of Colorado Denver. They've published some good poets in past issues like Noah Eli Gordon, so I am very happy.
I tried to think what it meant to be someone who though not born in the West, has spent the last 27 years here in Colorado living in the mountains. I raised two kids up here in Pinewood Springs with my husband. We became adults up here. Though I'm inclined to feel "at home" most anywhere, (probably due to the frequent & rather jolting moves I experienced growing up), I know that whenever my husband and I entertain the idea of moving somewhere else, we usually end up musing about New Mexico, California, Washington, Arizona. Though different, these are states we particularly feel "at home" in, so I suppose I am very much a "Western" woman, whatever that means. But that is just a physical response. What I think I gleaned from my own poems, is that the West is still a place of dark turns, of something invisible that moves people to forget everything in the expanse of its terrible beauty. I cannot use the word "terrible" strongly enough. Because I have seen enough dark turns. Because I go on seeing them. It is not like being "in the wild." It is more like dreaming while awake. Some of the beauty renders nightmares; some of it wrests you to heaven. Like the icy canyon road that killed the 15-year old neighbor boy. But then the singular beauty. Like in Dana Gioia's poem, "California Hills In August." You learn to see the smallest detail of landscape and it brings you to this space in your head where you learn to love the simple, the sparse. To live in the West is to become haunted. Sometimes without benefit of water.
Here are my poems that Copper Nickel accepted:
Battered
Those boys must have learned
to bear the Wyoming wind
from snow fences bent along
the highway,
from fields
flat as their eyes
no asylum,
from tides of antelope
skirring through frozen needle-and-thread,
followed by the scud of grifters,
hypothermic vultures.
Beating
him to death,
they were like children
who had learned
first the burn of wind,
then to turn a cold cheek,
hands cupping ears
blocking the sound
of a wind with no beginning, no end.
They kept at it
how many times
they can’t remember
only that he had always been with them,
part of that wind,
the one intimate sibling.
********
Which is True
My children first opened their eyes inside the ivory petals of the yucca
I can touch the claretcup’s flower and disarm its needles
I found my sister’s earring beneath a juniper tree
A hurricane carries shells from the ocean floor to the desert
Once when I was small, a hurricane carried away all my dolls
It is warm at the top of a hurricane
All of my dolls lived to tell me this
My children too were born with inner springs,
malleable
My sister’s children are ancient as pictographs
They hold hands in rows across slickrock
Some of these children were torn through suction
A hurricane is an inverted suction
The juniper tree and the yucca plant are related
By a their waterless roots
You can watch river water turn to gold in the desert
My children disappeared in the desert
I found their footprints in the cryptogamic soil
Where there is no water you dream of hurricanes
Deserts and children are fragile; they change shape as you breathe
All the water in the world threatens to fill their lungs
The other day I got a pleasant note from an editor at the literary journal Copper Nickel. They have accepted two of my poems for their special edition of Women Writing the West. Copper Nickel is published out of University of Colorado Denver. They've published some good poets in past issues like Noah Eli Gordon, so I am very happy.
I tried to think what it meant to be someone who though not born in the West, has spent the last 27 years here in Colorado living in the mountains. I raised two kids up here in Pinewood Springs with my husband. We became adults up here. Though I'm inclined to feel "at home" most anywhere, (probably due to the frequent & rather jolting moves I experienced growing up), I know that whenever my husband and I entertain the idea of moving somewhere else, we usually end up musing about New Mexico, California, Washington, Arizona. Though different, these are states we particularly feel "at home" in, so I suppose I am very much a "Western" woman, whatever that means. But that is just a physical response. What I think I gleaned from my own poems, is that the West is still a place of dark turns, of something invisible that moves people to forget everything in the expanse of its terrible beauty. I cannot use the word "terrible" strongly enough. Because I have seen enough dark turns. Because I go on seeing them. It is not like being "in the wild." It is more like dreaming while awake. Some of the beauty renders nightmares; some of it wrests you to heaven. Like the icy canyon road that killed the 15-year old neighbor boy. But then the singular beauty. Like in Dana Gioia's poem, "California Hills In August." You learn to see the smallest detail of landscape and it brings you to this space in your head where you learn to love the simple, the sparse. To live in the West is to become haunted. Sometimes without benefit of water.
Here are my poems that Copper Nickel accepted:
Battered
Those boys must have learned
to bear the Wyoming wind
from snow fences bent along
the highway,
from fields
flat as their eyes
no asylum,
from tides of antelope
skirring through frozen needle-and-thread,
followed by the scud of grifters,
hypothermic vultures.
Beating
him to death,
they were like children
who had learned
first the burn of wind,
then to turn a cold cheek,
hands cupping ears
blocking the sound
of a wind with no beginning, no end.
They kept at it
how many times
they can’t remember
only that he had always been with them,
part of that wind,
the one intimate sibling.
********
Which is True
My children first opened their eyes inside the ivory petals of the yucca
I can touch the claretcup’s flower and disarm its needles
I found my sister’s earring beneath a juniper tree
A hurricane carries shells from the ocean floor to the desert
Once when I was small, a hurricane carried away all my dolls
It is warm at the top of a hurricane
All of my dolls lived to tell me this
My children too were born with inner springs,
malleable
My sister’s children are ancient as pictographs
They hold hands in rows across slickrock
Some of these children were torn through suction
A hurricane is an inverted suction
The juniper tree and the yucca plant are related
By a their waterless roots
You can watch river water turn to gold in the desert
My children disappeared in the desert
I found their footprints in the cryptogamic soil
Where there is no water you dream of hurricanes
Deserts and children are fragile; they change shape as you breathe
All the water in the world threatens to fill their lungs
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Spring's Sacred Bird
End of May. Spring is fast ending—at least as it is interpreted by May. Between graduation parties, weddings, work and more work, I've barely had the chance to enjoy the cool, pale green grasses and tiny wildflowers that are scattered across the trail I walk on every day to get to my mother-in-law's house. At 88, she still gardens like mad, but she totters more, so I like to check on her.
We have been getting submission after submission for the Native American section of the next volume of Many Mountains Moving. I have been sending stacks of poems and stories to Diane Glancy who is our wonderful section editor. So many voices from so many tribes across the U.S.
Had dinner with my friend Helen who is back for a quick, three-week hiatus from Thailand. She doesn't work but her husband, an engineer, oversees a factory for Seagate in a tiny village in Thailand. She has moved into an apartment in Bangkok because there is more to see and do. She invited me to come out to Thailand to visit her and I had to laugh. She is lovely, but I can't identify with her easy life of maids and drivers and long, listless days in a country inundated with sex trafficking.
Rachel was married over Memorial Day weekend and what a lovely wedding it was. The service was officiated by a priest and a rabbi. The prayers were spoken in Hebrew and English. The gazebo was completely shrouded in the white, delicate fabric of the chuppah. Aaron was one of the ushers so we finally got him to cut his long hair. Now, he looks like my son again!
I was able to dance a little before my feet finally gave out, but I am always so at peace when I am spending time with my husband and sons and Aaron's Kristin who sits by me and talks when I can't dance any more. I was happy as I watched Rachel dance in her white gown, white rose in her dark hair. I thought of a sweet poem I had read in Poetry by the 7th century lyric poet Alcman which was translated by A.E. Stallings:
Halcyon
O girls who sing so honey-sweet and true,
My dancing days are through,
My limbs don't have the strength to carry me.
If only I could be
A cerulean bird that flew
With the kingfishers over the bloom of the waves,
Heart unflinching, brave,
Spring's sacred bird, as purple as the sea.
We have been getting submission after submission for the Native American section of the next volume of Many Mountains Moving. I have been sending stacks of poems and stories to Diane Glancy who is our wonderful section editor. So many voices from so many tribes across the U.S.
Had dinner with my friend Helen who is back for a quick, three-week hiatus from Thailand. She doesn't work but her husband, an engineer, oversees a factory for Seagate in a tiny village in Thailand. She has moved into an apartment in Bangkok because there is more to see and do. She invited me to come out to Thailand to visit her and I had to laugh. She is lovely, but I can't identify with her easy life of maids and drivers and long, listless days in a country inundated with sex trafficking.
Rachel was married over Memorial Day weekend and what a lovely wedding it was. The service was officiated by a priest and a rabbi. The prayers were spoken in Hebrew and English. The gazebo was completely shrouded in the white, delicate fabric of the chuppah. Aaron was one of the ushers so we finally got him to cut his long hair. Now, he looks like my son again!
I was able to dance a little before my feet finally gave out, but I am always so at peace when I am spending time with my husband and sons and Aaron's Kristin who sits by me and talks when I can't dance any more. I was happy as I watched Rachel dance in her white gown, white rose in her dark hair. I thought of a sweet poem I had read in Poetry by the 7th century lyric poet Alcman which was translated by A.E. Stallings:
Halcyon
O girls who sing so honey-sweet and true,
My dancing days are through,
My limbs don't have the strength to carry me.
If only I could be
A cerulean bird that flew
With the kingfishers over the bloom of the waves,
Heart unflinching, brave,
Spring's sacred bird, as purple as the sea.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Needles and Nerves
A canyon wren's call is a lovely sound. A claretcup cactus in full, blood-red bloom is a spectacular sight. I thought of these things as I lay on my back with the acupuncture needles protruding from my ears, head, feet and legs. All this to quiet my nerves and to help with the painful dystonia in my feet, particularly the right foot that has a penchant to twist inward in the early mornings and late evening.
Needles.
I thought of the Needles area of Canyonlands where I was this past Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Utah is so beautiful this time of year. Little, salmon-colored lizards darted in and out of the slickrock and the thick, yellow barberry bushes were fiery with light. The world could have ended in the red sand for all I cared. I was diverted from my pain by dark green Mormon tea and the way the Indian paintbrush dared to place itself brazenly amidst this strangest of grasses. Orange mallow, scarlet gillia, ivory yucca blossoms, evening primrose and tall sage were like immutable prayers.
Needles.
I don't want to ever leave. I want to stay on this earth and take its pain and push it back again and out like giving birth a million times. I want to watch in silence how the gold light on the Colorado River sinks and rises and rearranges its shape like a nervous spirit. There is a nerve as raw as mine and yet translucent. I adhere to the colors and movement around me. They take me up with them.
Needles.
Carol pulls them out of my body, one-by-one, dozens of needles. I am afraid to move, afraid the days, the weeks will disperse the feeling of the desert into tiny particles that will sink below currents, below a surface I long to skim across like light. My feet are the heavy adversaries in this story. After needles though, they tingle and promise to behave. They have just been dancing in the desert.
Needles make you confess. You winch a little as they are put in and manipulated, but later, you sleep like you are truly sliding and skimming across a surface and you don't sink below. That fear is just an illusion. I say this to myself throughout the week as the beauty of the desert recedes gently. I walk my dogs through the crunchy pine cones along a familiar Colorado trail. My feet are working at this moment and I am happy. I must confess.
Needles.
I thought of the Needles area of Canyonlands where I was this past Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Utah is so beautiful this time of year. Little, salmon-colored lizards darted in and out of the slickrock and the thick, yellow barberry bushes were fiery with light. The world could have ended in the red sand for all I cared. I was diverted from my pain by dark green Mormon tea and the way the Indian paintbrush dared to place itself brazenly amidst this strangest of grasses. Orange mallow, scarlet gillia, ivory yucca blossoms, evening primrose and tall sage were like immutable prayers.
Needles.
I don't want to ever leave. I want to stay on this earth and take its pain and push it back again and out like giving birth a million times. I want to watch in silence how the gold light on the Colorado River sinks and rises and rearranges its shape like a nervous spirit. There is a nerve as raw as mine and yet translucent. I adhere to the colors and movement around me. They take me up with them.
Needles.
Carol pulls them out of my body, one-by-one, dozens of needles. I am afraid to move, afraid the days, the weeks will disperse the feeling of the desert into tiny particles that will sink below currents, below a surface I long to skim across like light. My feet are the heavy adversaries in this story. After needles though, they tingle and promise to behave. They have just been dancing in the desert.
Needles make you confess. You winch a little as they are put in and manipulated, but later, you sleep like you are truly sliding and skimming across a surface and you don't sink below. That fear is just an illusion. I say this to myself throughout the week as the beauty of the desert recedes gently. I walk my dogs through the crunchy pine cones along a familiar Colorado trail. My feet are working at this moment and I am happy. I must confess.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Of Flowers and Childbirth
Monday, March 31st, my son Aaron turned 23. My husband and I were still awake at 1:30 a.m. that morning and we remembered that Aaron had been born at exactly 1:01 a.m., 23 years ago. It took my breath away when I realized that I was not much older than he when I gave birth to him. I had just turned 26. His was a long labor, at least 24 hours and I was not well. I was always a thin girl/woman, still am, and I had small, but sturdy, premature babies. I was thinking about all of this as I walked my dogs this afternoon, winding through muddy trails and stepping across the pools of melted snow that collect in the gryke-like shallows of boulders. Then suddenly I looked down and there at my feet was a clump of just-opening Pasque flowers. "Too early," I moaned immediately. "Not yet," I warned them as I leaned down to take in their lavendar beauty. These "Easter flowers" that signal the arrival of spring had somehow been summoned to open when we have yet a month of potential blizzards.
Somewhere on the Internet I read that the Blackfeet Indians and other herbalists used Pasque flowers to induce abortions or childbirth. Early entities to bring about other early entities. And when did the Christians recreate it as a spiritual flower representing resurrection?
I worried about the Pasque flowers all the way back home. If a wet, cold snow comes, will they be gone forever this spring? Will I miss out on seeing the fields of them on Lion's Gulch trail this year? Will they just simply fold up tightly and then reemerge in late May? I am concerned about the separation of things from their source. Things should not happen so quickly, I argue to no one. Things should stay in their places and attach themselves to what sustains them. Why be in a hurry to emerge, separate, die? What a silly lament.
Once, a while back, I wrote a poem about giving birth to Aaron. My first born and though I rejoiced at his birth, even back then I hated that he was wrested from my body. An early entity he was and still to this day I think of his childhood as a quick blur, disappearing like so many Pasque flowers along a hillside, closing tightly, resurrection just a dream.
We Two
When he was being born,
I floated above the women
who held my legs
open.
There was a sea
below us, airy and bright,
and such momentum
as he rose,
I sank
and rose again.
White effluence tossed us
without sound
we exhaled into water and mist.
I longed to stay this way,
indwellling,
near a clear shallow.
Squalls, a sheet pulled against
skin and
we breathed in electric light.
Selves torn,
we slept,
marrow closing over gill.
(published in Many Mountains Moving, 2006)
Somewhere on the Internet I read that the Blackfeet Indians and other herbalists used Pasque flowers to induce abortions or childbirth. Early entities to bring about other early entities. And when did the Christians recreate it as a spiritual flower representing resurrection?
I worried about the Pasque flowers all the way back home. If a wet, cold snow comes, will they be gone forever this spring? Will I miss out on seeing the fields of them on Lion's Gulch trail this year? Will they just simply fold up tightly and then reemerge in late May? I am concerned about the separation of things from their source. Things should not happen so quickly, I argue to no one. Things should stay in their places and attach themselves to what sustains them. Why be in a hurry to emerge, separate, die? What a silly lament.
Once, a while back, I wrote a poem about giving birth to Aaron. My first born and though I rejoiced at his birth, even back then I hated that he was wrested from my body. An early entity he was and still to this day I think of his childhood as a quick blur, disappearing like so many Pasque flowers along a hillside, closing tightly, resurrection just a dream.
We Two
When he was being born,
I floated above the women
who held my legs
open.
There was a sea
below us, airy and bright,
and such momentum
as he rose,
I sank
and rose again.
White effluence tossed us
without sound
we exhaled into water and mist.
I longed to stay this way,
indwellling,
near a clear shallow.
Squalls, a sheet pulled against
skin and
we breathed in electric light.
Selves torn,
we slept,
marrow closing over gill.
(published in Many Mountains Moving, 2006)
Friday, March 21, 2008
The Audacity of Advertising
The new Volume VIII of Many Mountains Moving is out and it's gorgeous! If you would like to purchase a copy, go to our website: www.mmminc.org or send $12 to MMM, 549 Rider Ridge Drive, Longmont, CO 80501.
A poem I like from this journal:
Brown Christ
Yesterday, I saw God
A Brown Christ hovering
Above an onion field
Over tilled plains of Colorado
Frayed constellations of denim
Ox hide work boot
Broken at the heel
A curved knife gripped in his fingers
Low clouds undulating
Hair of broken lemongrass
& rodeo lasso
A fragrant beard of perejil
Everything else smelled of sulphur & manure
The silos wept
And snowflakes tumbled
Tenderly from the day moon
Refracting luminous congregations of aspen
With the music of truck dogs
Howling over accordions
Shimmering manna-light
-Tim Hernandez
A poem I like from this journal:
Brown Christ
Yesterday, I saw God
A Brown Christ hovering
Above an onion field
Over tilled plains of Colorado
Frayed constellations of denim
Ox hide work boot
Broken at the heel
A curved knife gripped in his fingers
Low clouds undulating
Hair of broken lemongrass
& rodeo lasso
A fragrant beard of perejil
Everything else smelled of sulphur & manure
The silos wept
And snowflakes tumbled
Tenderly from the day moon
Refracting luminous congregations of aspen
With the music of truck dogs
Howling over accordions
Shimmering manna-light
-Tim Hernandez
Happy Easter!
Every particle of matter is a Christ: each one come from nothing
to be nothing. The portions tell a different aspect of the story. The horses,
for example, with their heads in séance, illustrate the final moments of his
life: the sad glance down. The stone: his face with eyes closed. The eel: his
spirit swimming up.
-David Keplinger
From "The Prayers of Others"
to be nothing. The portions tell a different aspect of the story. The horses,
for example, with their heads in séance, illustrate the final moments of his
life: the sad glance down. The stone: his face with eyes closed. The eel: his
spirit swimming up.
-David Keplinger
From "The Prayers of Others"
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