of staying cognizant:some part of us always
out beyond ourselves
knowingknowingknowing
Are we all in training for something we don’t name?
to exact reparation for things
done long ago to us and to those who did not
survive what was done to themwhom we ought to honor
with griefwith furywith action
On a pure nighton a night when pollution
seems absurdity when the undamaged planet seems to turn
like a bowl of crystal in black ether
they are the piece of us that lies out there
knowingknowingknowing
1980
FRAME
Winter twilight. She comes out of the lab-
oratory, last class of the day
a pile of notebooks slung in her knapsack, coat
zipped high against the already swirling
evening sleet. The wind is wicked and the
busses slower than usual. On her mind
is organic chemistry and the issue
of next month’s rent and will it be possible to
bypass the professor with the coldest eyes
to get a reference for graduate school,
and whether any of them, even those who smile
can see, looking at her, a biochemist
or a marine biologist, which of the faces
can she trust to see her at all, either today
or in any future. The busses are worm-slow in the
quickly gathering dark. I don’t know her. I am
standing though somewhere just outside the frame
of all this, trying to see. At her back
the newly finished building suddenly looks
like shelter, it has glass doors, lighted halls
presumably heat. The wind is wicked. She throws a
glance down the street, sees no bus coming and runs
up the newly constructed steps into the newly
constructed hallway. I am standing all this time
just beyond the frame, trying to see. She runs
her hand through the crystals of sleet about to melt
on her hair. She shifts the weight of the books
on her back. It isn’t warm here exactly but it’s
out of that wind. Through the glass
door panels she can watch for the bus through the thickening
weather. Watching so, she is not
watching for the white man who watches the building
who has been watching her. This is Boston 1979.
I am standing somewhere at the edge of the frame
watching the man, we are both white, who watches the building
telling her to move on, get out of the hallway.
I can hear nothing because I am not supposed to be
present but I can see her gesturing
out toward the street at the wind-raked curb
I see her drawing her small body up
against the implied charges. The man
goes away. Her body is different now.
It is holding together with more than a hint of fury
and more than a hint of fear. She is smaller, thinner
more fragile-looking than I am. But I am not supposed to be
there. I am just outside the frame
of this action when the anonymous white man
returns with a white police officer. Then she starts
to leave into the wind-raked night but already
the policeman is going to work, the handcuffs are on her
wrists he is throwing her down his knee has gone into
her breast he is dragging her down the stairs I am unable
to hear a sound of all this all that I know is what
I can see from this position there is no soundtrack
to go with this and I understand at once
it is meant to be in silence that this happens
in silence that he pushes her into the car
banging her head in silence that she cries out
in silence that she tries to explain she was only
waiting for a bus
in silence that he twists the flesh of her thigh
with his nails in silence that her tears begin to flow
that she pleads with the other policeman as if
he could be trusted to see her at all
in silence that in the precinct she refuses to give her name
in silence that they throw her into the cell
in silence that she stares him
straight in the face in silence that he sprays her
in her eyes with Mace in silence that she sinks her teeth
into his hand in silence that she is charged
with trespass assault and battery in
silence that at the sleet-swept corner her bus
passes without stopping and goes on
in silence. What I am telling you
was never there. I say I am there.
1980
RIFT
I have in my head some images of you:
your face turned awkwardly from the kiss of greeting
the sparkle of your eyes in the dark car, driving
your beautiful fingers reaching for
a glass of water.
Also your lip curling
at what displeases you, the sign of closure,
the fending-off, the clouding-over.
Politics,
you’d say, is an unworthy name
for what we’re after.
What we’re after
is not that clear to me, if politics
is an unworthy name.
When language fails us, when we fail each other
there is no exorcism. The hurt continues. Yes, your scorn
turns up the jet of my anger. Yes, I find you
overweening, obsessed, and even in your genius
narrow-minded—I could list much more—
and absolute loyalty was never in my line
once having left it in my father’s house—
but as I go on sorting images of you
my hand trembles, and I try
to train it not to tremble.
1980
A VISION
(thinking of Simone Weil)
You. There, with your gazing eyes
Your blazing eyes
A hand or something passes across the sun. Your eyeballs slacken,
you are free for a moment. Then it comes back: this
test of the capacity to keep in focus
this
unfair struggle with the forces of perception
this enforced
(but at that word your attention changes)
this enforcedloss of self
in a greater thing of course, who has ever
lost herself in something smaller?
You with your cornea and iris and their power
you with your stubborn lids that have stayed open
at the moment of pouring liquid steel
you with your fear of blinding
Here it is. I am writing this almost
involuntarily on a bad, a junky typewriter that skips
and slides the text
Still these are mechanical problems, writing to you
is another kind of problem
and even so the words create themselves
What is your own will that it
can so transfix you
why are you forced to take this test
over and over and call it God
why not call it you and get it over
you with your hatred of enforcement
and your fear of blinding?
1981
TURNING THE WHEEL
1. Location
No room for nostalgia here. What would it look like?
The imitation of a ghost mining town,
th
e movie-set façade of a false Spanish
arcade, the faceless pueblo
with the usual faceless old woman grinding corn?
It’s all been done. Acre on acre
of film locations disguised as Sears,
Safeway, the Desert National Bank,
Fashion Mall, Sun Valley Waterbeds.
Old people, rich, pass on in cloistered stucco
tiled and with fountains; poor, at Golden Acres
Trailer Ranch for Adult Seniors, at the edge of town,
close by the Reassembled Church of Latter-Day
Saints and a dozen motels called Mountain View.
The mountains are on view from everywhere
in this desert: this poor, conquered, bulldozed desert
overridden like a hold-out
enemy village. Nostalgia for the desert
will soon draw you to the Desert Museum
or off on an unpaved track to stare at one saguaro
—velvety, pleated, from a distance graceful—
closer-on, shot through with bullet holes
and seeming to give the finger to it all.
2. Burden Baskets
False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
and by some who should know better:
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.
Yet suddenly for once the standard version
splits open to something shocking, unintentional.
In the elegant Southwest Museum, no trace of bloodshed
or broken treaty. But, behind glass, these baskets
woven for the young women’s puberty dances
still performed among the still surviving
Apache people;filled with offerings:
cans of diet Pepsi, peanut brittle,
Cracker Jack, Hershey bars
piled there, behind glass, without notation
in the anthropologist’s typewritten text
which like a patient voice tired of explaining
goes on to explain a different method of weaving.
3. Hohokam
Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around.
I try to pierce through to a prehistoric culture
the museum says were known as those who have ceased.
I try to imagine them, before the Hopi
or Navaho, those who have ceased
but they draw back, an archetypal blur.
Did they leave behind for Pima or Navaho
something most precious, now archaic,
more than a faceless woman grinding corn?
Those who have ceased is amnesia-language:
no more to be said of them. Nobody wants
to see their faces or hear what they were about.
I try to imagine a desert-shamaness
bringing water to fields of squash, maize and cotton
but where the desert herself is half-eroded
half-flooded by a million jets of spray
to conjure a rich white man’s paradise
the shamaness could well have withdrawn her ghost.
4. Self-hatred
In Colcha embroidery, I learn,
women use raveled yarn from old wool blankets
to trace out scenes on homespun woollen sacks—
our ancient art of making out of nothing—
or is it making the old life serve the new?
The impact of Christian culture, it is written,
and other influences, have changed the patterns.
(Once they were birds perhaps, I think; or serpents.)
Example: here we have a scene of flagellants,
each whip is accurately self-directed.
To understand colonization is taking me
years. I stuck my loaded needle
into the coarse squares of the sack, I smoothed
the stylized pattern on my knee with pride.
I also heard them say my own designs
were childlike, primitive, obscene.
What rivets me to history is seeing
arts of survival turned
to rituals of self-hatred. This
is colonization. Unborn sisters,
look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves,
see us not one-dimensional but with
the past as your steadying and corrective lens.
5. Particularity
In search of the desert witch, the shamaness
forget the archetypes, forget the dark
and lithic profile, do not scan the clouds
massed on the horizon, violet and green,
for her icon, do not pursue
the ready-made abstraction, do not peer for symbols.
So long as you want her faceless, without smell
or voice, so long as she does not squat
to urinate, or scratch herself, so long
as she does not snore beneath her blanket
or grimace as she grasps the stone-cold
grinding stone at dawn
so long as she does not have her own peculiar
face, slightly wall-eyed or with a streak
of topaz lightning in the blackness
of one eye, so long as she does not limp
so long as you try to simplify her meaning
so long as she merely symbolizes power
she is kept helpless and conventional
her true power routed backward
into the past, we cannot touch or name her
and, barred from participation by those who need her
she stifles in unspeakable loneliness.
6. Apparition
If she appears, hands ringed with rings
you have dreamed about, if on her large fingers
jasper and sardonyx and agate smolder
if she is wearing shawls woven in fire
and blood, if she is wearing shawls
of undyed fiber, yellowish
if on her neck are hung
obsidian and silver, silver and turquoise
if she comes skirted like a Christian
her hair combed back by missionary fingers
if she sits offering her treasure by the road
to spare a brother’s or an uncle’s dignity
or if she sits pretending
to weave or grind or do some other thing
for the appeasement of the ignorant
if she is the famous potter
whose name confers honor on certain vessels
if she is wrist-deep in mud and shawled in dust
and wholly anonymous
look at her closely if you dare
do not assume you know those cheekbones
or those eye-sockets; or that still-bristling hair.
7. Mary Jane Colter, 1904
My dear Mother and Sister:
I have been asked
to design a building in the Hopi style
at the Grand Canyon. As you know
in all my travels for Mr. Harvey
and the Santa Fe Railroad, I have thought this the greatest
sight in the Southwest—in our land entire.
I am here already, trying to make a start.
I cannot tell you with what elation
this commission has filled me. I regret to say
it will mean I cannot come home to St. Paul
as I hoped, this spring. I am hoping this may lead
to other projects here, of equal grandeur.
(Do you understand? I want this glory,
I want to place my own conception
and that of the Indians whose land this was
at the edge of this incommensurable thing.)
I know my life seems shaky, unreliable
to you. When this is finished I promise you
&nb
sp; to come home to St. Paul and teach. You will never lack
for what I can give you. Your affectionate
daughter and sister,
Mary.
8. Turning the Wheel
The road to the great canyon always feels
like that road and no other
the highway to a fissureto the female core
of a continent
Below Flagstaff eventhe rock erosions wear
a famous handwriting
the river’s still prevailing signature
Seeing those rocksthat roadin dreamsI know
it is happening againas twice while waking
I am traveling to the edgeto meet the face
of annihilating and impersonal time
stained in the colors of a woman’s genitals
outlasting every transient violation
a face that is strangely intimate to me
Today I turned the wheelrefused that journey
I was feeling too alone on the open plateau
of piñon juniperworld beyond time
of rockflank spread around metoo alone
and too filled with youwith whom I talked for hours
driving up from the desertthough you were far away
as I talk to you all daywhatever day
1981
YOUR NATIVE LAND,
YOUR LIFE
(1981–1985)
I
Sources
For Helen Smelser
—since 1949—
I
Sixteen years.The narrow, rough-gullied backroads
almost the same.The farms:almost the same,
a new barn here, a new roof there, a rusting car,
collapsed sugar-house, trailer, new young wife
trying to make a lawn instead of a dooryard,
new names, old kinds of names:Rocquette, Desmarais,
Clark, Pierce, Stone.Gossier.No names of mine.
The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5
south of Willoughby:long dead.She was an omen
to me, surviving, herding her cubs
in the silvery bend of the road
in nineteen sixty-five.
Shapes of things:so much the same