making a late night phone call
from a closing Greyhound station
seven years ago you were accused
of stealing dark glasses;
you always were lean and hungry
a tall thin Indian going nowhere
it was when you thought
you could beat your way through hell,
instead you escaped
down a braided bedsheet
and never stopped letting go
WHITE NOISE
* * *
HALF HUMAN / HALF DEVIL (HALFBREED) MUSE
shutting off
a dripping faucet so there is no
leak, no leak, not a drop
my eyes want to push out, out
through mind-skin, arms and legs are propelled
through numb air, words writhe, wrists flare escaping
numbness, no sound, no sound
no movement, stuck, a blank
wound in a rope ball, tight, hard
spun, a drill bit piercing
earth, whir of steel exhaling rock
dust, drill bit biting, dog
gnawing bone, gripping ivory
hankering down on, grinding
giving up to giving over
lurch, lurching laconic
dance, drum rattle
gangly movement, offbeat, arm
bent over head, leg
straight out, head twisted and shift
of body to next feral contortion
animal skin taut, blood
paint, ochre skin, ash smell
pebbles encased trapped
in sound, pebbles rasp
against thin dry skin
a herd of rattles overtakes me
LETTER TO SIR JOHN A. MACDONALD
Dear John: I’m still here and halfbreed,
after all these years
you’re dead, funny thing,
that railway you wanted so badly,
there was talk a year ago
of shutting it down
and part of it was shut down,
the dayliner at least,
‘from sea to shining sea,’
and you know, John,
after all that shuffling us around to suit the settlers,
we’re still here and Métis.
We’re still here
after Meech Lake and
one no-good-for-nothin-Indian
holdin-up-the-train,
stalling the ‘Cabin syllables / Nouns of settlement,
/. . . steel syntax [ and ] / The long sentence of its exploitation’1
and John, that goddamned railroad never made this a great nation,
cause the railway shut down
and this country is still quarreling over unity,
and Riel is dead
but he just keeps coming back
in all the Bill Wilsons yet to speak out of turn or favour
because you know as well as I
that we were railroaded
by some steel tracks that didn’t last
and some settlers who wouldn’t settle
and it’s funny we’re still here and callin ourselves halfbreed.
* * *
1 F. R. Scott, “Laurentian Shield.”
STILL UNSAVED SOUL
If I hear one more word
I’m gonna howl
I’m gonna crawl outta my ‘heathen’
skin and trick you
into believing I am the Virgin
Mary and take you bed.
If I hear one more line
about your white church
I’m gonna start sitting and dancing
with all my ‘false gods’
in a giveaway dance and honour
you with all the ‘unclean’ sheets from my bed.
If I hear one more blessed thought
or witness one more holy act
I’m gonna throw up
thirty-five years of communion hosts
from this still unsaved soul.
FIREFLIES
1. I have since reconsidered Eliot
and the Great White Way of writing English
standard that is
the Great White Way
has measured, judged and assessed me all my life
by its
lily-white words
its picket-fence sentences
and manicured paragraphs
one wrong sound and you’re shelved in the Native Literature section
resistance writing
a mad Indian
unpredictable
on the war path
native ethnic protest
the Great White Way could silence us all
if we let it
it’s had its hand over my mouth since my first day of school
since Dick and Jane, ABCs and fingernail checks
syntactic laws: use the wrong order or
register and you’re a dumb Indian
dumb, drunk or violent
my father doesn’t read or write
the King’s English says he’s
dumb but he speaks Cree
how many of you speak Cree?
correct Cree not correct English
grammatically correct Cree
is there one?
2. is there a Received Pronunciation of Cree, is there
a Modern Cree Usage?
the Chief’s Cree not the King’s English
as if violating God the Father and standard English
is like talking back(wards)
as if speaking the devil’s language is
talking back
back(words)
back to your mother’s sound, your mother’s tongue, your mother’s language
back to that clearing in the bush
in the tall black spruce
3. near the sound of horses and wind
where you sat on her knee in a canvas tent
and she fed you bannock and tea
and syllables
that echo in your mind now, now
that you can’t make the sound
of that voice that rocks you and sings you to sleep
in the devil’s language.
FOR BRUCE, THE NIGHT WE SAT STUDYING CREE
Cree Language Structures and Common Errors in English bookend
my life. From somewhere between the two, I take a book down;
it opens graciously inviting me to, ‘take my shoes off and
come in for tea.’
I am an unexpected guest but I stay for supper and
as the evening lengthens I am offered the sofa but
“ahhh,” I say, “I’d feel displaced tomorrow if I stayed, but
thank you.”
the leftover Scrabble pieces of conversation,
cover the grocery list of conventional partings and
orchestrate the last agreed upon “bye.”
I close the book jacket and
slip it back into its empty space on the shelf.
CIRCLE THE WAGONS
There it is again, the circle, that goddamned circle, as if we thought in circles, judged things on the merit of their circularity, as if all we ate was bologna and bannock, drank Tetley tea, so many times ‘we are’ the circle, the medicine wheel, the moon, the womb, and sacred hoops, you’d think we were one big tribe, is there nothing more than the circle in the deep structure of native literature? Are my eyes circles yet? Yet I feel compelled to incorporate something circular into the text, plot, or narrative structure because if it’s linear then that proves that I’m a ghost and that native culture really has vanished and what is all this fuss about appropriation anyway? Are my eyes round yet? There are times when I feel that if I don’t have a circle or the number four or legend in my poetry, I am lost, just a fading urban Indian caught in all the trappings of Doc Martens, cappuccinos and foreign fi
lms but there it is again orbiting, lunar, hoops encompassing your thoughts and canonizing mine, there it is again, circle the wagons . . .
LEATHER AND NAUGHAHYDE
So, I’m having coffee with this treaty guy from up North and we’re laughing at how crazy ‘the mooniyaw’ are in the city and the conversation comes around to where I’m from, as it does in underground languages, in the oblique way it does to find out someone’s status without actually asking, and knowing this, I say I’m Métis like it’s an apology and he says, “mmh,” like he forgives me, like he’s got a big heart and mine’s pumping diluted blood and his voice has sounded well-fed up till this point, but now it goes thin like he’s across the room taking another look and when he returns he’s got ‘this look’ that says he’s leather and I’m naughahyde.
IT CROSSES MY MIND
It crosses my mind to wonder where we fit in this ‘vertical mosaic,’ this colour colony; the urban pariah, the displaced and surrendered to apartment blocks, shopping malls, superstores and giant screens, are we distinct ‘survivors of white noise,’ or merely hostages in the enemy camp and the job application asks if I am a Canadian citizen and am I expected to mindlessly check ‘yes,’ indifferent to skin colour and the deaths of 1885, or am I actually free to check ‘no,’ like the true north strong and free and what will I know of my own kin in my old age, will they still welcome me, share their stew and tea, pass me the bannock like it’s mine, will they continue to greet me in the old way, hand me their babies as my own and send me away with gifts when I leave and what name will I know them by in these multicultural intentions, how will I know other than by shape of nose and cheekbone, colour of eyes and hair, and will it matter that we call ourselves Métis, Métisse, Mixed Blood or Aboriginal, will sovereignty matter or will we just slide off the level playing field turned on its side while the provincial flags slap confidently before me, echoing their self-absorbed anthem in the wind, and what is this game we’ve played long enough, finders keepers / losers weepers, so how loud and how long can the losers weep and the white noise infiltrates my day as easily as the alarm, headlines and ‘Morningside’ but ‘Are you a Canadian citizen?’ I sometimes think to answer, yes, by coercion, yes, but no . . . there’s more, but no space provided to write my historical interpretation here, that yes but no, really only means yes because there are no lines for the stories between yes and no and what of the future of my eight-year-old niece, whose mother is Métis but only half as Métis as her grandmother, what will she name herself and will there come a time and can it be measured or predicted when she will stop naming herself and crossing her own mind.
THE SOUND OF ONE HAND DRUMMING
‘It is not the end of all being. Just a small stunting of a road in you,’¹ but
you will branch out into all directions of this country,
this nation-state inside of you waiting to come of age,
cede, or claim independence from the founding fathers of confederation
or thought
and all your tributaries will flow into the great dam of existence,
the watershed of doubt and creation
of your soul and others in this land of no returning
this fountain of youth and sorrow, and
print-dressed women will greet you and say, “kayas,”²
and kiss you on the cheek
call you relative,
call you to them for everlasting life
and who knows what will come of reading this bible
of technology in your soul,
if you have one that isn’t digitized yet,
the soul you pray with every new dawn of your life before
stepping into the headlines
of thought or waving goodbye
to good fellows who trod off to loftier things
in the big house of knowing,
peeling back words from spines
that vault into theories as ornate as rococo
and as cluttered as a bad relationship
with oneself or anyone else within reach
of those words that flow like milkweed from Philosophers while
the small single words
of brown women hang on
clotheslines stiff in winter and
thaw only in early spring but
no one takes them off the line because
no one wants last year’s clothes,
they’re the wrong colour and out of fashion and
if dead white men stopped writing for one thousand years and
only brown women wrote
that wouldn’t be enough
time for all the Indian youth to say what they had to
or enough for me and those of my kind,
the sharp-toned-and-tongued kind
who keep railing on about this stuff
when all well-mannered and sophisticated Indian types
would have reasonably dropped it long ago
because it’s just rhetoric,
guilt-provoking
and sounds like a broken record of an Indian beating a drum
or like an Indian beating a drum with a broken record,
or like an Indian breaking a record,
or like an Indian breaking a drum over a record
whose sound is digitized, on CD-ROM
complete with video and CD-quality sound.
* * *
1 “Thirst,” Robert Priest.
2 kayas: Cree for ‘it’s been a long time.’
MADE OF WATER
* * *
LIQUID PRAIRIE
I miss the North Saskatchewan that runs through
those trees that shoot up black and grand
from its cool hips,
I miss those spruce that
defy the flatness,
gloat at the pressing-palm sky, the
loaded-rifle earth and
grow anyway.
I sit on this thin coast
but haven’t yet been on that belly of water
they call the ocean.
THE GEESE ARE NOT WELCOME
the grass is puny here,
its threads stretch
to fill an oblivious sky,
a child’s arms strain
to be silk scarves in a prairie wind and
there is no wind here,
hardly,
no wind at all
no rolling wheat waves,
no grass dance or
bowing willow partners,
no floor to dance on
or prairie light to dance under,
there is no sky here,
just eroding
canvas cover
no weather here either,
to give me a piece of its mind when
I step outside;
no light that waltzes into town,
no light here,
hardly,
no light at all,
no filmmaker’s palette,
no simple equation of earth under sky,
just bossy cedars,
obnoxious ornamentals,
maudlin vines and
roses that flaunt
their breasts over fences,
leaves that wear out their welcome and
grass that never lets up growing green,
and no geese to haunt my winter clock.
there are no geese here; they are not welcome
INSTALLATION PIECE
When I arrived you were the first
one I met, as open as
a window in a storm,
as real as childbirth but
over time you grew
as dark as
a cellar and as lewd as
a bitter drunk and besides
I found that I came looking for
happily-ever-afters folded
in big trunks, transported
dovetailed in the back of a pickup
prayed them over Hell’s Gate
to your door but
my Saratoga
trunks were too heavy, together
we couldn’t lift them, you said
you just couldn’t carry
any more. So
I hired two moving men and
divided my things into
red carry-ons,
turquoise overnighters,
orange Pullmans and black Gladstones, stacked
them one on top of the other
like lovers, piled them
high and wide,
relocated romance
myself.
FIREFLIES
With half a headlight shining in my face I listen and go on without knowing the road ahead, all the corners and hills, knowing too well the road behind and the rest stops in between now and forever and all the faces, those ones I’ve chosen beforehand, look too familiar, familiar as the roads behind me only this time I listen and hear only the tapping of my heart, or is it my head which asks me to do something before it’s too late and now I recognize what’s shining in my face is the sun blinding me as I drive into it, and the west grabs me as any purse snatcher would out of the hands of my grandmothers who keep asking when I will find a man.
When will I find a man to oil these dry noisy bones, when will I plant a garden and grow children straight and tall, their sunflower heads heavy with dreams. “When,” they ask (with that old brown woman’s glint in their eye), “will the firefly finally catch me looking back” and lead me into my hottest flame, to warm the marrow in these bones, when my bed won’t hold me anymore, grown weary of my requests to wrap these joints that creak and groan with the weight of my own choices.
The old women cup their hankies in their sinewy hands and giggle and tease like mosquitoes buzzing around my head and they ask “What does he eat in winter?” I look blank faced and earnest and say “I don’t know,” and they slap their knees and burst into laughter, talking in Cree. I feel lost between their playful banter and the Cree syllables that summon me from long ago, syllables that know me but I don’t know them. They talk fast, banter and stifle their cackles and ask “whether he has teeth and which ones are left,” and they snort into their hands like insufferable children and one of them tells a story and they all shake like fools with laughter and straighten their scarves on their heads and pull their skirts over their knees that bob like ducks in water. They make more tea and laugh and I know that they do this because they know better and because they have met more fireflies.