Dreaming a Way Home
for Ben and Dawn
Your head was light a few hours ago,
after the first six. You were flirting
with the checkout girl at Safeway,
handing her sweaty dollar bills, loose change
for the twelve pack under your arm,
songs in your head,
sun still high and burning.
Now, only four remain, crowded between
your legs, taking up space where children
might sit to listen
to the stories. You don’t want to share
the half-warmed cans with your friends
who sink like stones into a dirty sofa to watch
MTV babes flash across
a silent screen.
They are drunk enough.
Jim City Indian won’t shut up about
the importance of tradition, cheap
tape player pounds Dakata Hotain Singers
into choking smoke while the coke-whore
from two doors down
puts her tongue in a bro’s ear, his hands
down her shirt. They vanish
behind a door. Other bodies
slip past you, spread, blur, connect
and you
are suddenly afraid.
You begin to talk, to sing
your way out of the black silence that
is pulling down your eyes.
Your head is heavy.
Your voice grabs out like
someone falling.
A bone pushed through your skull
while you were sleeping
haunts you…
Navajos scare you.
Skinwalkers.
Bear medicine.
You sing out against it
and the emptiness.
And you try not to sleep.
Your head has grown so heavy
someone else must lift it.
Your wife’s hands empty
the last ones down the sink.
She sighs,
calls your name
into each hollow can, crushes
each one when you don’t answer.
The children begin to cry
and she is gone.
Your grandfather’s big ,shiny, square face
is bobbing like a tethered balloon
above you, trying to teach you the steps again
to that dance.
Don’t you remember
your small feet chasing his shadow?
He is suddenly angry, fingers on the lumpy
scarred flesh you offered again and again
beneath a burning sun and the tears
of the people. Have you forgotten?
Iktome on the ceiling walks
the four directions,
drops on your chest and you feel
a vague desire to weep.
Cell by cell
is the way to destroy a warrior now,
he tells you.
You have two choices;
Red Road.
Black Road.
You can no longer stagger in between.
Peacekeeper
I will be
a perfect sphere
that hands glide over,
protectors smoothing any signs
of roughness, any cracks.
I will say
I am a happy woman.
I will smile at my children.
I will lie with my husband
I will say that bruise was from a fall.
I will be
a perfect sphere,
in the center reborn, crumbling
away the edges that press
life into hard energy,
into battles
I can only lose.
All my grandmothers, celebrate!
I am a peacekeeper,
perfectly inert.
Sentinal Peak
The moon rises in minutes, leaving less
of him behind than the town holds onto.
He inhales her fullness, the line of light
along her edge, the sound
of Old Jimmy’s bent fingers clacking closed
the heavy bakery doors containing
sighing loaves of cooling bread.
His day is through
and he breathes it in.
He leaves the massive image of himself
clomping across cold concrete floors
with fifty pound sacks of flour, his name
mashed against a mixer wall, over and
over, “stupid Francisco”, “fat ass Francisco,”
The red arm of the clock that sweeps
his worth out in seconds.
He exhales and is reborn
into the night, a warrior
waking from suspended sleep, moon for sun
kissing his wide cheeks,
empty hands buoyant, waiting.
Shadows of birds
flitting from saguaro to shrub
are the only ones to know
his secret name
or how many times he has saved this town.
On his faded bike, wobbling
tire, eyes glaring, weaving through
stalled traffic, he pushes heavy legs
against creaking pedals until they become
the sturdy legs of a silver pony
hurling him toward the mountain’s
winding black tongue.
He is swallowed up and deposited
at the peak
where his grandfathers sat watch
for their enemies. He sits
and watches, certain
he is needed.
He lights a cigarette,
closes his eyes and becomes
a wide-winged bird circling, thermals
pulling him toward the face of the sky until
he smells pine cleaner on his fingers,
yeast in his hair, tiredness rising
from his pores and the weight
of his cashed check curled in his back pocket
anchoring him to earth. His mother
is below, walking from room to room,
hands ringing in their nervous orbit.
His father is in the back planting
a kick in the dog’s rib.
He sees himself on a bus, spreading
bills flat across the driver’s palm, pointing
north, thinking Boulder.
What he hears the moon saying
is private and sad.
He feels his own heaviness
against the gravel ground. Shifting,
he startles
a coyote that bounds
into the blackness.
He watches long enough
to know it won’t return, long enough
to see the stars wounding the night sky,
long enough
to feel his stomach yawn for his mother’s tortillas.
Then the mountain coughs him down perilous edges.
His shirt flaps behind him like a useless wing.
Sleep
I dream that Christ is a great white vulture circling
above tired fingers where I cling to an edge;
A mess I have somehow gotten into, hands sweating loose
from untrustworthy rocks, Christ becomes eagle
for a moment,
then a man
the wind struggles to keep buoyant
and I am falling, watching Christ
become vapor, scattered
clouds in a darkened sky.
I land on ice thick as scar tissue,
naked and listening
to a frazzled little penguin,
oily and yellowed, cartoon smile and
eyes like my own, lead me
to a hole, coax me to reach
a little further until I sink
into grey-green water that crushes the air from my lungs.
My hands are on the fin of something great
that pulls me deeper down and I go.
In a twirl of tangling grasses, my mother’s face,
bruised eyes turned to heaven, dances to a pressing current,
hands still counting each bead on a broken rosary.
From the sharp-toothed jaws of this dark beast come
thick sounds forming
words that kiss just behind my ear,
“You can’t rise without me,” over and over
until I am out of air and clawing
free of this scape,
this sleep and your skin
that is too close.
And I can finally breath.
I do not love you.
The White, White World
For Hummy, who should have never been taken away
The sunlight had delivered her, not Christ.
It crammed itself in the doorway
like the faces of her people
the day she was taken away.
It told her the men were gone now,
she could come out.
It spoke
in a voice they couldn’t hear, the angels,
demons, black-robed wives of Christ,
like her cries from within
the shed.
She was quiet now, like a finished prayer,
and she heard it call
with the smell of earth, her mother’s smell,
moist, life-giving – the soft voice of the river
saying, “Come to me. I will help you.”
She opened her eyes
like someone who had slept deeply and lifted
her head from the floorboards, filthy with the choking
stench of all that happened there.
She pictured her arm making sweeping arches
with a hard brush to clean it away.
The sun waited
like a patient grandmother.
It touched her foot and told her,
“Go. Quickly now.”
She pushed the woman parts
of her five year old body back inside herself
with the arm that wasn’t broken and
moved on her belly
like a black-eyed serpent across the floor,
out into the full light, warm and white.
The cracking
sound of the fire the men had set
licked the walls with a hot heat meant to send her
to heaven or hell.
She shut her eyes, dreamed of home
and moved with the tall grasses, the birds,
the angry hornets,
toward the call of the river
She slipped down the cool, clean mud of its banks
and let the waters pull her in.
She felt its touch, older than anything she could remember.
It washed their excrement from her,
all of it. Her blood tinted
the water and left her,
not for dead as they had.
It prayed circles around her
as her people would have done.
She opened her eyes to see the shed losing itself
to the frantic flames, the last abuse
it would endure, then
the black hems of the robes
coming over the rise with pails,
running faster and faster toward her.
Wild Boy
His hairs are always leaping.
Long shiny winding black snakes,
slithering to the spaces between my pillows.
There is nothing tight enough
to hold them all together and perhaps
that is what worried his mother who begged,
“Por favor, mi hijo, get a haircut.”
And maybe she was right, loosed or bound
those hairs pull for freedom.
They straddle pages of open books,
cling to screen doors,
embed themselves into purses, hats and jackets,
huddle near barely open windows
and the bottoms of shoes.
Some twirl around doorknobs,
others find their way into dresser draws.
Some cling to the fan’s wire cage and blow
like silly decorations and sometimes
I feel an itch between my legs
only to find one coiling near my thigh.
He will never go.
It is what I like to think.
It is the prayer just beneath my lips and his hair
woven expertly into the quilt
I cover myself with every night.
I know they are listening to my dreams
and using the phone when I am not looking.