Turtle Mountain Reservation

For Pat Gourneau, my grandfather

The heron makes a cross

flying low over the marsh.

Its heart is an old compass

pointing off in four directions.

It drags the world along,

the world it becomes.

My face surfaces in the green

beveled glass above the washstand.

My handprint in thick black powder

on the bedroom shade.

Home I could drink like thin fire

that gathers

like lead in my veins,

heart’s armor, the coffee stains.

In the dust of the double hollyhock,

Theresa, one frail flame eating wind.

One slim candle

that snaps in the dry grass.

Ascending tall ladders

that walk to the edge of dusk.

Riding a blue cricket

through the tumult of the falling dawn.

At dusk the gray owl walks the length of the roof,

sharpening its talons on the shingles.

Grandpa leans back

between spoonfuls of canned soup

and repeats to himself a word

that belongs to a world

no one else can remember.

The day has not come

when from sloughs, the great salamander

lumbers through snow, salt, and fire

to be with him, throws the hatchet

of its head through the door of the three-room house

and eats the blue roses that are peeling off the walls.

Uncle Ray, drunk for three days

behind the jagged window

of a new government box,

drapes himself in fallen curtains, and dreams that the odd

beast seen near Cannonball, North Dakota,

crouches moaning at the door to his body. The latch

is the small hook and eye.

of religion. Twenty nuns

fall through clouds to park their butts

on the metal hasp. Surely that

would be considered miraculous almost anyplace,

but here in the Turtle Mountains

it is no more than common fact.

Raymond wakes,

but he can’t shrug them off. He is looking up

dark tunnels of their sleeves,

and into their frozen armpits,

or is it heaven? He counts the points

of their hairs like stars.

One by one they blink out,

and Theresa comes forth

clothed in the lovely hair

she has been washing all day. She smells

like a hayfield, drifting pollen

of birch trees.

Her hair steals across her shoulders

like a postcard sunset.

All the boys tonight, goaded from below,

will approach her in The Blazer, The Tomahawk,

The White Roach Bar where everyone

gets up to cut the rug, wagging everything they got,

as the one bass drum of The Holy Greaseballs

lights a depth

charge through the smoke.

Grandpa leans closer to the bingo.

The small fortune his heart pumps for

is hidden in the stained, dancing numbers.

The Ping-Pong balls rise through colored lights,

brief as sparrows

God is in the sleight of the woman’s hand.

He walks from Saint Ann’s, limp and crazy

as the loon that calls its children

across the lake

in its broke, knowing laughter.

Hitchhiking home from the Mission, if he sings,

it is a loud, rasping wail

that saws through the spine

of Ira Comes Last, at the wheel.

Drawn up through the neck ropes,

drawn out of his stomach

by the spirit of the stones that line

the road and speak

to him only in their old agreement.

Ira knows the old man is nuts.

Lets him out at the road that leads up

over stars and the skulls of white cranes.

And through the soft explosions of cattail

and the scattering of seeds on still water,

walks Grandpa, all the time that there is in his hands

that have grown to be the twisted doubles

of the burrows of mole and badger,

that have come to be the absence

of birds in a nest.

Hands of earth, of this clay

I’m also made from.

Source: Jacklight (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984)