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The Wild Divine
by Ada Limón

After we tumbled and fought and tumbled again,
he and I sat out in the backyard before his parents
came home, flushed and flowered and buzzing
with the quickening ripples of blood growing up
and I could barely feel my hands, my limbs numbed
from the new touching that seemed strikingly
natural but also painfully kindled in the body’s stove.
Oh my newness! Oh my new obsession, his hands!
I thought I could die and be happy and be humbled
by luck of a first love and a first full-fledged fuck.
I wanted to tell my ma. I wanted to make a movie.
I wanted to blast out of my bare feet to sky-town
as we passed the joint in the soupy summer’s air
too-spiced with oak leaves, eucalyptus, and smoke.
I thought I might have a heart attack, kind of craved
one, kind of wanted the bum-rush of goodbye
like every kid wants when they’re finally on fire.
Then, out of the stoned-breath quiet of the hills,
came another animal, a real animal, a wandering
madrone-skinned horse from the neighbor’s garden,
bowed-back, higher than a man’s hat, high up
and hitched to nothing. He rustled down his giant
head to where we sat, baked and big-eyed at this
animal come to greet us in our young afterglow.
He seemed almost worthy of complete devotion.
We rubbed his long horse nose, his marble eyes turning
to take us all in, to inhale us, to accept our now-selves
and he was older, a wise, hoofed, grizzled, equine elder
and I thought, this was what it was to be blessed—
to know a love that was beyond an owning, beyond
the body and its needs, but went straight from wild
thing to wild thing, approving of its wildness.

Torn // Witness the wet dead snake, / its long hexagonal pattern weaved / around its body like a code for creation, / curled up cold on the newly tarred road. / Let us begin with the snake: the fact / of death, the poverty of place, of skin / and surface. See how the snake is cut / in two--its body divided from its brain. / Imagine now, how it moves still, both / sides, the tail dancing, the head dancing. / Believe it is the mother and the father. / Believe it is the mouth and the words. / Believe it is the sin and the sinner-- / the tempting, the taking, the apple, the fall, / every one of us guilty, the story of us all. / But then return to the snake, pitiful dead / thing, forcefully denying the split of its being, / longing for life back as a whole, wanting / you to see it for what it is: something / that loves itself so much it moves across / the boundaries of death to touch itself / once more, to praise both divided sides / equally, as if it was easy.

from Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón

The new year ends a year of sorrow / spring finds everything fresh / mountain flowers laugh with green water / cliff trees dance with blue mist / bees and butterflies seem so happy / birds and fishes look lovelier still / the joy of companionship never ends / who can sleep past dawn

a poem by Cold Mountain

Exile of Memory
by Joy Harjo

Do not return,
We were warned by one who knows things
You will only upset the dead.
They will emerge from the spiral of little houses
Lined up in the furrows of marrow
And walk the land.
There will be no place in memory
For what they see
The highways, the houses, the stores of interlopers
Perched over the blood fields
Where the dead last stood.
And then what, you with your words
In the enemy’s language,
Do you know how to make a peaceful road
Through human memory?
And what of angry ghosts of history?
Then what?

Don’t look back.

In Sunday school we were told Lot’s wife
Look back and turned
To salt.
But her family wasn’t leaving Paradise.
We loved our trees and waters
And the creatures and earths and skies
In that beloved place.
Those beings were our companions
Even as they fed us, cared for us.
If I turn to salt
It will be of petrified tears
From the footsteps of my relatives
As they walked west.

I did not know what I would find

The first night we set up our bed in the empty room
Of our condo above the Tennessee River
They’d heard we were coming
Those who continued to keep the land
Despite the imposition of newcomers
And the forced exile of our relatives.

All night, they welcomed us
All night, the stomp dancers
All night, the shell shakers
All night circle after circle made a spiral
To the Milky Way

We are still in mourning.

The children were stolen from these beloved lands by the government.
Their hair was cut, their toys and handmade clothes ripped
From them. They were bathed in pesticides
And now clean, given prayers in a foreign language to recite
As they were lined up to sleep alone in their army-issued cages.

Grief is killing us. Anger tormenting us. Sadness eating us with disease.
Our young women are stolen, raped and murdered.
Our young men are killed by the police, or killing themselves and each other.

This is a warning:
Heroin is a fool companion offering freedom from the gauntlet of history.
Meth speeds you past it.
Alcohol, elixir of false bravado, will take you over the edge of it.
Enough chemicals and processed craving
And you can’t push away from the table.

If we pay enough, maybe we can buy ourselves back.

We used to crowd the bar for Tuesday ten-cent beer night.
It was the Indian, poetry, biker, and student bar
In that university and military base town.
Trays packed with small cups of beer passed nonstop
Over the counter all night.
We brought all of our thirsty dreams there
Gambled with them at the pool table, all night.
Danced with them and each other on the blood-stained dance floor
To jukebox songs fed by dimes and quarters, all night.
And by 2 A.M. we staggered out
To the world made by Puritan dreaming
No place for Indians, poets, or any others who would
Ride the wild winds for dangerous knowledge.

All night.

In the complex here there is a singing tree.
It sings of the history of the trees here.
It sings of Monahwee who stood with his warrior friends
On the overlook staring into the new town erected
By illegal residents.
It sings of the Civil War camp, the bloodied
The self-righteous, and the forsaken.
It sings of atomic power and the rise
Of banks whose spires mark
The worship places.
The final verse is always the trees.
They will remain.

When it is time to leave this place of return,
What will I say that I found here?

From out of the mist, a form wrestled to come forth—
It was many-legged, of many arms, and sent forth thoughts of many colors.
There were deer standing near us under the parted, misted sky
As we watched, they smelled for water
Green light entered their bodies
From all the leaved things they ate—

The old Mvskoke laws outlawed the Christian religion
Because it divided the people.
We who are relatives of Panther, Raccoon, Deer, and the other animals and winds were soon divided.
But Mvskoke ways are to make relatives.
We made a relative of Jesus, gave him a Mvskoke name.

We could not see our ancestors as we climbed up
To the edge of destruction
But from the dark we felt their soft presences at the edge of our mind
And we heard their singing.

There is no word in this trade language, no words with enough power to hold all this we have become—

We are in time. There is no time, in time.
We are in a traditional Mvskoke village, far back in time.
Ekvnvjakv is in labor, so long in time.
She is not young and beyond the time of giving birth.
The keeper of birthing is tracking her energy, and time.
My thinking is questioning how, this time.

A young boy wrestles with two puppies at the doorway.
A little girl, bearing an old woman spirit appears
With green plants in her hands.
Twins play around the edge of the bed.

Earth’s womb tightens with the need to push.
That is all that I see because of the fogginess of time.

I sing my leaving song.
I sing it to the guardian trees, this beloved earth,
To those who stay here to care for memory.
I will sing it until the day I die.

A Map to the Next World
by Joy Harjo
—for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

Shark and Cockroach
by Elder James Olson

Consider them, consider them
—The one
Streaking through ocean glooms,
Torpedo-swift,
Forever restless,
Swimming ceaselessly,
Enormous maw
—Teeth triple-tiered, razor-sharp—
Gaping, gaping,
Avid to devour
Fish, flesh, and fellow,
Bits of chain, old tires,
Anything, anything;
The other
Scuttling in darkness,
Ravenous for refuse,
Wallpaper, paint flakes, filth,
Glue, sawdust, wood chips,
Anything, anything;

Consider them:
Both insatiably voracious,
Forms old, almost, as Life;
So quickly perfected,
Since, hardly changed
(Their Maker satisfied);
There you have it—
A glimpse of the Great Design
As so far fulfilled,
And yes, your place in it;
The Cosmic Blueprint:
Mindless appetite,
Predator, scavenger;
All the rest,
Mere food.

The Man-Moth
by Elizabeth Bishop
—Man-Moth: a newspaper misprint for “mammoth”

Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.
Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the trains starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.
Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.
If you catch him,
hold a flashlight up to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Archaic Torso of Apollo // We cannot know his legendary head / with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso / is still suffused with brilliance from inside, / like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, // gleams in all its power. Otherwise / the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could / a smile run through the placid hips and thighs / to that dark center where procreation flared. // Otherwise this stone would seem defaced / beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders / and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: // would not, from all the borders of itself, / burst like a star: for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, from the collection Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
This is one of my all-time favorite poems from my all-time favorite poet. It’s uncertain what statue Rilke wrote of specifically, but the one I chose to draw is a likely candidate. I’ve read and reread this poem probably a hundred times.

GOLGATHA IN MY FATHER’S GARAGE
by Blaike Marshall

I dreamt I crucified my father in the garage.
Galvanized flesh to oak, a nail for the bottle
of pills taken all at once. Another for the son
she decided to keep, the rest for the days
we don’t discuss. The twin beams
conjoined at the torso, taller than I would ever
remember him, sang psalms that flipped
the flow of the Nile; waters running
red as always, with blood or wine, outlining
the delta in his palms. The air felt like the coast
before the hurricane, or an air after streets
have burned. And if a veil was torn, I didn’t hear it.
Resting in the plunging lump of his narrow neck—
an apology to me or himself, something we have
never shared. Between his outstretched arms hung
an air that felt like the only air I would breathe
from there on, an air that was always his.

A Poem in which I Try to Express My Glee at the Music My Friend Has Given Me
by Ross Gay
— for Patrick Rosal

Because I must not
get up to throw down in a café in the Midwest
I hold something like a clownfaced herd
of bareback and winged elephants
stomping in my chest,
I hold a thousand
kites in a field loosed from their tethers
at once, I feel
my skeleton losing track
somewhat of the science I’ve made of tamp,
feel it rising up shriek and groove,
rising up a river guzzling a monsoon,
not to mention the butterflies
of the loins, the hummingbirds
of the loins, the thousand
dromedaries of the loins, oh body
of sunburst, body
of larkspur and honeysuckle and honeysuccor
bloom, body of treetop holler,
oh lightspeed body
of gasp and systole, the mandible’s ramble,
the clavicle swoon, the spine’s
trillion teeth oh, drift
of hip oh, trill of ribs,
oh synaptic clamor and juggernaut
swell oh gutracket
blastoff and sugartongue
syntax oh throb and pulse and rivulet
swing and glottal thing
and kick-start heart and heel-toe heart
ooh ooh ooh a bullfight
where the bull might
take flight and win!

Promise of Blue Horses // A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning, / then the sun— / relating the difference between sadness / and the need to praise / that which makes us joyful. I can’t calculate / how the earth tips hungrily / toward the sun—then soaks up rain—or the density / of this unbearable need / to be next to you. It’s a palpable thing—this earth philosophy / and familiar in the dark / like your skin under my hand. We are a small earth. It’s no / simple thing. Eventually / we will be dust together, can be used to make a house, to stop / a flood or grow food / for those who will never remember who we were, or know / that we loved fiercely. / Laughter and sadness eventually become the same song turning us / toward the nearest star— / a star constructed of eternity and elements of dust barely visible / in the twilight as you travel / east. I run with the blue horses of electricity who surround / the heart / and imagine a promise made when no promise was possible.

Joy Harjo, “Promise of Blue Horses” from the collection How We Became Human

Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On // This morning when I looked out the roof window / before dawn and a few stars were still caught / in the fragile weft of ebony night / I was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me: / a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting, / and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer / in this city far from the hammock of my mother’s belly. / It works, of course, and deer came into this room / and wondered at finding themselves / in a house near downtown Denver. / Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song / to get them back, to get all of us back, / because if it works I’m going with them. / And it’s too early to call Louis / and nearly too late to go home.

Joy Harjo, “Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On” from the collection How We Became Human

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