These early mornings become mist. A bridge empties it's people over this screen and nowhere is to be found that hint of the closure of the poem I've been leashed to for the last many years. I speak of it only to see it magnified and do not know if the edges have sharpened or softened.
I leave you with this: I miss poetry. I miss the way it use to tunnel under my skin and lay its eggs on the periphery: a nail balancing on the edge of my tongue. I do not miss the disasters that ensue with such poems, the ellipses that trail in circles around a fallen tree with question marks blooming out of my jacket pockets, or the silences smoothing down the nests where the poems lay, but I do miss the silence's shadow, how it shifted underfoot, becoming spoon or fork or kerosene. Something in recent years has made me turn away from such beauty. I think perhaps, at times, not all the time, but sometimes, I am waiting for a poem to come to me, the words, the hooked snarls, the plank where I jump quietly into the unknown, saad be nans'ch'a i', to return to me, and quilt its letters onto my blank pages again.
I extend my hand out, tug gently, and wait for my song to come spilling forth.
Aside from this battle for creativity and time, I have been in many places. A couple of weeks ago I was webcasted live for the first time from the National Museum of American Indian in Washington, DC. It was a strange experience to be reading to an audience I could see, and audience I could only imagine was out there (whoever got my last minute email regarding this reading) and the frightening realization that, the museum, will archive this reading and it will become artifact. Not a terrible thing really, but that word "artifact" does carry so much more sinister meaning with Native people than it should. It's probably similar to my experience at Brown University when the students I visited, in Orlando White's introduction poetry class, would talk about having gone to boarding school in Vermont or in England somewhere. I was thinking: How terrible! I feel so bad for you. Its the 21st century, how could your parents be so cold-hearted? It wasn't until I later that I realized: I'm at Brown University, those kids did not go to the same boarding schools my grandmother had to run away from or one that my parents and their cousins attended. Orlando told me his boarding school experience and it sounded nightmarish, dark and lonely. Others have shared a similar story. I was a 'day-student', I was able to go home in the evening, but others had a dorm hall with military style beds with rough wool blankets to look forward to. My parents and many people say it wasn't as bad as people make it out to be, that they were able to find life-long friends, lovers and best of all, there was a sense of community there, shared laughter, etc. I've never asked them if they've had to brush the dining hall floor with a tooth brush, or if they were slapped upside the head when they uttered a word in their native language. But each of former dorm student has their own experiences, their own story. I've met many over the years. My whole family with the exception of those of us who lived near the highway, who were able to take the cheese-box bus to school, attended at some point in their lives a BIA school. My story begins on the same campus, in the same time zone, I was just able to walk away more often.
I leave you with this: I miss poetry. I miss the way it use to tunnel under my skin and lay its eggs on the periphery: a nail balancing on the edge of my tongue. I do not miss the disasters that ensue with such poems, the ellipses that trail in circles around a fallen tree with question marks blooming out of my jacket pockets, or the silences smoothing down the nests where the poems lay, but I do miss the silence's shadow, how it shifted underfoot, becoming spoon or fork or kerosene. Something in recent years has made me turn away from such beauty. I think perhaps, at times, not all the time, but sometimes, I am waiting for a poem to come to me, the words, the hooked snarls, the plank where I jump quietly into the unknown, saad be nans'ch'a i', to return to me, and quilt its letters onto my blank pages again.
I extend my hand out, tug gently, and wait for my song to come spilling forth.
Aside from this battle for creativity and time, I have been in many places. A couple of weeks ago I was webcasted live for the first time from the National Museum of American Indian in Washington, DC. It was a strange experience to be reading to an audience I could see, and audience I could only imagine was out there (whoever got my last minute email regarding this reading) and the frightening realization that, the museum, will archive this reading and it will become artifact. Not a terrible thing really, but that word "artifact" does carry so much more sinister meaning with Native people than it should. It's probably similar to my experience at Brown University when the students I visited, in Orlando White's introduction poetry class, would talk about having gone to boarding school in Vermont or in England somewhere. I was thinking: How terrible! I feel so bad for you. Its the 21st century, how could your parents be so cold-hearted? It wasn't until I later that I realized: I'm at Brown University, those kids did not go to the same boarding schools my grandmother had to run away from or one that my parents and their cousins attended. Orlando told me his boarding school experience and it sounded nightmarish, dark and lonely. Others have shared a similar story. I was a 'day-student', I was able to go home in the evening, but others had a dorm hall with military style beds with rough wool blankets to look forward to. My parents and many people say it wasn't as bad as people make it out to be, that they were able to find life-long friends, lovers and best of all, there was a sense of community there, shared laughter, etc. I've never asked them if they've had to brush the dining hall floor with a tooth brush, or if they were slapped upside the head when they uttered a word in their native language. But each of former dorm student has their own experiences, their own story. I've met many over the years. My whole family with the exception of those of us who lived near the highway, who were able to take the cheese-box bus to school, attended at some point in their lives a BIA school. My story begins on the same campus, in the same time zone, I was just able to walk away more often.
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