of my haunches, as I powerfully gathered
my tongue unfolded in a blur,
a sticky lasso,
and plucked a fly from his lapel—
my last wifely act.
2 Control
At first, I hated this body,
my lung-thin skin, my temptress spots.
I wanted red silk and you gave me this!
Advantages—my bones are bendable straws
through which I drink sun,
golden yolk, food of inner life, heat, tremendous wish.
And there is night and the many voices
seething delirium
universal mirrors that are my eyes
implacable gold
What you change cannot love you.
I told him that. He kissed me anyway.
3 Origin
I was hungry, so the author of all things
gave me the flies of sorrow to eat.
Gave me the underslung heroic couplets
of a man’s breast to drink from.
Gave me the perfect nothing
of my own original soul
to dive and dive in never touching bottom.
Sometimes I have the memory of what it was like
to be truly lovely
to dance by candlelight and tear the filmy cotton lace
off my nipples and draw you in.
Sometimes I have the memory of what it was like
to be another kind of food.
4 King Black Snake
My god, my predator,
to get away from you I change shapes.
I become the laughter at my core.
Time
My breasts are soft.
My hair is dull.
I am growing into the body
of the old woman who will bear me
toward my death,
my death which will do me no harm.
Every day the calico cat returns from the fields
with a mouse in her jaws.
After every bite of the tender lawn, the ground squirrel
jerks and flinches,
but no hawk drops out of the sky.
The fat creature continues to eat, nervously
stuffing itself with pleasure.
I watch him as I drink from a bottle of grassy wine.
Why do I long
to be devoured and to forget
in life rather than in death?
What is the difference?
Spring Evening on Blind Mountain
I won’t drink wine tonight
I want to hear what is going on
not in my own head
but all around me.
I sit for hours
outside our house on Blind Mountain.
Below this scrap of yard
across the ragged old pasture,
two horses move
pulling grass into their mouths, tearing up
wildflowers by the roots.
They graze shoulder to shoulder.
Every night they lean together in sleep.
Up here, there is no one
for me to fail.
You are gone.
Our children are sleeping.
I don’t even have to write this down.
Blue
I have moved beyond my life
into the blueness of the tiny flower
called Sky Pilot.
The sheer stain of the petals
fills the sky in my heart.
Over the field,
two bluebirds pause
on shivering wings.
They could as well have been a less glorious
color, and the flowers too.
Why were we given this unearthly radiance, this blueness,
if not to seek it out, to love it with all our hearts?
Thistles
for Persia
Under ledge, under tar, under fill
under curved blue stone of doorsteps,
under the aggregate of lakebed rock,
under loss and under hard words,
under steamrollers
under your heart,
it doesn’t matter. They can live forever.
The seeds of thistles
push from nowhere, forming a rose of spikes
that spreads all summer until it
stands in a glory of
needles, blossoms, blazing
purple clubs and fists.
Best Friends in the First Grade
I’m brave.
I’m kind.
These are our powers.
Boys are coming!
How about we lead them into a trap and run?
We’re both the bravest twins.
Identicals.
Only you like blue.
And I like orange.
Remember you have to act like
me and I have to act like you?
Don’t kill the spider.
I forgot the crocodile hole!
We both can’t die.
Our special rope tells us what to do.
I got you. I won’t let you fall.
I’ll shoot the jump rope over to the other side.
The king is chasing.
The rainstorm has heard our plan. Oh,
they are following us. We will have no choice
but to marry now. You will be a daughter.
I will be the rainstorm’s wife.
But watch out.
The king has poisonous teeth.
Little Blue Eyeglasses
for Aza
Little blue eyeglasses,
I give you the honored task
of assisting my youngest daughter
in her work, which is to see not only
general shapes but specific details
and minute variations in the color and texture
of objects ranging from immense
(Ocean. Sky.) To very tiny.
(Invertebrate hidden at edge of carpet)
Little blue eyeglasses,
I charge you with the solemn responsibility
of depth perception. Guide her steps
through dim corridors
and allow her to charge down
the staircase into my arms
without injury. Above all,
little blue eyeglasses,
train her eyes upon the truth
and let her eyes rest in the truth
and help her see within the truth the strength
to bear the truth.
Grief
Sometimes you have to take your own hand
as though you were a lost child
and bring yourself stumbling
home over twisted ice.
Whiteness drifts over your house.
A page of warm light
falls steady from the open door.
Here is your bed, folded open.
Lie down, lie down, let the blue snow cover you.
Wood Mountain
for Abel
The sky glows yellow over the tin hump
of Mount Anaeus, and below on the valley floor
the fog cracks and lifts.
Beyond it the throat of the river flares.
The river shakes its body
of terminal mirrors.
I saw you walk down the mountain yesterday.
You were wearing your stained blue jacket,
your cheap, green boots.
You disappeared into a tree
the way you always did, in grief.
I went looking for you.
In the orchard floored with delicate grass,
I lay down with the deer.
A sweet, smoky dust rose
from the dead silver of firs.
When I stand in the circle of their calm black arms
I talk to you. I tell you everything.
And you do not weep.
You accept
how it was
night came down.
Ice formed on your e
yelids.
How the singing began, that was not music
but the cold heat of stars.
Wind runs itself beneath the dust like a hand
lifting a scarf.
Mother, you say, and I hold you.
I tell you I was wrong, I am sorry.
So we listen to the coyotes.
And their weeping is not of this earth
where it is called sorrow, but of another earth
where it is known as joy,
and I am able
to walk into the tree of forgiveness with you
and disappear there
and know myself.
Advice to Myself
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic—decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
Morning Fire
My baby, eating rainbows of sun
focused through a prism in my bedroom window,
puts her mouth to the transparent fire,
and licks up the candy colors
that tremble on the white sheets.
The stain spreads across her face.
She has only one tooth,
a grain of white rice
that keeps flashing.
She keeps eating as the day begins
until the rainbows are all inside of her.
And then she smiles
and such a light pours over me.
It is not that white blaze
that strikes the earth all around you
when you learn of the death
of one you love. Or the next light
that strips away your skin.
Not the radiance
that unwraps you to the bone.
Soft and original fire,
allow me to curl around you in the white sheets
and keep feeding you the light
from my own body
until we drift into the deep
of our being.
Air, fire, golden earth.
Asiniig
The Ojibwe word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are alive. They are addressed as grandmothers and grandfathers. The universe began with a conversation between stones.
1
A thousand generations of you live and die
in the space of a single one of our thoughts.
A complete thought is a mountain.
We don’t have very many ideas.
When the original fire which formed us
subsided,
we thought of you.
We allowed you to occur.
We are still deciding whether that was
wise.
2 Children
We have never denied you anything
you truly wanted
no matter how foolish
no matter how destructive
but you never seem to learn.
That which you cry for,
this wish to be like us,
we have tried to give it to you
in small doses, like a medicine, every day
so you will not be frightened.
Still, when death comes
you weep,
you do not recognize it
as the immortality you crave.
3 The Sweat Lodge
We love it when you sing to us,
and speak to us,
and lift us from the heart of the fire
with the deer’s antlers, and place us
in the center of the lodge.
Then we are at our most beautiful,
Powerful red blossoms,
we are breathing.
We can reach through your bones
to where you hurt.
You call us grandfather, grandmother.
You scatter bits of cedar, sage, wikenh, tobacco
and bear root over us,
and then the water
which cracks us to the core.
When we break ourselves open—
that is when the healing starts.
When you break yourselves open—
that is how the healing continues.
4 Love
If only you could be more like us
when it comes to the affections.
Have you ever seen a stone
throw itself?
On the other hand
whose idea do you think it is
to fly through the air?
Mystery is not a passive condition.
To see a thing so perfectly what it is—
doesn’t it make you
want to hold it,
to marvel, to touch
its answered question?
5 Gratitude
You have no call to treat us this way.
We allow you to put us to every use.
Yet, when have you ever
stopped in the street to lay your forehead
against the cool, black granite facade
of some building, and ask the stone
to bless you?
We are not impartial.
We acknowledge some forms
of consideration.
We open for those
who adhere to our one rule
endure.
6 Infinite Thought
Listen, there is no consciousness
before birth or
after death
except the one you share
with us.
So you had best learn
how to speak to us now
without the use of signs.
Remember, there will be no hands,
except remembered hands.
No lips, no face,
except remembered face.
No legs and in fact no
appendages, except
the remembered ones,
which always hurt
as consciousness hurts.
Now do you understand what it is?
Your consciousness
is the itch, the ghost of consciousness,
remembered
from how it felt
to be one of us.
About the Author
LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of ten novels, as well as volum
es of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.
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ALSO BY LOUISE ERDRICH
NOVELS
Love Medicine
The Beet Queen
Tracks
The Bingo Palace
Tales of Burning Love
The Antelope Wife
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
The Master Butchers Singing Club
Four Souls
WITH MICHAEL DORRIS
The Crown of Columbus
POETRY
Jacklight
Baptism of Desire
FOR CHILDREN
Grandmother’s Pigeon
The Birchbark House
The Range Eternal
NONFICTION
The Blue Jay’s Dance
Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country
Copyright
The author would like to thank and acknowledge the editors of Georgia Review, in which “Time” originally appeared in slightly different form.
ORIGINAL FIRE. Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition August 2006 ISBN 9780061751400
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 0-06-093534-0
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