I speak and dream in English. I am a gifted writer and speaker of English. And that fact, in the small world of the Salish language and of the Spokane Indians, is cause for unequal amounts of celebration and grief.
151.
Thursday Is a Good
Day to Find an Empty
Church Where You
Can Be Alone
I want to believe
That my father and mother
Have found each other
In the afterlife
And become a new kind
Of husband and wife.
I hope they’ve built
A home by water
And have guest rooms
For all of us sons
And daughters.
But I don’t want to be
The atheist who prays
Only for himself,
So let me just say
That my mother and father
Would certainly prefer
To be alive and alive.
Maybe they can return
As birds. Listen.
I know this magic
Will never happen.
And maybe my faith,
Or lack of faith,
Is odd. But I don’t need
Answers. I just want
To be heard by somebody—
By the real and/or imaginary God.
152.
Pine
And now I need
To do something
Excessively Indian
So I will name
All of the pine trees
On the reservation.
That one is Mother
And that one over
There is Mother
And so is that third
Pine in the valley
And that tall one
On the ridge is Mother.
Okay, I’m either lazy
Or I have an arboreal strain
Of Oedipus complex.
So let me take this down
A few degrees.
That pine, the closest one
To my mother’s grave—
I imagine its roots
Will eventually feed
On what my mother
Will become
After many years
In the earth.
So let my mother
Be that tree
And let that one tree
Be my mother.
And let my Mother Tree
Turn every toxin
Into oxygen
So that my siblings
And I can finally
And simply breathe.
153.
Ancestry
My late mother is
The grandmother
Of this poem.
It is her
Descendant,
Disrespectful
Enough to reveal
That my late mother
Was conceived
By rape,
That most vicious
Of amendments.
Unlike me, this poem
Will question
My late mother
About her conception
And self-conception:
I’m sorry
To interrogate you.
I know you’re the victim
And should be treated
With respect.
But there are things
I’d like to know.
When did you first learn
You were the child
Of rape? Who
Told you? Why
Did they tell you?
Should I even
Call him
Your father?
Nobody wants
To be known
As a rapist’s daughter,
Do they?
I should tell
Everybody
You were raised
By a good man
Named James,
And not
By your biological
Father, yes?
Are you angry
With me
Because I’ve revealed
What you chose
To conceal?
I’m sorry
For this
Intrusion.
But I need
To know if you saw
The rapist’s face
When you looked
Into the mirror?
Did your mother see him
When she looked
At you?
Is it possible
That your mother
Loved you less
Than your siblings
Because of how
You were created?
Did you ever learn
How to be
Anything other
Than devastated?
Okay, stop, stop,
I want to stop
This poem
And drop
The facade.
I, Sherman Alexie,
Am the child
Of Lillian Alexie,
who was the child
Of rape.
I, Sherman Alexie,
Am the grandchild
Of rape.
My children are
The great-grandchildren
Of rape.
All of these descendants
Exist
Because of rape.
Rape is
Our ancestor.
Rape is
Our creator.
Rape is
Our Book
Of Genesis.
Rape is
Our Adam & Eve.
And yet.
And yet.
We never
Forget
That my mother chose
My father
Because of love.
I chose my wife
Because of love.
Our children
And grandchildren
Will choose
Their spouses
Because of love.
We continue
Lovingly
Despite
The crimes
Committed
Against any
And all
Of us.
How miraculous
Is that?
Dear Mother,
Dear Lillian,
Thank you
For choosing me.
Thank you
For your gifts,
Borrowed
And renewed.
Thank you
For my birth.
And for all
The plentitude
Of this
Half-vicious
And half-forgiving
Earth.
154.
Things I Never Said to My Mother
1.
I have two sons—your grandchildren—
One dark-skinned and one light.
That means they’ll have to fight
Slightly different enemies.
My dark son will have to be wary
Of angry white men with guns.
My light son will have to verbally battle
Angry Indians with sharp tongues.
2.
My sons ride city buses
To and from school.
They walk among thousands
Of strangers arranging
And rearranging themselves.
There are so many new
Skyscrapers
Being built
In our city of rain,
I wonder if
Everybody’s spirit animal
Is now the construction crane.
3.
Dear Mother, I live and work
In a black neighborhood. Well,
In a black neighborhood being
Gentrified. It’s good. I love it here.
Late one night, at my office
One mile from home, I stared
Out my window in an insomniac
haze.
Remember how crazed I used to be?
Turns out eight hours of sleep
Is the only vision quest I need.
Anyhow, as I stared out that window,
I saw a transformer sizzle
And spark down the block.
Accidental and gorgeous fireworks.
Then that transformer boomed
And turned the neighborhood
Into one large and powerless room.
In five minutes, the closed supermarket
Parking lot below me was crowded
With dozens of black teens and young adults.
A sudden party! And the bass that shook
Their car windows shook my office window!
Then, three minutes after the party started,
Six police cars pulled into the parking lot.
Oh, shit! Oh, shit! I wondered if somebody
Was going to get shot! But the cops stayed
In their cars, content to just be reminders
Of more dangerous possibilities,
While the black teens behaved like teens.
Twenty minutes later, the power came back.
I was surprised that it had been fixed
So quickly. Soon enough, the black kids
Vacated the lot. And the cops did, too.
It was one of those city nights where
Bad things could have happened.
But it was good things that shook the air.
The music and car engines and laughter
Only singing about love, not disaster.
4.
I ask my older son to define “abundant,”
And he shrugs and says, “That’s when
You have too much stuff. Like us.”
My younger son wants to maybe become a rapper,
But he doesn’t want to exploit black culture.
He wants to tell his urban Indian truth,
But he doesn’t want to be a colonial asshole.
He says, “Dad, I know I’ve got money and power,
Even though I’m just a kid. But I want to talk
About all the evil shit in the world.” I say, “Son,
You just gotta be honest when you’re trying
To be a socially conscious artist in your village.”
And he says, “I’m gonna be honest from the start
Because my rap name will be Lil’ Privilege.”
5.
Dear Mother, at your funeral,
Your grandson said, “I didn’t know her
Very well. And I think I missed out
On good things, didn’t I?”
I said to him, “Kid, you didn’t learn
About some magic. That’s true.
But we have also kept you
Two hundred and ninety-two miles
Removed from the tragic.
I mean—you have never seen
Another Indian even take a sip of booze.
That’s the best kind of indigenous news.”
A few weeks later, back in Seattle,
My son imitated me at the supermarket.
He hunched over the cart, puffed out
His belly, and said in his best rez accent,
“Ah, shit, I hate that tofu disguised as meat.
It’s phony. Now go find me some turkey baloney.”
Ah, I love that my sons trust me enough
To mock me to my face.
That’s the best kind
Of familial grace.
6.
I once saw the moon fully
Reflected in a mirrored skyscraper
Then fracture into one hundred moons
As I drove under and beyond.
There are a million freeway exits
And I’ve taken maybe 99 of them.
There’s a dude who sells hot dogs
Half price if you prove you’re half in love.
Everything, everything, everything
Can be installation art.
7.
Mother, I know
I was a sad little fucker.
I cried all the time.
It wasn’t pretty.
But I wasn’t always
Crying because of you.
I was crying because
I was born to live in the city.
And now I do.
Thank God, I do.
155.
Tattoo
WHEN THEY WERE very young and dating, my mother and father, Lillian and Sherman, got tattoos of each other’s names on their left wrists.
It was my mother’s first and only tattoo. My father would eventually get forty-two tattoos, but most of them were of the ink-pen-and-lighter variety. He received none of them while sober. And he got at least a dozen of them while in jail.
But my parents were sober and inexperienced when they got those first tattoos. They couldn’t take the pain.
So my father stopped his tattoo at “Lil,” short for Lillian, though nobody ever called my mother Lil.
And my mother stopped her tattoo at “Sh.”
156.
Scrabble
IN THE LAST hours of writing the last draft of this book, I realized that memoir is a partial anagram for mom noir.
157.
Public Art
At an open mike, I heard a poet proclaim
That her sadness was a beached whale on the shore,
And I complimented her on that metaphor.
But the poem that she had performed was not the same
As the poem that I’d heard. That poet seemed peeved
By my misinterpretation and turned away.
But I remain positive that her poem contained
Whales and sadness. And I happen to believe
That my sadness does beach me like a confused whale,
While my mania turns me into the love child
Of a rescued whale and hummingbird, too wild
To remain in the sea and too overscaled
For flight. But, wait, sometimes, my mania lets me
Become the great blue whale hovering over
A single orchid. Sometimes, being bipolar
Lets me ignore physics. Ha! Who needs gravity?
Look at me! Look at me! I am antimatter!
I am mammal and the opposite of mammal.
My wings are carved from glass. My flukes are enamel.
Watch me fly. Watch me fall. Applaud when I shatter.
158.
What I Have Learned
THE SPOKANE INDIAN word for salmon is pronounced shim-schleets.
The Spokane Indian word for a male’s mother is pronounced skoo-ee.
These are approximate pronunciations. This is phonetics. I can’t say the words very well. I have not learned how to hear the words, either. But I am practicing.
I will never be fluent in my tribal language, but I believe these are the two most important words for me to know.
My mother.
Skoo-ee.
My salmon.
Shim-schleets.
My wild salmon.
My wild mother.
Skoo-ee.
Shim-schleets.
Skoo-ee.
My mother as salmon.
My mother as salmon.
Skoo-ee.
Shim-schleets.
159.
Like a Bird
ON A SATURDAY morning in a hotel room in Bellingham—in an Oxford Suites that had three-dimensional art in the bathroom that spelled WASH in huge wooden capital letters—I confessed to my wife of twenty-four years that I had always been deeply ashamed of my acne-scarred back.
“Yes,” she said.
During the course of our long relationship, I’d admitted to a certain percentage of my various shames, like our marriage was a recipe and I needed to add a small, precise amount of vulnerability—but not a teaspoon more—in order for everything to turn out well.
“I have never told you the full extent of my embarrassment,” I said. “I need to tell
you now. So, okay, I have always moved and dodged and hid my back under sheets and pillows. I have used angles of light and shadows to avoid you being able to fully see my back. Even when we bathed or showered together. Even during sex. I’ve operated like an escape artist for two decades.”
She didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. I tend to fall in love with the unnamable. Then she spoke.
“I’ve seen your back,” she said.
“I want you to see it better,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. She looked amused, irritated, slightly baffled. She knew that she was again part of two narratives, one that was happening in real time and another that I was revising and editing even as the first was taking place.
That two-simultaneous-narratives shit must be equally aggravating and attractive to the nonwriter lovers of ever-distracted writers.
“This freaks me out,” I said. “But I am going to get naked and lie facedown on the bed. And I want you to look at my back. I want you to study my back. I want you to study my scars. I want you to tell me what they look like. I want you to touch the scars. I want you to trace their outlines with your fingertips. I want to feel you feeling my scars.”
I felt an odd combination of fear, pride, and idiocy, like I was about to jump out of a plane into deep woods where I would hunt a brown bear with a pocketknife. And so I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.