The Brooklyn Rail

Flesh and Ghost

1.
We’re the children of a great love, and a great violence.
We’re the grandchildren of a great love, and a great violence.
Our softness and our hardness are always at odds with those surfaces.
We ask them to be kind and to be gentle,
we tell ourselves to be kind and to be gentle.

Our hands shake in the early evenings.
They always shake in the early evenings
as the nights get long and we
we can’t see when they’ll end.

An infinite morning haunts our dreams because of its quietude,
because of its light and its air.
A cold air that bites when it‘s frigid,
deep down through our nose and into our mouth
and lower into our chest.
An air that is cloudy and
an air that is green
the green of the cedars and the mountains.

Go camping again, my sister,
go back into the woods where you feel safe.
I’ll come find you when you find morning.
I search for it myself and dream of an afternoon that we found in our youth.
I picked you up and held you high and carried you around as you squeezed on my neck
and called me big brother.
You danced at the powwow
you danced in circles
you told me to watch and to let you know
you danced good.

Twenty two or twenty three Decembers gone and I remember you clearly.
I remember you now and I love you still.
You’ve got the road and
I’ve got the road and we’ll meet in the Yakima prairies
once we’ve walked through our stories
and slowly ease away from
our speed and our dread
that hurry our hearts
and exhaust our bones and our ancestors.

They’re not our ancestors, though.
They’re our mothers and our fathers sitting quietly alone
as we watch them make sense of their youth.
They’re clouds to us now,
just hues of light and recollections of feeling and emotion.
We imagined the colors were their dreams,
churning away in their memories.
Mnemonics of shape and reason,
on syncope and swaying,
as the anxieties of the gods sit heavy in the past.
And they say, such are things in dreams and autumn.

Ho-Chunk Holy Song
Saith the ghost,
'Dream, oh, dream again,
And tell of me, Dream thou!'

Into solitude went I
And wisdom
was revealed to me.
[Saith the ghost,] 'Dream, oh, dream again,
And tell of me, Dream thou!'

Let the whole world hear me,
Wise am I!
[Now saith the ghost.] ‘Tell of me, Dream thou!’

All was revealed to me; From the beginning
Know I all, hear me! All was revealed to me
[Now saith the ghost,] 'Tell of me, Dream thou!'"

2
We were at a loss of language,
except for what we could speak.
and I spoke and spake my way
right out of this place.
It's hot here still
and the humidity was never present
but lingers on the past in the ways
that memories tend to lazily lay.
I don't remember what was a memory
or what was a dream.
I imagine the colors were dreams
and the smells were memories.
It doesn't matter that much anymore
since
I'm home and here
and hot and bothered about the heat
and the place and the men
who couldn't teach me anything.
I love them anyway and
what am I but half asleep daydreaming those teachings.
I learned and I learnt the everyday absences
of strength and weakness.
That binary isn't good enough,
c'mon, downright bad.
We got in the car and we drove south
up and down the mountain back that way sidling through
the cool clear paths in the rain
and on the street.
Take it easy
we got plenty of time and we're always a little tight
and tonight we're home in a home I haven't been to
in such a long while.
Memories at my feet
And on the street
and in the little pains of everything
no one says nowadays.
They’ve moved on.
Hometown blues and I think of you.
I always think of you on days like this.
Until tomorrow,
when I wake up not remembering
anything and go bout my day til it's time
to remember everything.
Wherefore soft sounds
and disfluencies abound.