I-gv-yi-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-sgo-hni-ho-’ i/
FIRST CHEROKEE LESSON: MOURNING
Find a flint blade
Use your teeth as a whetstone
Cut your hair
Talk to shadows and crows
Cry your red throat raw
Learn to translate the words you miss most:
dust love poetry
“It isn’ t a game for girls,”
he said, grabbing a fifth
with his right hand,
the wind with his left.
“For six days
I raced Jack Daniels.
He cheated, told jokes.
Some weren’ t even funny.
That’ s how come he won.
It took a long time
to reach this Yellow River.
I’ m not yet thirty,
After his ham & cheese in the drape factory cafeteria,
having slipped by the bald shipping foreman
to ride a rattling elevator to the attic
where doves flicker into the massive eaves
and where piled boxes of out-of-style
cotton and lace won’t ever be
decorating anyone’s sun parlor windows.
Having dozed off in that hideout he fixed
between five four-by-six cardboard storage cartons
You would have thought it foolish to speak to the dead,
but I have lived two decades longer now than you
and all this time I have carried you in my head
so I think I have the right to question what you said,
dear teacher. My religious upbringing’s residue,
you would have thought it foolish. To speak to the dead,
however, is sometimes necessary, especially haunted
by all the things I know you hoped I’d do
with all this time that I have carried you in my head.
In a dream last night I followed where you led
Today in Rome, heading down
Michelangelo’s Spanish Steps,
under an unchanging moon,
I held on to the balustrade,
grateful for his giving me a hand.
All for love, I stumbled over the past
as if it were my own feet. Here, in my twenties,
I was lost in love and poetry. Along the Tiber,
I made up Cubist Shakespearean games.
(In writing, even in those days,
Seeing my friend’s son in his broad-brimmed hat
and suspenders, I think of the Quakers
who lectured us on nonviolent social action
every week when I was a child. In the classrooms
we listened to those who would not take up arms,
who objected, who had accepted alternative
service in distant work camps and showed
slides of hospitals they helped to build.
On Wednesdays, in Meeting for Worship,
when someone rose to speak,
all the energy in the room
flew inside her mouth, empowering her to tell
The Doctor is glimpsed among his mulberry trees.
The dark fruits disfigure the sward like contusions.
He is at once aloof, timid, intolerant
Of all banalities of village life,
And yet is stupefied by loneliness.
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s crying with all her might and main,
And she won’t eat her dinner — rice pudding again —
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
I’ve promised her dolls and a daisy-chain,
And a book about animals — all in vain —
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain;
But, look at her, now she’s beginning again!
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.
It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.
But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.
And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.
So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes...
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.
It is not 1937 for long. A clump of ash trees and a walk
Down the the boathouse: inside linen is tacked up
In a long blank mural; the children sit on the wings
Of the dry dock, and then, over the water in a circle
Of rowboats, the aunts and uncles wait while
At their center the projectionist, Jean Renoir,
On a cedar raft, casts silhouettes of rabbits, birds,
And turtles for the sleepy children. Corks
Come out of old bottles, it is a few minutes past sunset
And, now, a swimmer beside the raft looks
