War in the GenesFrom War in the Genes “Aeons of Wishes” "Medicine-Meeting, Hoopa, 1994” “Before 9/ Aeons of Wishes The plum tree scratching hundreds of matches against a sky as black as the ceiling I'll stare at more centuries than I can say, my mother comes, summoned to cries of children frightened by lightning, as her mother came, not screaming from cancer gnawing intestines but calm and giving me cookies, a substitute grandma the one resurrection my Christian mom could offer her "Wild Indian" son, who was four and bored by all the lovey talk and strangers' names and finally stole some matches, which, when hit with rocks, cracked like cap-pistol shots – Dad drunk and shooting at ghosts again myself my mother's "little man" begging him to behave. He grew quiet, then quieter still, too quiet now for his kid, whose days of naughtiness – or most or some – have gone into wish for understanding. The pear belongs to the grandmother next door, who lit – years freeing her from city safety-laws – Mexican rockets, last Fourth of July, liberating sky over Monroe Street, Madison, Jefferson and Friendly, my daughter's president. She's five this fall, her birthday candle flames leaves of the plum, aeons of wishes starring a black cloud sky.
Medicine-Meeting, Hoopa, 1994 for Helen and Chad Telling the gathering I'm Cherokee – my skin, like the skins of many of them, the skin of soldiers who tore futures not rightfully theirs from the genes of defeated populations – my answers are Father's mother's: "Sassafras tea for congested lungs; mint leaves for troubled digestion; willow bark chewed for pain; tobacco breathed, into aching ears"– and words of love, to raise the dead in children's dreams of living as women and men.
Before 9/ for my daughter, Martina Oregon coastal cannon could not still One from a submarine, and a Sunday school class, Was sent to heaven because we Machine-gunners, training to kill Others, who'd try to down our bombers, had failed to see A Japanese balloon, as it had descended, bearing bombs Intended to burn acres and acres of Billions of dollars worth of centuries of trees, Whose great grandparents were not even cones when A galleon, hold empty for gold, sailed Further offshore than any spear could reach And cannonaded villages, Which might have resisted invasion. As steadfast as those sacrificing lives To their conception of God, my countrymen Are offering what syllables as beautiful as petals, Wilting, have always said, and, Recalling Nazi firing squads' Eliminating future sabotage, I take No satisfaction from Afghanistan's or Iraq’s destruction. Instead, I hear the dead, Whose deaths I and millions of my generation intended, Their homes, blown into tombs, become The sorrowing tones of a friend, The conquerors' – our – language now his. At 17, a volunteer, at 25, a resister, I lived By the words of orators. At 75, survivor of a heart attack And cancer, I heed the silence of thousands in My daughter's voice, Phoning, three miles from explosions, to reassure Her mother and me Just after the World Trade Center went down.
Age 77, I Climb to Indian Ridge’s Fire-Lookout Tower and Search for Lineage Gestated from sand and fires as fierce as those mating smoke with clouds near here, glass walls, although as clear as poets or parents alert for danger, seem siblings of old volcanoes' stone. Ink an eruption, of dew-drop dimension, I find a closer kinship with the wooden tower's chronology's sagas of growth-rings, still being written by cones below this peak, but, generations of giant pines charred to the roots, living flesh cooked to the hoofs or claws in my brain, and any human's life possibly only this moment, between hate and other mistakes and love and eternity, my family's history to date's final dot's a bee, as black as a cindered earth, orbiting sun in a crimson blossom, doomed but yet a promise of centuries of beauty for grandchildren soon to be born.
After Heart-Bypass Surgery, Another Ritual for Continuing Struggle To save my heart, veins, from legs which paraded through World War Two, have, like loyal royal guards, been sent to higher ground, delaying overthrow, but two big dogs, teeth sharper than pen, intend to end my history, the foot trying to defend weakened, from redeployment of blood, and shod with soft rubber – from trees French Legionnaires ordered planted by Indo-Chinese, tapped now by Vietnamese, supplying an American corporation named, for victory, Nike. Heedlessly – or, as historians say of our country – "terribly" young, the dogs' companions demand reassurance that lack of licenses, leashes and rabies-inoculations won’t end their best friends' freedom. Never, in my grim time, so young, I place my plight with that of buffalo hunted, not for food but for fun, to near extinction and with that of my Cherokee forebears, and keep carefully quiet, until, again beyond the reach of jaws stronger than mine, I seize, between worn, grave-spade-shape Vanishing American incisors, my right to whine, to growl, to warn, to bite and to the next breath.
Caring for the Soon to be Born This, for all I can know, my last breath of our ever more poisonous atmosphere, to be shaped into word or not, I hear bulls' bellowing survival intentions, and write that my father wrote, on the walls of our barn, the times of colossal matings and the times when calves would have to be – following centuries of bovine captivity, for humans' prolonged nursing – tugged free from exhausted cows and rubbed dry and warm, with "gunny-sacks," named for the ones bulged by powder for cannon to kill millions of my Native American people. Emerging, paired, as if in prayer, to be grasped by helpful hands, small hoofs, glistening like seashells, made deep prints in my brain, which puberty had turned into Science class's primal-mud, and, now, a final heartbeat likely to leave grandchildren and poems not yet formed, I write that: stub-pencil sharpened on trigger-finger nail, Dad scribbled as devotedly as he had strummed the strings of his banjo, for crowd after crowd, and, then, for my mom and for five children, until applause, stampeding hoofs or cannonade stilled in his chest, he left me, to scribble the times of destinies, which would – war not yet nuclear – be born.
A Coastal Temple Ruin, 1992 For Octavio Paz and Cesar Vallejo Surf echoing Spanish cannon, or Aztec drums summoning centuries of slain, victory-regalia-petals proclaim sun ascendant, while, rainbows wing from nests, to split banana beaks and sing aeons-extinct sea-verge-ecology ancestries, clouds, roots, fragrance, fruit offering survivors of war in the genes more than invaders took and defenders gave their lives trying to save.
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