Counterpoint

I looked like my mother
when I was growing up,
curls framing the boisterous
mouth I’d gotten from her Tuscan base.

When I got older I took after my father —
surly and fed up with some
unexplained hole in my center.

It started when I was twelve, walking
an old trail on
an old reservation, the sign out front
proclaiming that “these four and one half acres
have never belonged to the white man, having been
granted to the Nipmuc Tribe by King George the Third…”

and although I wasn’t Nipmuc
and my dad’s reservation
was twenty-five hundred miles away,
the light became as sweet
as cornbread and my eyes grew fat,
clogging so much
they ran over,
and I did what little I could, climbing
a small hill to stand and face south,
singing a song my father had taught me
from an old vinyl record,
a Johnny Cash song
about drums, Indian drums
just on the fringe of hearable sound,
singing softly enough myself so I couldn’t be heard
ten feet from where I stood,
and I stopped crying.

I stopped calling myself “white” that day.
I told myself:
I will not be two at once.
I will choose the song I mean to be.

So for years I worked that way
and I thought I had it all together,

until I walked into the Pequot casino
for the first time
and saw the people spending money
in hordes,
the sound of cash bell and buzzer
playing a crazy dog dance,
saw the exhibits on loan from
the new cultural center and saw
people looking hard at them for once;
then saw the Goliath crystal
Indian
shooting a psychedelic arrow into the atrium
every hour on the hour,

and I knew:

there is a gap I will never learn
to live in, a place
between the anthem I learned
and the dirge I never heard.
The song on the hill,
the private song that made me swell with tears
and feel as though I belonged,
never taught me that being split
could mean
something other than choosing pride
in one side or the other,
could be
harder than simply choosing
to stand on a hill and sing
and decide I’d gotten it right for all time.

I sat down because my head
was cloven
and King George The Third,
disguised as a drunk on a park bench
in the indoor orchard
by the Wampum Rewards booth,
laughed at me and said:

Creating America was a bitch,
but creating you?
That was easy.