According to informed sources
here on Facebook
if you just click this button
you will learn
your Native American name.
You can use it in a tattoo!
For a small Paypal fee, someone
will send you matching authentic
Native American flash art —
the ancient Native Americans
called such stencils ‘totems’
and accorded them great power.
A genuine Native American bracelet
of turquoise on leather,
bought from the counter
at the corner XtraMart,
will protect you from harm,
and while you are there pick up
the genuine Native American
cigarette case to match —
the Native Americans thought
tobacco was sacred, you know,
so light up, cousin (that’s what
Native Americans called each other,
you know) and enjoy
the taste of spirituality.
I recommend this brand with
the Native American on the package.
It’s OK, you’ve earned it.
Somewhere a Native American
is smiling from the back of his unicorn.
Tag Archives: heritage
Native American
Cautionary Tale
A cruel and arrogant
prince once barked his shin
on a myth in his path to conquest —
you would think he’d be angry,
or humbled. No.
“Never mind,” he said, “no matter.
I will take it and put it flush
into the floor of my great hall
where it will be at once foundation
and trampled upon.”
He did. He took the myth for his own.
He trafficked upon it
until he wore a groove into it.
And when inevitably
he tripped over the groove he’d worn
he cracked his crown, and
so he died.
When we see those ruins
of his palace now,
we know that stone at once:
it’s red and smooth and
the stains he left all around it
remain evident
though the stone itself is clean.
Never worry
about conquistadors,
appropriation, those who steal
the myths of others and build upon them
and hold them
as their own. They fall,
always; eventually,
the stones they’ve stolen
catch them up and they fall.
Wary
I’ve got no pressing reason
to open my head,
so there’s no reason for you
to stand there staring at my hair,
wondering when I’ll pick it up
and let you see
the swirl of waste oil
on the surface of the pool within,
let you peer at the discarded items
visible on the bottom,
let you think about the sudden stink
in the air.
Truth is,
I’ve done enough of that
for a while. It hurts
like a mother, and I suspect
that what seems necessary to me
might only be entertainment to you.
Instead,
I think next I’ll lift a few foreign scalps
and see what’s in there — so don’t stand
too close. No telling what I might do
with such tempting locks before me
waiting to be examined. I don’t know
what trash I might find beneath them, and while
I’m disgusted with the possibility,
I know I will learn something
that might be useful, might learn why you stare at me
so deeply, so coldly. I may learn
how to be wary of you at last.
Music Education
When I want to remember,
I listen to rock and roll.
When I want to learn,
I listen to hip-hop.
When I want to be exploded,
I listen to jazz.
It does not matter what I listen to
when I want to party.
When I want to be heard,
I play a guitar or a poem.
When I want to be,
when I want to just sit on the point of me,
there is only the red cedar flute
my father gave me, tied with leather, oiled and dark.
I am imperfect as player
but whole when I play it, and alone, always alone.
Total Recall
Reposted from a few years ago, by request.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
TOTAL RECALL
1. (in an office at work)
“they hate white guys like us.”
“i’m not white.”
“what do you mean?”
“my father’s Mescalero.”
“oh, that doesn’t count.”
2. (in a bar)
“you’re a conquered people
and you’re just going to have
to get used to that.”
3. (at my nonni’s house)
“your father steals from me
every time he’s in my house.”
“no, he didn’t, nonni.”
“he does. he stole a knife. he stole money.
i no understand why
your mother want to be
with those Indian peoples.
it’s good you look like her father.”
4. (my father’s way of saying how bad pain was)
“i’ve got a headache
that would kill a white man.”
5. (at school)
“your dad brought two colored kids
home for the weekend to stay over?”
“yes.”
“did they smell funny? do Indians
get along with them? i didn’t know that.”
6. (at the office)
“oh, i love Indians! Indians
are so beautiful — i love their feathers
and the way they dance. do you dance?
do you have feathers?”
7. (at school)
“hey brown, how come your sister
looks like a chink
and you look like a wop?”
8. (driving with my dad)
“i’m never gonna marry
a white girl.”
“son, your mother’s white.
it doesn’t matter sometimes.
marry who you love.”
9. (outside a club)
“don’t you really hate seeing these kids
running around with mohawks
when they’re not even Indian?”
10. (in a coffee shop)
“take your glasses off.
oh, yeah, i can see it now.”
11. (at work)
“now that your hair is long,
i can really see it.”
12. (too many times to choose)
“now that i know, of course,
it’s obvious.”
13. (at school)
“i’m really surprised
that you have to shave.
does your father have to shave?”
14. (during a performance review)
“aren’t you a little old
for this? i mean, aren’t you supposed
to have gotten over this, had a vision quest
or something when you were young?”
15. (too many times, too many bars)
“should you be drinking this much,
i mean, you know, fire water and all that?”
16. (at work)
“when your mother makes lasagna,
does she use buffalo in the sauce?”
17. (third week, introduction to anthropology, freshman year)
“so, you’re Italian and you’re Indian?
god, you must have a temper.”
18. (junior year, private school)
“jesus, put away the knife! what are you — crazy?
it’s just a word. I mean, you are a half-breed,right?
that’s what you are, right?
i’m sorry, jesus, i’m sorry, i didn’t know,
how’m i supposed to know that?
you’re fucking crazy!”
19. (being interviewed for someone’s grad thesis on people who grew up in interracial households)
“so, how do you describe yourself?”
‘i don’t, i guess. not really. not anymore.
i guess ‘poet’ works as well as anything.”
“which side do you get that from?”
20. (first time in Italy)
“my mom’s family’s from around naples.”
“but this isn’t Napoli. why you come here?”
“because i’ve always wanted to see Venice.”
“you should see Napoli. you should see.”
“next time, maybe.”
“yes, next time. something there for you, maybe.
maybe home.”
“yes, maybe.”
21. ( first time on the rez)
“i’m looking for records, anything.
my father was born here, was sent to a residential school
and joined the army after,
he lost touch with every one, never came back.”
“there are no records, though. everything was lost in a fire back in ’67. i’m sorry. you’ll have to do some work to prove it, if you’re interested in being enrolled –”
“no, that’s not it. i just wanted —
something.
anything.”
“well…welcome home?”
Wicked Tall
“he’s wicked tall”
if you were born and raised around here
you understand that
it means his height
is worthy of remark
and carries a hint of outlaw
as if such height
would have inspired a Puritan
to sermonize
(the usage isn’t modern, you know
it’s been around for at least 300 years)
“wicked”
the intensifier
much as he is
he amplifies
disasters
you might attract trouble
he ignites it
wicked tall
must make it easier for demons
to find him
lightning rod
for your late night
bar fight
brought back to full flame
from almost quenched embers
simply because he showed up late
heard half the story
and swung
and now you’re sprung
swinging by his side
because
you’re wicked good friends
and just because he’s done something
wicked stupid
doesn’t mean you
walk away
that would make you a wicked douchebag
besides
he’s wicked tall
and it would be impossible to deny
that you saw him in trouble
if you run into him the next day
so
you and your wicked tall friend
get into trouble
and then laugh it off
later
that’s what you do
in this town
in this state
around here
in wickedville
wherever you find trouble
and someone to share it with
Nonni
Watching the salted
water rolling softly
in a shiny pot, I realize
my Nonni
wouldn’t know me now:
no olive oil in the house,
putting butter on the pasta
when it’s done…shaking cheese
out of a can onto the sticky pile
in the bowl.
This is hunger, I’d tell her
if she was here: I’m just hungry.
She’d frown, her lips turned down
the same way her hands curved and curled
over the wooden stick she used
to roll the fresh dough out for her spaghetti,
her quadretti, her wandi.
Always a white enamel pan
full of meat and sauce in the ancient fridge —
but she never called it sauce. It was always gravy.
She could lay out a meal, nothing fancy,
just good food that satisfied,
in no time. I’m fast too
when it’s time to eat,
but it’s not the same.
And I don’t know how
to make it so. So instead
I turn my back on her
and stuff the naked noodles into me
and try to fill myself. I’ll likely eat
the whole pan, fall asleep
early, and wake up still hungry.
In the morning I’ll stare
into the fridge and look for
gravy in a battered pan.
And I won’t cry. Not again.
The Owl
I only know the owl
because I have been told about the owl,
have been startled by the owl once or twice
and seen the owl through chicken wire,
heard the owl in a suburban grove
and been afraid of the owl then,
calling my name the way I’d been told it would
when I was being called to close my eyes
for the last time. But I do not
know the owl, have neither lived near it
nor seen it hunt or shit,
in fact can only call the owl “the owl”
as if there were only One Owl
worthy of the name, and all I can know
of The Owl is myth and shadow wings
and meaning assigned in a void of experience,
of education in hard fact and simple proximity,
when what I want most desperately now
is for an owl to live here, on the shelf,
demanding to be free to be itself,
and to acquiesce to that demand, to let it go
and follow it, hoping that I might understand
why it has moved so many, why its call
is considered the voice of the journey home,
why such a call is so compelling
that it must be followed and obeyed
until I starve beneath its tree,
covered in its droppings, its serene disdain
and caution in my live presence,
fearful of what we hang on it
as it goes, solitary, among the trees
on its way to an individual, real existence.
The Narrative
the narrative
is simple:
you’ve got natives
and their descendants
immigrants by choice
and their descendants
involuntary immigrants
and their descendants
crossbloods of all the above
and that’s it.
plenty of nuances,
tragedies, subplots,
myths, legends,
stories, tall tales,
obfuscations, and
damn lies disguised
as statistics roil
the air here,
but the narrative itself
sits under all of them
like antiphony
in the choir
tugging the earlobes
turning the head back and forth
never quite clear
but always present
cutting a channel
through the dirt
that holds us all
Candid
When I saw
the photo of myself
I squirmed
for only a moment
then looked straight at it.
I saw a gray man
with a crooked smile,
my father’s face looking back at me,
sporting a half-mouth grin
I’d only ever seen in one photograph
from Korea, green before first combat
in his uniform,
his whole platoon around him,
his hair short, his eyes bright,
nine years before my birth.
In the picture he’s smirking
as if he knew even then
that his son would someday come
to a similar moment of recognition
and amused resignation,
a moment of humor
before a terrifying future,
that my face
would inevitably become his
in spite of all my years of being certain
that if I just kept my head down
and did everything he never did,
I could keep such a thing
from ever happening.
I wonder if he knew
that it would take this long.
Short Hearted Hank
Short-hearted Hank
broke his ankle last week.
No one in the neighborhood
stopped in to see him
though he laid up on his porch at first
with his big bound leg up on a milk crate
for everyone to see.
There were too many days this past winter
when he’d refused
to move his car to help our snowbound cars
get out of their narrow dugouts
while struggling not to slide into his bumper.
“Ya shouldn’t a parked so damn close,”
he’d bark from his warm window.
Hank’s just inside, almost out of sight right now,
his big-band music blaring
through that same window
while next door the Vietnamese guy’s eldest son
tunes up his Honda, gets that engine roaring
while his girlfriend polishes the shining rims.
When they’re done they’ll drown out Artie Shaw
with hip hop before they take off for parts unknown
as they always do, coming back long after midnight
if at all.
Hank may be the oldest resident here —
sixty-eight years in the same apartment,
says his sister who lives downstairs —
but that respect he insists none of us have for him
hasn’t been earned. Bastard —
but I saw the Vietnamese guy
and his eldest son
cutting Hank’s hedges this morning
before the street got busy
and all of us could feel ashamed by the gesture.
Short-hearted Hank must have seen it
but I don’t know if he said a word
to the interlopers, the neighbors
who will come and go in their time
like all of us around here do:
the forms must be observed, after all.
Ancestral Voices
There’s nothing to say —
they don’t speak much,
at least not to me.
There are no Italian whispers
or Mescalero shouts
in my ears.
But I imagine
they talk a lot
to each other
behind my back,
gossiping at my indiscretions,
my betrayals
of their own long-vanished worlds
that are usually based in trying
to live up to one set of expectations
at the expense of the other.
I imagine grumpy men
with dark faces
staring at each other
and passing
tiswin and good red wine
back and forth.
Bunch of drunks!
The best thing to do with gossip
is ignore it
and get on with your own life:
one proverb everyone shares
and no one follows.
To hell with that!
Dark Matter 