A Language of Shape and Shadow
June Obrien
Published by June O’Brien at Smashwords
Copyright © 2007 June O’Brien
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Dedicated to
Judith Bouffiou, midwife to possibilities
Jeanne Lohmann, medicine woman to miracles
Table of contents
Two: A Language of Shape and Shadow
A Language of Shape and Shadow
Introduction
I live in two worlds: American Indian and European American. I grew up in a world where reality speaks a subliminal language to humans and is always present. This language, this way of perceiving and experiencing, is the matrix of my poetry. I am from the hills of Oklahoma, from a large extended family living in the valleys and hills and along the Red River. Since leaving to go to college and find work I have found that the only place I feel at home is among tribal people. If I am too long away the world begins to die. But I also live in the dominant culture. In fact much of my working life has been at this interface between tribal and dominant cultures. Poetry is a way I express the conflict between these two worlds. It is a way to integrate the profound differences. Poetry is also a way I worship. When I am awestruck by love, the sudden breaking apart of limited understanding, I need some way to express the intensity. Poetry is also the way I give back to that which gives these experiences. When the mountain is clearly watching, when she breaks me open to her conscious reality, I want to return something of myself, something worthy of what she has given. I write for other reasons. My grandchildren are children of the dominant culture. But it may be that sometime they will want to know a different reality, another way of experiencing life. When they remember that I presented them to nature, that I explained to the wind and the water who they are and where they come from, something might wake up in them. If this happens I trust that they will be able to find in my poetry another way to live. In fact, I think anyone who reads poetry knows it as a means to another world. People who read poetry know the voice of the mountain, the love emanating from stones, the river that is different from the water it carries. These are the people I talk to in my poems.
“The Journey”
The image, “The Journey,” was created after going on a canoe journey with the people of the tribe where I live to the nation of my family and ancestral home. We are each on our own personal journey, paddling beside one another, dipping here and there into the fabric of life, each of us creating swirls and eddies in each other’s lives.
Bear
Bear O’Lague generously allowed the use of his painting “Journey” on the cover of the book. It is paint on paper. The image was first produced as sand blast on glass.
One: Unmarked Crossing
Unmarked Crossing
worn deep in its loamy banks
by wagon wheels and horses,
a road for outlaws
living in the hills
withdrawn from governments
and organizations
secular and religious:
a road with eyes
watching, not from the hill above
but from the tangled hollow below
with a clear uphill shot.
Belonging and not belonging
is life and death,
eyes discern kin and foe—
a formal responsibility
the burden of an instant.
Not St. Peter’s book exactly
but quick and functional nevertheless,
an unmarked crossing, a risk
all but strangers know:
A boundary made by outlaws,
mixed bloods
uncounted, unregistered, unrecognized.
A road I see in sleep and waking dreams,
looking for something unnamed,
seen from a bird’s eye
flying back and forth,
a dance
of time, layers of time, one above the other:
Caddo, Choctaw, Cherokee
and the unlabeled
Black and White.
Today
gray as winter oaks
and leafless brush.
With long mile-eating legs
he trots downhill
in no hurry
but with certain destination.
He disappears quickly
gray on gray
here and not here.
The River Runs Green
not far from edge to edge
but deep and swift,
where young men
from the reservation
play Russian roulette
with the cold hard current,
their clothes on the bank
the only farewell note.
The few who make it
grin like redeemed sinners
pleased by the river’s restraint.
Once I threw
a silver ring
arcing into the water
and asked to cross
into another life
of dream and memory.
Coyote must have been listening
because
she made a path
and I crossed every day
for a year,
and climbed the rimrock
into a dream
where ponies graze,
and stone madonnas
guard wild grottos,
where lynx hide
and coyote puppies
play,
and the moon makes
a rainbow path
for bears and little girls.
The river
she still runs green
not far from side to side,
a boundary on the map
of the reservation
(Indians, that kind of reservation),
a boundary
of land not ceded
of realities held
like a shawl holding secrets.
A boundary where coyote roams
shaking the ground
changing dimensions,
drinking at the river
with her pups,
yellow eyes on mine.
When she turns to go
I tumble at her heels
her wild milk in my mouth.
The river runs green
deep and cold
not far
from edge to edge.
Treaties
for the day we can stay,
when too long and too much is enough:
a child’s dream, this longing,
this illusion of belonging.
We tried to stay and couldn’t,
humiliated by too much effort
and too much loss,
ashamed of longing instead of belonging
longing for what was withheld by law and precedent.
God’s dark children,
God’s so beloved children:
our rejection written from the opening scene,
from the first ship’s prow against the beach.
We know no other option but perfectly to please
or perfectly hate or pack.
I pull the suitcase from under the bed.
A Woman From Nowhere
At thirty-five I was beautiful
and depressed.
Aunt Rose died
and I was back from Australia
after five years and one more degree.
Philosophy and psychology and affairs
led to long journeys in the desert.
I met an old man
who shot quail for me.
His sons came to check me out,
on horseback they came
not pleased to find me nearly naked
and swinging in a hammock
between two sturdy juniper trees,
a woman from nowhere
at the end of a pumy road.
I could see their inheritance in their eyes
the number of acres and cows
and I laughed to myself.
Pushed to the next turn in the road,
the next view from the ridge,
I leave the old man’s story
to its end.
I met a witch from Salem
cooking pies for cowboys,
drank beer with river guides,
spent a night of falling stars
between the railroad tracks and the river
with a man who wrote stories,
and had breakfast with a hung-over rodeo crowd
sad and raucous.
Back at rimrock and the river
everything expands
and sweeps beyond me
and I understand in my heart
that I am looking for God
or the Holy Spirit.
2.
In time I found the sweat lodges
among the trees
overlooking the city,
found my blood to its nearest kin of place and time.
They took me in
and slowed me down
and reminded me who I am.
The women held me
in the dark of the lodges
and made space
for new possibility.
The Sundance Tree
took my breath
there at the center of the world
and took root along my spine.
I prayed
a new prayer
for a place distant
and so isolated
I could live next to God
and be safe.
3.
I moved North