Orenoque,Wetumka, and Other Poems

by Robert Bensen

Blacksnake at the Iroquois Festival                                    


We set three paper plates in the grass
between the picnic tents and ravine at the wood's edge.
I broke our daughter's fried bread, murmuring thanks.
Steam uncoiled, brushed my hand
and branched along some shifty breeze.
A handful of Mohawk kids scooped polliwogs
in cups from the concession, their family's current stand.
They flocked around a lean, sweat-beaded young man,
who drew a hoop of writhing snake from the reeds,
a red blossom where he'd sliced the head off. 
"You know this snake?" he called across the ravine. 
"Can't say I do," I said.  "But why risk it with them?" 

Past the woods we couldn't see a lumbering freight
shake the trees and hoot some vestige of its victory. 
Our girl asked to touch the snake.  I carried her over.
She smoothed its patches of tweedy, irridescent black. 
"She's more brave than you," the boy in a Barney shirt
needled his brother.  "You were right," I said again,
"not to take a chance.  Not with them." 
But he, astonished at the drive in that headless spine,
roped it over his arm again and again.

The kids packed behind him when he crossed the knoll
to find the museum's naturalist.  He scanned the faces
of milling visitors suddenly hushed at this apparition
from some world where men strode bare-chested out of the wood
wearing snakes on their arms.  He'd hoped the white man
with the curious girl had known something final.

Well, back in the sluice, a deathmask stared
down narrow, trackless halls of reeds, 
while in the tents a woman beaded lightning down my sleeve.
And now, through apple leaves, as dawn pales blue
the hood of the moon's last milky eye,
I'm after sliding an arm around my sleeping girl,
who's of another mind:  she squiggles down,
feet perched on my wrist, poised to chase or be chased
around the circle we make.  Soon must come her dream
of another life she has to run through one more time.

What Lightning Spoke                                          

            1

The island that could have claimed my life refrained,
returned it with a mouthful of dirt and a shirtful of wind.
Later a Rastaman shook his locks at me and my plate of curried goat,
shouting, "One day you will be shot!"  Though I said I thought not,
I caught my breath and leapt from one frame of this life to another. 

Once the Channahon swept me in a hole below a dam. 
I drank the river dry.  Now the river flows inside.

Makoce sica, land that gives back nothing, wanted my bones
to scatter in its red clay, flecked with saurians and Sioux.
I echoed down its caverns till my arms fledged, and I flew.

The Colorado wind that spills down the spine of the continent
tried to kite me into the gutted Glory Hole, but I bent
and took root at the rim, and let the teeth of the wind
comb snakes from the snarls in my hair.

Water, earth, air:  their tendered deaths
caught in me like tinder—beneath this flesh is fire. 


            2

Begin again in silence. 
Out of nowhere, lightning and what lightning spoke;
spike and decay.  Echo.
It curtained the road, a tree of light hung from the root.

The boy I was, was walking with his sack of newsprint blurring in the rain.
The lightning branched and hooked in myriad brilliances streaming,
its rivers and rivulets flooding me with one idea:
in plain air, power makes infinite ways.

I bolted after its afterimage.  I swarmed through its fading cage.
No one home would mind a feverish child's tale,
so I retold it, next blue day, to a lone white feather of a cloud
that bloomed and boiled its furious head over the rooftops.

Maybe it was something I'd said, maybe just weather.
But sure some eminence had graved itself in my eyes' twin caves,
had scorched there the smoking claw of a thundergod.
I close my eyes and sketch, against the curtain of blood,

that first light, its descent, its flickering net of tongues.
At the time, there's only a lightening, a lift
like waking at last, already vaulting toward the zig-zag stars.
And ever after, for the record, its volleys echo

in the ear’s taut drum, down the stunned alleys of the head,
its signature chars the flesh of cloven oaks,
its shaft, drawn through the bow that arcs the valley,
will pierce the heart’s racing chambers it will pace. 

Copyright © Robert Bensen. All rights reserved.

"What Lightning Spoke" was first published in Pivot Magazine, and Blacksnake at the Iroquois Festival was first published in Tamaqua.


Hartwick College Professor of English Robert Bensen has released a new collection of poems titled Orenoque,Wetumka, and Other Poems, in collaboration with Professor of Art Phil Young, whose artwork is featured on the cover. 

The poems in Orenoque, Wetumka, occupy the borderlands between Euro-America and Native America, between now and then, between the seen and unseen. "The space between millennia was thin as water" in the reflection of the mangrove swamp in the opening poem, "Isis at Caroni." The poem invites the reader to get lost in the swamp: "the Indian guide Nanan lost us/with every turn of his wrist down every channel" that leads to the breath-taking, timeless world of the scarlet ibis. The poems negotiate the mazes of natural and human history to reveal the hidden and unknown, as in "What Lightning Spoke:"  "The lightning branched and hooked in myriad brilliances streaming, / its rivers and rivulets flooding me with one idea: / in plain air, power makes infinite ways." "Orenoque" is set in the labyrinthine Orinoco River of Venezuela during the rapacious 16th-Century explorations for El Dorado, and the late 1990s exploring for remnants of that ancient world. "Wetumka" weaves an ancient Zuni migration story with that of a Cherokee artist recovering his family scattered along and long after the Trail of Tears.


Bensen's poems have been collected in five books and published in journals from the U.S., U.K., West Indies, and Asia, as well as in African-American and Native American journals.  His work has earned a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the 1996 Robert Penn Warren Award.  He has written numerous essays on Caribbean and Native American literature, and edited several anthologies of those literatures, most recently Children of the Dragonfly (U. of Arizona Press). His poetry has been shown in eight exhibitions with photographs by Charles Bremer, in galleries that include the Bright Hill Literary Center and the National Museum of Dance, Saratoga Springs, NY.  He taught writing and literature and directed the writing programs at Hartwick College.  www.robertbensen.com

Okie Survival and WINNING THE DUST BOWL


By Carter Revard

My cousin Roy Camp was one of the better watermelon-stealers in our part of the country, between Pawhuska and Buck Creek--or at least he told the best stories about when the farmers really DID use rock salt in the shotgun, and he once went around for days unable to sleep on his back or even sit down because he got peppered with some of it one afternoon.  Sixty years later, when I was out in California visiting with him and his family, we got to talking about some of those good old bad old days, so after I was back in St. Louis, in June 1996, it was time to write Winning the Dust Bowl for Roy, who as is said in the poem had taught me to read back in 1936.  He had lived with us that whole year, out in the Buck Creek Valley, because not long before his father had been beaten to death in the Pawhuska jail (Roy had tried to pull the policemen off as they dragged his father through the doors).  When his mother remarried, Roy did not at first like the new stepfather; so the year my twin sister and I started to Buck Creek School he lived and went to school with us.
            
Three years later--as Steinbeck was writing The Grapes of Wrath--Roy and a buddy hopped a freight train and rode out to California to join his mother and stepfather at a sawmill near Truckee, up by Lake Tahoe.  A few years later he married a good strong woman, served in the Marines in World War Two, then saw to it that his mother Loretta had a good house right near where he and Celestine located in Porterville.  When I visited them for Roy's seventieth birthday and went down to the local mall for a birthday dinner, we couldn't move twenty feet along a sidewalk or an aisle without people greeting him with a big grin and handshake or hug.  So when I wrote this I wanted to remind Welfare Kings like certain governors and presidents that the food on their table is put there not only by "immigrants" but also by "natives"--people looked down on by those in power, even as they hand rich contributors largesse from the banks and businesses and porkbarrels made possible by the Okies, Indians, Chicanos, Koreans, Blacks, Hmongs, Vietnamese and probably even a few capitalistic Brits and Ayrabs and Noo Yawkers out there in LaLaLand. 


WINNING THE DUST BOWL

There was a reaching up
into the dusty leaves after
the biggest most golden ones, and almost
falling off the ladder--stretching up into
the stiff pungent leaves, on through
dead twigs, brushy branches where my fingers
just barely touched, touched and tipped
a heavy orb till with one last touch it
dropped upon my palm--
deep gold with greeny tinges, warm to fingers
closing despite the ladder's shaking--
and then a turning cautiously on rungs to toss
that last tree-ripened navel orange into
the sure and waiting hands below
of my cousin Roy--and the climbing down
to the solid loamy ground of his back yard
behind the house he built at the edge
of Porterville, by now just fringing the upper
middle class's brick and well-coiffed
development houses built over orange groves
and olive trees where as he says
if he and Celestine could have saved a little more from
their migrant Okie labor up and down this Gold Rush State
and further, from the Salton Sea's tomatoes all the way up
to Oregon's cherries, Washington's apples, all that
stoop labor, ladder aches, labor camps, sometimes
our Ponca cousins working alongside--as he says,
a little more in the savings bank and maybe
some twenty acres bought at the edge of Porterville
when land was still dirt cheap
would have made him a millionaire where now the bankers,
lawyers, heads of businesses live, as well as the doctor
from Pakistan who diagnosed his pancreatic cancer--but then
what's in THEIR yards is ornamental, flowers briefly,
looks beautiful but not for eating, what's on
their tables grows on some other field
of earth where Others work, and here
are these tree-ripened oranges, navels and
Valencias, in Roy's back yard.  I can't wait, we peel
and eat two big ones bursting with juice
and sweetness, then we wipe our hands
and mouths and he puts
into a plastic grocery bag two dozen dusty globes
for me to take back down to Pasadena, and walking back
toward the house we stop for onions,
enormous purple ones he's just dug up,
we find some ties and string the onions up to dry,
we look at the green tomatoes in their mini-jungle there
in his garden plot, the peppers, okra just poking up,
see where small apricot and peach trees now have bloomed,
and then past his window cooler that he built
and hooked up specially to a backyard hydrant here
(last night, cool breezes from it helped me sleep),
we see the huge rose-tree still in bloom and he pauses there
before its great crimson depths and fragrance and says quietly
that this was given by a friend before he died
who said he hoped that when it bloomed
they'd have good thoughts of him,
which, as Roy said, they surely do, and then
Celestine came out the front door past the amaryllis
with its humongous scarlet blooms and we walked
to my car, opened the trunk and flumped
the oranges in their plastic bag into its depths and slammed the lid
and we hugged and said we hoped
that next year on his seventy-second birthday
we'd have some more strawberries over angelfood
with whipped cream like Celestine had just fixed for us--
"You realize, Mike," he'd said,
"these aren't my strawberries--we
bought those a couple blocks away at that fruit stand
in the corner of that big strawberry field,
three dollars for what seems like half a bushel
from that Hmong family who run the stand--if all
those Hmongs the government's bringing in here now
would work like them I'd never object
to all the government's doing for them
and never did for us."So we had talked a little
about Viet Nam, and what we owed
the people we had used to kill and save our empire,
and what the Okies of the Dust Bowl times,
Roy and Celestine and our families,
had done for California--but now
when I closed the trunk-lid and we hugged
and said good-bye for this year and who knows
how long, it wasn't Hmong and Okie,
Mexican, Black or Indian, but just the three of us now--
a cousin like an older brother who'd taught me to read
in the first grade,
the beautiful woman he had married
when he had joined the Marines and might have gone
down on Tarawa in the South Pacific,
and me, the academic Osage Okie out for a visit.
"Now listen, Mike," Roy said, and I could tell
my getting lost in a different way,
each time I came to Porterville, was on his mind,
"the only thing you have to do to reach the highway
is turn right, right down where I'm pointing,
and follow that all the way."  And so I did,
never got lost and drove right down
past orange groves, English walnuts and olives,
past Bakersfield and oilwells pumping,
down Highway Ninety-Nine with its rose azalea blooming, on
into Pasadena where I had some work
on medieval manuscripts to do
at the Huntington Library, on that huge estate
the railroad magnate bought when land
was dirt cheap, built his mansion there, acquired
the Earl of Bridgewater's manuscripts and planted
a lot of cactus, made a Japanese Garden,
a Shakespeare Garden, built
an Art Museum, made a big Foundation--
or should I say he hired
a lot of workmen and they did it for him?  It may have been
on Mister Huntington's railroads that my cousin Roy
was riding, in or under boxcars, four years after his dad
was beaten to death in the Pawhuska jail, and Roy
rode freezing out to California and made a way
to put good food on many tables and to build
a family, house, a life with friends, children,
grandchildren, fellow fishermen who laugh and know
what it's like to catch
and let them go, and stretch the truth only
enough to make it credible.
Meanwhile, for academics the Huntington's
a gorgeous place to work, whole gardens full
of roses named for people who all hope
we'll have good thoughts of them when they bloom,
and there are many Friends of the Huntington
who surely do.


Copyright © Carter Revard. All rights reserved.

Carter Revard, Osage on his father's side, was born in the Osage Agency town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma and grew up on the Osage Reservation there.  He attended a one-room school in the Buck Creek rural community, won a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa, and was given his Osage name in 1952, the year he went to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship.  After taking his B.A. there, he earned a Ph.D. at Yale and taught medieval literature, linguistics, and American Indian literature at Amherst College, Washington University St. Louis, and elsewhere.  He retired in 1997 but continues to write and publish poems and scholarly essays.  His books of poetry include Ponca War Dancers (1980), Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992), An Eagle Nation (1993), and How The Songs Come Down (2005).  A collection of essays published in 1998, Family Matters, Tribal Affairs, was followed by Winning The Dust Bowl (memoirs and poems) in 2001. Some recent poems, including "Deer Mice Singing Up Parnassus," appear in AHANI Sing: Poems of the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Hedge Coke, from The University of Arizona Press.

Three Dreams Deep

by MariJo Moore



Trees are dreaming
of 
owls  dreaming
of 
Spirits dreaming
of 

humans understanding


ceremonial water                         



is what is needed
all

around

the

world.


  
Copyright © 2012 MariJo Moore. All rights reserved. 
With inspiration from Bruce T Martin's www.brucetmartin.com photographs of cenotes. In their world view, the Pre-Columbian Maya  - and some still do today - believe that cenotes are the homes of the Chac Gods,  the gods that bring rain....... and dedicated to Suzie Engel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: MariJo Moore, Cherokee/Irish/Dutch is an author/editor/poet, psychic/medium/spiritual advisor. Her published works include The Diamond Doorknob, Red Woman With Backward Eyes and Other Stories,  Genocide of the Mind: New Native Writings, and A Book of Ceremonies and Spiritual Energies Thereof.  She resides  in the mountains of western North Carolina. www.marijomoore.com

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