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.
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
