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 16^th-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

The Book War

By Wang Ping

I discovered “The Little Mermaid” in 1969. That morning, when I opened the door to light the stove to make breakfast, I found my neighbor reading under a streetlight. The red plastic wrap indicated it was Mao’s collected work. She must have been there all night long, for her hair and shoulders were covered with frost, and her body shivered from cold. She was sobbing quietly. I got curious. What kind of person would weep from reading Mao’s words? I walked over and peeked over her shoulders. What I saw made me shiver. The book in her hands was Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, and she was reading “The Little Mermaid.” The day I heard the story in my kindergarten, I begged my mom to send me to school right away so that I could read the fairy tales by myself. By the end of my first grade, however, the Cultural Revolution began. Schools were closed, libraries sealed. Books, condemned as “poisonous weeds,” were burnt on streets. I thought I’d never see “The Little Mermaid” again.

My clever neighbor had disguised Anderson’s “poisonous weed” with the scarlet cover for Mao’s work. Engrossed in the story, she didn’t realize my presence behind her until I started weeping. She jumped up, fairy tales clutched to her budding chest. Her panic-stricken face said she was ready to fight me to death if I dared to report her. We stared at each other for an eternity. Suddenly she started laughing, pointing at my tear-stained face. She knew then that her secret was safe with me. 

She gave me 24 hours to read the fairy tales, and I loaned her The Arabian Nights, which was missing the first fifteen pages and the last story. But the girl squealed and started dancing in the twilight. When we finished each other’s books, we started an underground book group with strict rules for safety, and we had books to read every day, all “poisonous” classics.

Soon I excavated a box of books my mother had buried beneath the chicken coop. I pried it open with a screwdriver, and pulled out one treasure after another: The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Book of Songs, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Tempest, The Notre Dame, Huckleberry Finn, American Dream, each wrapped with waxed paper to keep out moisture.

I devoured them all, in rice paddies and wheat fields, on my way home from school and errands. I tried to be careful. If I got caught, the consequence would be catastrophic for my entire family. My mother finally discovered I had unearthed her treasure box, and set out to destroy these “time bombs.” She combed every possible place in the house: in the deep of drawers, under the mattress, chicken coop... It was a hopeless battle: my mother knew what tricks I had in my sleeves. Whenever she found a book, she’d order me to tear the pages and place them in the stove, and she’d sit nearby watching the words turn into cinder.

When the last book was burnt, I went to the coop to sit with my chickens. Hens and roosters surrounded me, pecking at my closed fists for food. As tears flowed, the Little Mermaid came to me. She stepped onto the sand, her feet bleeding, and she could not speak, yet how her eyes and body sang and summoned me to join in! That night I started telling stories--the Little Mermaid, Romeo and Juliet, Huckleberry Finn, Aladdin...first to my siblings, friends, then to the neighbors—stories I found from those forbidden treasures, stories I made up for myself and my audience. We gathered on summer nights, in the winter darkness. When I spotted my parents in the gathering and saw the stars in their eyes, I knew I had won the war.


First published at Kinship of Rivers.
Copyright © Wang Ping. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wang Ping was born in China and came to USA in 1986. She is the founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers project, a five-year project that builds a sense of kinship among the people who live along the Mississippi and Yangtze rivers through exchanging gifts of art, poetry, stories, music, dance and food. With other artists and poets, she has been teaching poetry and art workshops to children and seniors along the river communities, making thousands of flags as gifts to bring to the Mississippi during 2011-12 and to the Yangtze in 2013.

Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), All Roads to Joy: Memories along the Yangtze (forthcoming 2012), all from Coffee House. New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999), an anthology she edited and co-translated, is published by Hanging Loose. Flash Cards: Poems by Yu Jian, co-translation with Ron Padgett, 2010 from Zephyr. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000, University of Minnesota Press) won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities, and in 2002, Random House published its paperback. The Last Communist Virgin won 2008 Minnesota Book Award and Asian American Studies Award. She had two photography and multi-media exhibitions--“Behind the Gate: After the Flooding of the Three Gorges” at Janet Fine Art Gallery, Macalester College, 2007, and “All Roads to Lhasa” at Banfill-Lock Cultural Center, 2008. She collaborated with the British filmmaker Isaac Julien on Ten Thousand Waves, a film installation about the illegal Chinese immigration in London. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bush Artist Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship.
www.wangping.com