In the Catholic cemetery on our reservation, a tree’s roots make their way toward my parents’ graves. Someday, those roots and my parents will become one body, one blood, one pine. You have your Eucharist and I have mine.
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Thanks, Sherman. A few days ago there was an article in the NYT about trees, how their growth rings show precipitation. It's hard for me to read articles about trees dying or facing death. One blood, one pine is what we are.
It's good reading a Sherman Alexie poem again. I had a small chap book by him... It was light blue. I can't recall the title. But I'll tell you! I went to war with that little book and it taught me a thing or two. It's been a few years now since I sat on my bed so focused on the language in that little book, thinking "my God... How does he do it?" He was doing gymnastics with words! He was doing par kor on the effin page! So I went out the next day and swiped an anthology of rebel poets. Get my love of language back on a proper track! Yes sir! But those Alexie lines kept rolling across my tongue... sticking to the roof of my mouth and soft palette like crows spitting out fricatives of derision, laughing at me.... daring me to write. The next day I drove like a banshee to Barnes and Noble, shifting that bitch into 4th with a sneer. "You think you can make me write!?" I yelled at my inner Alexie. I bought a Best of American Poetry, Kinnell's Book of Nightmares, and just to be contrary a Korean cookbook. But when I sat down with a cup of black tea, 3 stevias, Alexie's name jumped out at me from the cover of the Best of American Poetry. No! I shouted! I looked closer and read that he was the guest editor that year. No! Alexie's language haunted me! "You can't make me write! I am the Master of my private Idaho, not you!" I knew it was getting out of hand. "My poetry comes when I say so! You may try with your luscious liquids gently enfolding an image or two. Or think that a gruesome metaphor couched amid little puffs of 'p' and gentle mouthings of 'm' may force a less experienced poet to become infected with literary lilts and other onomatopoeias (sp?). But not I!"
I crawled into bed exhausted and dreamt I was John Wayne and Sherman Alexie poems in buckskins and face paint were waiting to ambush me, up around the bend. (To be cont....)