(Sometimes an outsider has a different view)
“When they hanged him,” he told me
“They constipated our history
Now it’s stuck.”
“Welcome to the turd world,” he said
“It’s the shits.”
I was there to learn, so
I nodded, but I saw only
A people milling around a corral
Trampling each other
Waiting for a door
The Unpeople
(The people at the margins)
There is no place to go
So we have become the unpeople
A pair of brown eyes in a kindergarten class
A trace of blonde hair on the trapline
We have built a fortress
In our golden hearts
And we mock the ladders
Loving priests throw against our walls
And the dollar coins the pure whites
Pile against our doors
To make sure they don’t open.
George’s Lament
(George has a few things he want to get said )
Casually spawned by
Frankenwhite and Igor Indian
We shamble through the
Damp halls of time.
We were the created people
Not the numbered red people,
Boiling on the reserves, nor
The carefully measured white
Displaying their lawns.
We were rulers of the plains
Now we measure the meters of our lives
In the resonance
Of an old guitar
We are the loaders of trucks the
Diggers of ditches the
Collectors of beer bottles
From roadsides. from
Cars going by
Without stopping to know us
We were golden, once, but
Have drifted down like
Fallen leaves beneath the oak
Pray for us
Some days we find it hard
To pray for ourselves
Lucy’s Reply to George
(For those who bear children, the future is always ahead)
Remember this:
Always
Roots heave pavement
Now we are the people at the edges, the shadows
In the April sunshine, the image at the corner of your eye, the weeds
At the edges of the cornfield, the underbrush they never cleared out
Behind the old barn
You’ll find us where you least expect us
Where the red river meets the unfeeling white ice
Where the forest meets the pavement
Find us walking along the edges of all this
Weeds beside the railway
Someday, while others are
Dreaming of Saturday
We will again gather stars to us
Someday, old, you’ll be moving
Slowly down the stairs
Only to meet our Young Ones
Eyes wide, coming up
Remember this:
In this long, hard, winter;
This woman winter:
Incrementally, patiently
Roots heave pavement.
But the Weeds Come Back
(Tenacious things, they are)
The statue of General Middleton
Grows no weeds around it
Thistle and dandelion
Poisoned in the spring
By the parks’ man
I suspect
The General would have liked that
Around the gray statue
Grass is neat
Every week, the green blades
Reach up
And the parks’ man comes by
And lops their heads off
I imagine
The General would have approved
I’ve often thought
If the statue of the General
Were lopped off
The process
Would not have to be repeated.
At the Legion on Bleeker Street
(Lollie finds some odd places to inspire her writings.)
Once and soon
These will not be ordinary men, but
Old eagles
Whispering down to feed
High among the mountains
Far above the streets
They come to cages
Only half here
Their inner eyes
Knowing what it was
To call out thunder
And put mountains
Under gold wings
Nails on Sale Today
(Lollie’s getting a little too carried away with the plight of the Métis.)
Formerly
We were eagles
Formerly
We had horizons
Without end
Formerly
You might have
Come to the hills
To ask advice
Of the eagles
But now, even when
The sun shines
Are all you’ll find are
A web of streets and
A people still struggling
To pull nails from their hands.
Bridge
(A bit of Métis history, according to George.)
We were the bridge
Between the east and the west
The dark forest and the big skies
We were the bridge between
Red and white
Using the Métis bridge
Canada carried itself
Onto the plains
And up to the highest mountains
So what happened?
We were the bridge to the prairies
The road to the mountains
And they walked
All
Over
Us
Partly
(Lollie wonders about being of mixed lineage)
Part-moon in the sky
Part nature in my blood
Partway home
I hope
Sometimes there’s a train riding me
And I am pounding granite
With my feet
Sometimes I am my great grandmother
Smelling smoke on the forest wind
Sometimes I am only part of me
A mouse afraid behind
A fallen leaf
By the Red River
(Just a thought)
A small red dragonfly
Sunning its wings
On a willow trunk
By the river
Dozens of new shoots
From the deftly-sawed stump
Some of us need roots in a storm
Some need wings in the sunlight
If you try to have both
You must lift the world
Afternoons
(A good visitor knows when it’s time to leave.)
These are the several ways of Sunday afternoons:
That the increase in time is less than you feared;
The weather outside less frightful;
That the many modes of
Hunger
Become evident
(please continue)
That men and women roll forward on the train
Of today, scattering tomorrows like chickens
On rusty old tracks
And all the bears of yesterday
Fall behind, their tongues so long
They trip on them
(so finally)
Afternoons should be spent
Elsewhere.
Lucy is knitting guillotines:
It’s time to go back into the jungle
And find my lost son, who has been abducted
By the Cookie Monster.
Part 7: Heron Feathers Poems 3
Lollie wrote these poems about Heron Feathers in her later years.
Remembering the Songs
(Heron Feathers & Jean share memories)
Many years later, I told Jean
“You were the first white men
Around the village campfire.
They sang a song designed
To frighten very ugly wendigos.
It was a calculated insult.
“I remember,” Jean said.
“The priest sang a Latin hymn
And, not knowing what to do
We sang ‘Aupres de ma Blonde’”
We laughed, but in all our decades together
I never hated a wendigo
As much as
That imaginary blonde.
Home is Where the Hugs Were
(Heron Feather’s brother comes to visit the Red River settlement)
My brother, High-Backed Wolf came by
When my oldest daughter was eight
And Jean was west on the hunt.
We talked of the family, birth and death, and
Not at all of deep woods nor distances
Between sister and brother
He came to trade in beaver skins
There was a growing demand
Better payments, and not many left back home
Home. I looked at the village on the edge of the plains
A woman always has one home in her heart
Where her father told her stories
Were it not for stories told by fathers
Girls might become women without seeing in men
A funny story, a deep laugh, a warm hug
On a cold night.
Voices
(Heron Feathers at 35)
When our child left
One spring
As the wild raspberries ripened
I whispered her name in the
Shortening of days
I killed the grasshoppers, only because
They couldn’t live long enough
To miss their children
At midnight I wake up
Thinking I hear my own mother’s voice
In the wind through the wild raspberries
Bones
(Jean does some trading with the Cheyenne.)
“Leave those bones alone!”
Jean would yell
But the kids never listened.
While he hunted buffalo
They played make-the-man on the floor
With the earthly remains of Old Dog Howling
Till Belle (the hound) stole the bundled right hand.
She cried when we caught her, but
We never found those bones.
In the spring, Two Buffaloes came again
To trade beaver pelts
(From mountains far to the west)
And to see his kin.
I placed the bones on the prairie
On the red velvet blanket,
Two Buffaloes silent at the sight
Of his white remaindered uncle.
Jean put sweetgrass in each eye socket
And a rosary on his chest.
He said the old man would go to both heavens.
When Two Buffaloes pointed at the missing hand
Jean explained that the White God
Had finally taken part of Old Dog Howling.
Two Buffaloes traded only with us.
Coming back each year to watch
The bones disappear
One by one
Mud and Stars
(Heron Feathers in old age)
Silent as moonbeams pelicans fly past the old woman although you should know that they are white with black wingtips keeping them up and she is brown and so old even her great grandchildren stay away, perhaps aware that she knows too much or nothing at all, even about the pelicans circling back to the prairie slough and landing by the bulrushes, their wings folding lifetimes and crytimes and even lost husbands against their warm chests as they paddle straight towards her muddy feet under a turning sky stretching up past the blue and out to the infinite stars.
Part 8: The Journey Home
Lollie leaves the bright lights of Notre dame du Portage for the streetlights of Etobicoke.
Woman of the Wind
(Migration of the Lollie to the deep woods of Etobicoke from the open plains of infinite questioning)
I, finally, became a woman
Of the quest
A Plymouth brought me
To the floodplain of my life
Following some river
Of sweetgrass smoke
And frankincense.
Now I am silent
Listening for footsteps
On the wind
Or meaning in the brown earth
Finding only
My own breathing
My own footprints.
God! I would sell my soul
Just to know
I actually had one
And that
The wrinkled old men
Who dreamed gods
Could also dream
A free woman
Holding even one small angel
To her breasts.
Exile
(If they made jack handles eight inches longer, the additional leverage would allow a woman to change a tire)
My feet sore from jumping on the goddam jack handle
Trying to sunder two nuts from the right rear tire
Trans-Canada highway west of Terrace Bay
Tractor-trailer rigs dissolving my proximity barrier before
A severance of distance and fading sound
A distant view of Lake Superiority
Leaves leaving forever their one summer
Running around my knees like lost cats.
I think the ice-gutted winds from Creeplaces have
Pried my cold fingers from six things more than I really knew
I just wish a severance of cold metal was as neatly done.
I appeared like a tramp at a church door
Offering the poor-box my golden opinions
But after the borrowed, the hand-me-downs
The seashell-gathered oddities were politely refused
I found myself holding out an empty purse
To which they added some curious coins.
Disassociated at that birth, I am separated in the fall
Haunted by leaves, annoyed by nuts,
Just a bit divorced from whatever place someone told me
Was my home.
Dawn
(Lollie puts a positive spin on her odyssey)
When they ask, “Did she truly live?”
Say she found some footprints, however faint
To follow
Say she learned then how the morning shone
When there were good things to do
Say she learned that days
Could be too short
And the nights
No longer
Infinite
Tell the world she laughed at the shadow of her car
Stretching before her
At dawn
Say that maybe a wound or two
Got left behind.
Ashes
(It’s not as bad as she feared)
I always fled flames
Till they caught me, now I know
I really feared ashes
Where Do the Gods Go
(More questions.)
Where do the gods go
When they die?
Does no-one chant for
Mizoupishou of the rocks
Is there no drum for
Grandfather Northwind
In our kitchens
We believe in Jesus
But the church needs repairs
And the organ is off-key
We believe in God but
It was too cold last winter
We are prodigal children
Wondering how to get home
Or if the stove is still lit
The River
(Three haikus)
I have gone downstream
On the rivers of old time
In a leaking boat
I have come upstream
On a fresh wind over pines
On gold-feathered wings
I have turned in circles
The world spinning giddy by
Learning the river
The Clowns
(You can tell she’s back in Toronto)
This world, she said
is a madhouse
where a group of clowns
have been mistakenly
incarcerated
and even when they stand on their heads
and juggle with their feet
no-one will let them go
Prove you’re crazy
and we’ll let you in
I’ve been looking for God, I said
You know the rest.
Why We Write Poems
(My explanation. Lollie says it’s close enough.)
When we were born, there were ten of us
Nine were me
The other, last born, was not
When we die, there will be ten of us
Nine will be me
The last to die will not
All our life we've sat at the table
Waiting for the tenth to start
And nine of us are hungry
***END OF POEMS***
Note on This Book
The Minor Odyssey of Lollie Heronfeathers Singer was published in 2000 by Penumbra Press as a 128-page book. You can order a handsome copy from https://www.penumbrapress.com/, or order it from your bookstore; ISBN 1-894131-12-6.
Questions about Lollie
Who's the Chick on the Cover of the Penumbra Edition?
Not Lollie, but Heron Feathers, Lollie's mythical ancestor. Lollie invented her and she's a genuine kitsch white-person's idea of an Indian. Lollie knows Heron Feathers is too good to be real, and says so to Lucy, in "Let There be Pencil".
The ceramic Indian Maid with the discount sticker seemed like a good symbol for the story.
When Does Lollie's Search for Community Begin and End?
It begins with "When the Words Stopped". When a relationship starts to die, a man's most feared weapon is silence. The silences start small, and grow like a cancer, and there's so little a woman can do.
It ends with "I Guess I’m a Métis", in which Lollie gets what may be the first sincere and warm hug she's had in a decade or so. Hugs are highly underrated in this life.
When Does Lollie's Search for Whatever Gods Might Be Begin and End?
Ah, the heart of the book! Starts before the book opens, and continues well past the last poem.
Is This a Real Odyssey?
The opposite, really. Odysseus wanted to go home, and get away from the gods that hounded him. Lollie leaves her home in the hope of finding some gods.
Is This an Accurate Depiction of First Nations or Métis Culture?
There's a line in the movie, Sixth Sense, that goes, "they only see what they want to see". Lollie's like that; she tends to pick and remember those views that she finds colourful or those that match her expectations. And it's been a while since her Odyssey; things have changed a lot for both groups, mostly for the better. I told Lollie about all these things, but she told me what I could do with myself, adding that she's "a poet, not a freakin' sociologist".
lennypoet@hotmail.ca
***END***