Thoughts on a Powwow

Thoughts on a Powwow

Viking chants have hard edges

sharp drums

suited for longships

with the heads of dragons.

They have no place

where the wind sighs

in oak and maple trees.

Where the red-wings call

in the marsh,

where gulls shriek,

where pines hush

un-native voices.

 

There are laments

in the music

born of these sounds.

Voices not meant

for the sea

but for the rivers running

and the rustle of the porcupine

and the squirrel,

the bugle of the elk,

the call of the loon

at twilight.

 

There are memories in it,

too poignant

and betray-ful

in the measured wailing

to bear too long.

It is a gift,

the voices sing:

 

This much sorrow

for us to hear,

but no more.

 

Listen and know

that the land I love,

that I was born to

and believe myself native to

does not fully

love me back.

It is not mine.

This much sorrow for me to hear.

The oars that cut the waves

are not the oars that

belong in this river.

My people have been

invaders as long as

these people have existed.

Those stony lands

are no more mine.

 

We are people between,

we who took this land

for our own,

who claimed the red-wing

and the loon,

the elk and the pines

for our own.

 

Took it

Held it

Even loved it

as if the stones of home

gave us the right.

As if dragons bring

anything but burning.

 

This much sorrow for us to hold. 

A Broken Hallelujah

 

Leonard Cohen wrote that

life and love are

a broken hallelujah.

i thought i got it

until this morning.

 

it snowed last night

because it’s michigan

and it’s march,

which is just a cold

and broken time here.

this snow, though,

is so beautiful

it makes my heart hurt.

 

every twig, gray and unlovely

without spring on yet,

wears a white coat.

briefly perfect.

And the gray and dirty snow

standing in heaps

is briefly

perfect.

It’s wet snow, heavy snow,

and sometimes clumps

fall from branches,

with a tail

like a comet.

the clumps land with

a wet plop

i can hear in my mind.

the wonder of

such beauty,

transiently glorious,

that’s hallelujah.

 

then the office.

always reliable,

me.

because my job

doesn’t lend itself much

to working from home,

because I am always

in the office…

I won’t mind covering 

even though it is not 

my turn.

just like that,

my morning hallelujah,

cracks

and grays.

taking out the mail

--not my job today—

is just cold wind

snowflakes in my eyes

even though the weeping cherry

covered in the snow

that still drifts down

is so lovely.

 

It’s a cold and it’s a broken

hallelujah

offered now

with a tear in my eye

because my stupid brain

does what it does.

i grayed it.

i broke it.

struggling back to 

perfect hallelujah

is exhausting and 

i’m so tired.

 

if i can accept it 

a little broken,

like I accept myself 

a little broken…

maybe the universe won’t mind

if hallelujah is 

a little broken.

isn’t it all the better

for being offered

in its glorious imperfection?

we get it,

Leonard Cohen and me.

 

even broken and cold,

hallelujah is always

good enough.

If Only We Were Greener Things

 The following was originally posted on Michelle's website, Shamama. The site has been taken down, so I am posting this essay here.

If Only We Were Greener Things

              

All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above. From The Overstory, by Richard Powers.

If you grew up in northern Michigan, you know the annual madness for morel mushrooms. If you are savvy, you know there is a lookalike false morel out there that looks and tastes similar. If you are also really unlucky, you know it will make you throw up your pilaf so fiercely it will be 15 years before you can eat rice again. Regardless of your experience with morels, you are probably familiar with the various fungi that spring up after a rain, or you have gleefully kicked a puffball mushroom to release the spores into the wind. It’s all part and parcel of coming up Michigan.

               I didn’t know it, but kicking the puffball made me a part of the unending cycle of regeneration and destruction that is nature. In recent decades, science has been looking more closely at exactly how closely woven all our threads really are and made a mind-spinning discovery: the wood wide web. This is the network of fungal threads, called hyphae, that runs just under the surface of the forest. What is so incredible is that this network includes the trees, their roots so thickly entwined with hyphae that it can be difficult to tell which is which. This network, known scientifically as the mycelia, is all but invisible to the naked eye and trees use it to share nutrients, warn of insect attack and probably much more. While some of us have always believed that the trees speak to each other—and have even heard them—this proof has shaken everything we thought we understood about a forest.

               British author Robert MacFarlane visited botanist Merlin Sheldrake[1] in Epping Forest to learn about the wood wide web and recounts the experience in a chapter of his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey. Most striking to me, he writes about his struggle to adequately describe what happens there where we can’t see it:

I glance down, try to trance the soil into transparency such that I can see its hidden infrastructure: millions of fungal skeins suspended between tapering tree roots, their prolific liaisons creating a gossamer web at least as intricate as the cables and fibres that hang beneath our cities. What’s the haunting phrase I’ve heard used  to describe the realm of fungi? The kingdom of the grey. It speaks of fungi’s utter otherness—the challenges they issue to our usual models of time, space, and species.

               “You look at the network,” says Merlin, “and then it starts to look back at you” (MacFarlane 100-101).

               This passage speaks to me in so many ways. Specifically, it makes me think of t he moment during breathwork with Michelle when she encourages us to “send down [our] roots into Mother Earth.” What a profound union that would if we had hyphae like the fungi! But this is about more than simple communion. MacFarlane wants to penetrate and see into the network, as if to really see it is to then understand it.

               Sheldrake posits a different perspective: that the network is, at least for now, impenetrable. You look at the network and then it starts to look back at you. You may have heard the Nietzsche quote about looking into the abyss and it’s accompanying caution: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you” (brainyquotes.com).

               Nietzsche is warning his readers to be wary of studying something so closely that you become the thing you seek to understand, particularly when studying “monsters.” Sheldrake, however, makes a different word choice. He does not suggest we can look into the network; we can only look at it. We can stare at it as long as we like but we are not capable just now of seeing into it. We can’t sprout hyphae from our tailbones, after all. We are limited by both body and language to only imagine, as MacFarlane does, hearing the forest say to us “if your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning” (Powers 4).

               We can’t green our minds to communicated with the wood wide web, not in the way we wish we could. On Star Trek: Discovery, the crew of the science ship encounters a giant tardigrade. Through it, they are able to engineer a ‘mycelium’ drive that allows them to use the mycelial network to ‘jump’ from place to place across space without ever understanding why or how. It is only when the chief engineer accidentally ingests spores from the tardigrade that he comprehends the effect of humans on the mycelial network. It amounts to torture of the ailing tardigrade and damage to the overall network. Even when the mycelial network is writ large across the universe, it is only when we somehow taking in the spores that we can even connect in a meaningful way.[2]

               MacFarlane dwells on our linguistic limitations when it comes to translating its lessons to humanity. He posits that “’we need . . . a new language altogether—one t hat doesn’t automatically convert it to our own use values . . . we need to speak in spores’” (110) aloud to Sheldrake.

               Sheldrake agrees whole-heartedly. “That’s exactly what we need to be doing—and that’s your job . . . That’s the job of the writers and artists and poets and all the rest of you’” (111). The job of writers and artists and poets. My job. As a writer, as a native-born Michigander, it is my to find the right words and learn to speak in spores. In short, to go outside and learn to tap in.

               Indeed, Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass and Potawatomi, insists that “[t]o be native to a place we must learn to speak its language” (Kimmerer 48). She doesn’t mean language about a place, which is what we have, but language of place, of the plants and trees, of everything that lives in and on and around us.  “We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species,” she writes, “let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us . . . Imagine how less lonely the world would be” (58). If our minds were only greener things…

               Michigan calls loudly to those of her natives who try to send down their roots, their spiritual hyphae, in other places. She calls with the voice of the planet to all her lost children who tread heavily and understand so lightly. Both Kimmerer and MacFarlane agree that whatever the wood wide web is, it is community. Like any human community, it allows for the exchange of information and goods and news. It makes every living thing it touches part of the collective whole. It is, writes Kimmerer, “the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together” (__)

               This summer, my first full summer in Michigan since 1989, I grew tomatoes, basil, rosemary, thyme, flowers. I dug in the earth for the first time as a willing gardener. I met a worm who, when I unearthed him, I called ‘icky.’ When informed by a much wiser gardener that I’d hurt his feelings, I made a sincere apology and gave him back a little of his soil. When I failed to water often enough, I lost flowers. When I did well, I had tomatoes and basil to eat with fresh mozzarella and rosemary to lay on my Thanksgiving turkey. It satisfied me on a primal level. I grew food. I got dirt under my fingernails. I shared my wonder with the four-year-old next door. What a precious, precious gift to have insulted a worm and then made up with it![3]  I connected, just a little and so can we all.

               Just watch out for those false morels.

 

Works Cited

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the

Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions. 2013.

MacFarlane, Robert. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. W.W. Norton

Nietzsche, Friederich. “Friederich Nietzsche Quotes.” Brainy Quotes.  BrainyMedia Inc, 2022.

12 February 2022. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/friedrich_nietzsche_124387.

Powers, Richard. The Overstory. W.W. Norton & Co. 2018.

Wikipedia contributors. "Star Trek: Discovery (season 2)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Feb. 2022. 

 

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[1] Yep. That’s really his name. He’s done fascinating research into the mycelial network in Central America, too.

[2] Don’t inhale spores. It didn’t end well for the Star Trek guy and it’s usually bad for you.

[3] I assume we made up. I speak worm as well as I speak fungus.

Working Title: Manitou

 

I have met the sea and
been a little in love,
heard the mermaids sing
and hoped it was for me.
I have been a little in love
with the smell of brine
and fish things

 

I have put my body in the sea,

been rocked ‘fore and aft

on its swells; ridden them

back to land and sand sharp with shells.

It stung my eyes,

left a rime of salt

that made my hair lank

and gritty,

was full of stinging things

that do not love me.

 

I have ridden upon the sea

and looked down into a blue

so deep

there are neither words enough

nor courage to contemplate.

I have been among those

who seek to conquer

from her breast.

The depth was terrifying,

the hull too thin.

 

I have overflown the sea,

looked down through tiny windows

and been in awe—

and some fear—

of what it brings

and what it takes away.

 

Always looking down.

Always apart and not a part.

 

I have been on islands

inhabited the places of salt marsh

and brackish delta,

of dunes and tire tracks in sand,

of sandpipers and plovers and wild horses

and strange gifts.

I have felt the singing

of unknown and alien things

and been a little in love with the wildness.

 

They are great,

yes,

and they are mighty,

yes.

 

But they are not my Great Lakes.

The oceans and sea and gulf,

too arrogant,

too brash,

too sure of their power.

They overwhelm with their promise

of seeing the horizon,

the curve of the earth,

the stars overhead

in a place with no light.

 

Their names do not sing,

not like Mishii’gan or Mishigami,

not like Odaawaawi-gichigami,

not like Anishinaabewe-gichigami.

They have no manitou

that sing to me.

They do not speak a language

I long to understand.

 

Mishigami is unhappy today,

deep green and lashing out

under a heavy sky.

She compels the spirits of the wind

and the spirits of the sand

to dance.

 

I think I understand manitou.

 

There is manitou in the sough of the wind

that blows so hard,

in the sting of sand on my cheek,

in the wash of wave over the pier

and manitou in the wash of wave

when it empties back into the river

and, yes, in the wash of wave upon rocks

and the wash of wave upon the sand.

Each their own manitou.

 

There is manitou in the river,

and in the swell of the river,

swells that rise and do not break

where they come from the lake.

There is manitou in the flowing

into the river

dancing with the manitou of flowing out.

 

It sings, all the manitou,

in one voice that is

the symphony of the storm—

which also has manitou of its own.

It sings beckons says

Listen.

I, who was born here

but am not a native.

 

If I stand in the place

where all manitou meet,

if I feel the sting

the cold

the howl

the crash

the wash

the hush

hush

hush

 

hush

 

I might hear 

my manitou wake and sing,

and begin to heal

from oceans.

Again

 With blunt fingers nimble as anything

he builds and maintains and loves.

His hands are a tally of scars--

here he cut his palm and

there a nail tore the skin--

count them and tell the litany of his days.

What do they hold, these capable hands?

Babies and bibles and birdhouses and my hands 

when he makes me fly.

Again, Daddy!

A flat black pencil marks the cut on the board

he lets me hold with my little hands.

His fingers close over my little feet

and lift me up up up

Again, Daddy!

His hands are warm, callused, gentle, big.

Sometimes they give a shake--pay attention!

Or cage my head in rough affection to kiss my forehead.

Sometimes they are dirty and smell of crude

or sawdust or horses or all three and Lava soap, too.

He holds my hands around the stick

so I can burn the marshmallow without losing it in the fire.

When the days march on as days will do,

he opens his hands to let me fly free.

Leaves them open in case he needs to

catch me.

Now his hands are often idle

or clasped in prayer.

They tremble, fragile as onionskin,

the years in flesh so quick to bruise.

His hands hold the history of him,

of love and life and daughters,

of breaths taken and released

and counted down to the last.

They hold my heart and they alone

recall the shape of my baby skull

when it lay cupped in his hand.

Again, Daddy.

Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earthshattering KABOOM!

I expected a bang

(I wanted a bang)

and dreaded a whimper.

I expected triumph

(I wanted triumph)

but I'm in a conference room

and there are clients in the lobby

right outside.

I took a moment

(I wanted that moment)

to change my name on Facebook.

There's a kind of triumph

(Remember, I wanted triumph)

in that action, but it was just...

less than.

This is the way my marriage ends:

Not with a bang

(I WANTED MY GODDAMN BANG)

or a whimper,

but with the click

of a pen

on the other end

of a three-way Zoom call.

(You have left the meeting)

Trauma, the Poet

If I could make my trauma
write its own poem,
it would be a viper
with hissing (sssstupid)
and hushing (bitchsshhhh)
and fangs made of hard word ends
(fat shit).
It would be a viper.

Or a constrictor

squeezing my chest,

aching my bones,

knotting my stomach

so I can't eat.

Writhing and twisting my words,

turning me wrong.

It would definitely be a constrictor.

But this is Michigan.

It's probably a blue racer.

It won't bite hard

but it chases me,

keeps me running,

always wary

waiting

wondering

what will happen

when it catches me?

It's totally a blue racer.

Trouble is,

snakes don't have hands.

Their words stay in their heads

and they can't write poems.

Neither can trauma.

Lucky me.