A Cahuilla creation story tells of two old women shooting the breeze in the dark starless night, laughing, cackling, hooting, whispering, telling tales of who knows what, since this is before the beginning. They share a cigar, passing it back and forth. Then in a moment of sidesplitting crazy laughter one of them drops it. Sparks fly in every direction through the darkness; and the stars, sun, moon, planets, world and everything in it are born.


I am smoking my father's cigar
the smell of cedar is heavy
around my house

I live in a hidden canyon.

You know more than you think you do. You
are only just beginning
to come
into it. Always.


I am living my father's life. I have not spoken
of it for many years. I am white specks of bone
where we scattered you. Your ashes
fall hurriedly through my mother's fingers.
No one wants to die. Magnolia Canyon.
inland hot October. Then last night a huge
coyote roadkilled at Henshaw's Lake.
I pass in the dawn, whispering a prayer
and scaring up a raven.

The enemy is close, under my white skin
black skin brown skin red skin yellow skin furred skin feathered skin.
Lord! Does poetry have to become a rant?
Has it come to this? Burning all the fuel we want
on our desert bikes
because we can dammit!
because we're fuckin' amercans!

The demon eats itself. We are along for the
cannibal ride. Did we choose it? Do we ever?
If I chose you, it is because I have a bitter streak, or want
to test myself, test something I have forgotten or never knew?
Perhaps we wake, for a moment at the moment of our death.
North American soldiers a year out of high-school roll tanks over
wounded women, children, men in Falluja.

My friend Krikor tells me that Falluja people are simple honest folk.
That's what people everywhere mostly are, coyote too, and owl, and flicker, red fox, and wood rat, sycamore and oak,
AND FUCKIN' MORNING DOVE! Bathing, bathing in the water.

Must poetry be a rant? Sparks dance in the air,
phosphorescence from shells that burn brown skin for hours.
Is this how the world is born now? With uranium shrapnel, cluster bombs
that bounce twenty feet back up into the air exploding to send a 1000 spinning burning devils to sear and scorch and scream?
Shall we say yes, yes this is how it begins?

My friends too have steel in their eyes and bones.
No, not steel but willow, yew, rock, bones in their bones;
of cougar, fox, and the ancient not so silent ones. We hope, we pray
for voices other than our own, more than our own.

There are ten thousand creation stories: goofy, solemn, ecstatic,
some of them even made up right there on the spot
to trick the anthropologists.
None but our own kind tell stories of the End.
This, that pursues itself, that lives within itself, does not end.
It is little-by-little, as in word by word; and it is all at once.
It tests itself through us.
It forgives itself as we do. It returns.
It tells tales on itself too. It gives itself away. It laughs.
It tells us how we all die of natural causes.
And ‘It' is not even something,
just a way of talking . . .

I am sitting with you in the desert dark. We share a cigar, passing it back and forth. Our laughter fills the night. Carelessly and drunk from laughing we drop the cigar. A myriad sparks fly up in the desert sky . .

 

 

 

© Caitríona Reed May, 2001

 

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