SPECIAL FEATURE
ROBERT DAVIS HOFFMAN
Robert Davis Hoffman is a poet and a carver. He is a Tlingit Indian from Southeast Alaska, a member of the Tsaagweidi clan and Xaay Hit (Yellow Cedar House of Kake, Alaska). His Tlingit name is Xaashuch’eet. Davis is the author of SoulCatcher, a collection of poetry published by Ravens Bones Press, Sitka, in 1986. His poems have been featured in the following anthologies: Into the Storm, Orca Press, 1984; In the Dreamlight: Twenty-One Alaskan Writers, Copper Canyon Press, 1984; Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth Century Native American Poetry, Harper & Row, 1988; Dancing on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of Contemporary Northwest Native American Writing, The University of Arizona Press, 1990; Raven Tells Stories: An Anthology of Alaskan Native Writing, The Greenfield Review Press, 1991; Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices, The Aperture Foundation, 1995; Alaska Native Writers, Storytellers, and Orators: The Expanded Edition, Alaska Quarterly Review, 1999; Native Universe: Voices of Indian America, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, 2004.
Robert Davis Hoffman is a poet fully engaged in his heritage and culture. He describes the creative impulse for his poetry and carving this way: “My desire to create comes from a drive to connect my past to the present, stated in my poem Saginaw Bay: ‘. . . I keep going back, I keep trying to see myself against all this history . . .’ When I create new forms out of the old, using non-traditional materials and styles, I bridge the past and the present. Our ancestors knew there were spirits in everything; they spoke to places, they thanked the cedar, they spoke to the creatures, they spoke to their tools. My art contains my ‘thought-conversations.’ But the materials already possessed their inherent power. My job as an artist is simply to rearrange what is, just as re-telling is the job of the storyteller. As I am creating, I am merely re-creating.”
Acknowledgments: Thirteen poems in this feature section are published for the first time. Three poems are reprinted with permission of the author. Grateful acknowledgment is made as follows: “Saginaw Bay: I Keep Coming Back” was originally published in SoulCatcher, Ravens Bones Press, 1986. “Leveling Grave Island” and “Danger Point, Bainbridge Island” originally appeared in Dancing on the Rim of the World, edited by Andrea Lerner, University of Arizona Press, 1990.
SAGINAW BAY: I KEEP GOING BACK
I
He dazzles you right out of water,
right out of the moon, the sun and fire.
Cocksure smooth talker, good looker,
Raven makes a name for himself
up and down the coast from the Nass River,
stirs things up.
Hurling the first light, it lodges
in the ceiling of the sky,
everything takes form –
creatures flee to forest animals,
hide in fur. Some choose the sea,
turn to salmon escaping.
Those remaining in the light
stand as men, dumb and full of fear.
Raven turns his head
and laughs in amazement,
then dives off the landscape,
dividing the air
into moment before
and instant after.
He moves north, Kuiu Island, Saginaw Bay –
wind country, rain country,
its voices try to rise through fog.
The long tongue of the sea
slides beneath the bay.
Raven is taken in by it all:
sticky mudflats horseclams squirting,
rockpool waterbugs skitting,
bulge-eyed bullheads staring through shadow,
incessant drizzle hissing.
Oilslick Raven
fixed against the glossy surface of infinity.
II
The Tsaaqueidi clan settled there first,
it was right. Beaches sloped
beneath canoes greased with seal fat.
They delivered the Seal clan
to these same creeks
shaking with humpies and dog salmon.
Everywhere eyes
peered from the woods and mist.
The berries were thick and bursting,
and there were always the roots.
They knew how to live,
by the season.
Sometimes it felt like the center of the world,
mountains circling within reach.
At its mouth on a knoll a fortress
guarded against intruders.
They came anyway,
from the south.
A swift slave raid
destroyed the village.
The people fled every direction.
A captured shaman
tortured and ridiculed
scalped before his very people.
Through blood running in eyes
he swore revenge
and got it.
After the massacre the battered clan
collected themselves and moved
north to Kupreanof Island.
That became the village of Kake.
They became the Kake-kwaan,
and every once in awhile
one sees in his mind
Raven tracks hardened in rock at Saginaw
where Raven dug his feet in
and tugged the mudflats clear into the woods
remaking a small Nass
because he grew homesick there,
and in those moments
they feel like going back too.
III
Kake is the Place of No Rest. It is.
I’ve heard men in black robes
instructing heathen natives:
outlaw demon shamanism,
do away with potlatch,
pagan ceremony,
totem idolatry,
get rid of old ways.
The people listened,
dynamited the few Kake poles –
mortuary poles fell with bones,
clan identifiers got lost in powder,
storytellers blown to pieces
settled on the new boardwalk
running along the beachfront
houses built off the ground.
In the middle of Silver Street
my aunt drove the silver spike
that sealed the past forever.
People began to talk different,
mixed and tense.
Acted ashamed of gunny sacks of k’ink’,
mayonnaise jars of stink eggs.
No one mashed blueberries
with salmon eggs anymore.
They walked different,
falling all over.
A storekeeper took artifacts for credit
before his store went up in a blaze.
Grandpa went out in his slow skiff
and cached in the cliffs
his leather wrapped possessions
preserved like a shaman body
that can’t be destroyed, that won’t burn.
IV
Grandpa’s picture hangs in the church
next to Jesus.
He was a great minister. He traveled
with the Salvation Army band,
the famous Kake band
called to San Francisco
to play for President Harding.
My father as a young man
was sent away,
Sheldon Jackson Industrial School, Sitka.
They changed him.
Separated from his family
years at a time,
one of the conditions.
He was punished.
for speaking his own language.
He graduated.
He was sent off to college,
a handsome man.
A ladies’ man, I’ve heard,
shy and sad, but likeable.
But goddamn, you had to catch him sober
to know what I even mean.
Now they say I remind them of him.
But you have to catch me sober.
V
I turn ten or fifteen or something.
Pentilla Logging Co. barges into Saginaw.
Floathouses, landing craft and cranes.
Cables to the beach, cables in the woods.
Dozers leave treadmarks in mud.
Redneck rejects, tobacco spitters
drink whiskey in rowdy bunkhouses
at the end of the drawn out day,
brag how many loads, how many turns,
who got maimed, flown out
and did they take it like a man.
Climb all over each other
gawking at the spare camp women
and their minds turn to tits and ass.
Some men can’t help it,
they take up too much space,
always need more.
They gnaw at the edge of the woods
till the sky once swimming with branches
becomes simply sky, till there is only
a scarred stubble of clearcut
like a head without its scalp of hair.
They hire a few Indians from Kake,
what for I don’t know.
Maybe it looks good,
maybe it’s the stories they come with,
maybe it’s just they do things so quietly,
even sit speechless
in the stalled speedboat
while high power rifles
chip at the cliff painting –
the circle with three dashes
warning the invaders
from the south centuries ago
who destroyed with such precision.
VI
When my uncles were younger
they crawled on their bellies
through kelp draped rocks
at Halleck Harbor, Saginaw Bay
at a tide so low
and almost remembered;
uncovered in the rubble
of boulders from the cave-in
a hundred skeletons
in armor and weaponry –
slave hunters
piling over each other,
still hunting.
VII
Because Raven tracks are locked in fossil,
clam beds still snarled in roots
because it has been told to us this way,
we know for a fact
Raven moves in the world.
VIII
The old ones tell a better story in Tlingit.
When I was small everyone used Tlingit
and English at once.
Tlingit fit better.
But I forget so much
and a notepad would be obtrusive
and suspect. I might write a book.
In it I would describe
how we all are pulled
so many directions,
how our lives are fragments
with so many gaps.
I know there’s a Tlingit name for that bay,
it means “Everything Shifted Around.”
I’m trying to remember
how that shaman was called.
I can’t.
Except of course he was the most powerful
and I feel somehow tied to him (and was he
the one wrapped in cedar mat
sunk in the channel
only to reappear at his grieving ceremony
ascending the beach at Pt. White?)
I don’t know, I get mixed up.
But I know my own name,
it’s connected with some battle.
Listen, I’m trying to say something –
always the stories lived through paintings,
always the stories stayed alive in retelling.
You wonder why sometimes you can’t reach me?
I keep going back.
I keep trying to picture my life
against all this history,
Raven in the beginning
hopping about like he just couldn’t do enough.
RECONSTRUCTION
(For Uncle Topsy, Shaayaxdu.eesh - Tsaagweidi)
I thought my life was in layers
like a complex Chilkat blanket’s warps and wefts;
foreground, background; the native, the not-native
It couldn’t unravel.
My father thought Tlingit but spoke English.
I always heard we live in two worlds,
heard that we learn who we are
by living right with the land,
that it should feed us like mother with milk.
I never hunted, could not speak the language of the forest.
Never fished, could not dance with the river.
To make sense of this place
I tried to reduce it: mudflats here, cliffs there, clouds above,
sulfur, rock, evaporation – but for all the details
it could not come to life, had no spirit.
I puzzled with this.
I heard we learn who we are by being a warrior.
Trained myself to be angry, to be at war.
On my head, a fierce killer whale helmet with a fin that slashes.
Water roiling and adversaries came out of nowhere,
Like Naatseelanei’s[1] killer whales seeking vengeance.
My Uncle was different:
He wore tubes that fed him oxygen, the summer I lived with him.
One July day when the water was smooth,
we took our uncle to the sockeye stream.
It was all over the CBs, we were so proud to get him out.
We brought his air.
We pulled in fat halibut. There was so much!
We thought we fished good!
“But the fish came to us,” Topsy said.
Gliding across the strait, we brought Uncle
to the ancestral homeland
of our Tsaagweidi Killer Whale clan,
Skanax, Saginaw Bay
We sat there, the boat hardly rocked.
A whale broke the water
at the base of our last fort, that stood far above.
Topsy held out his arms reciting the names
even the people;
where Raven danced, and flirted, and played;
where canoes arrived and were greeted,
or destroyed;
how things that seem mythical, unfolded here,
right here!
I felt it. We all did.
And we understood
We didn’t bring Uncle here,
he brought us here, home.
I thought I needed his memories, his life.
But he told me,
“You know, even when you know the answers, listen. Just listen.”
He said his uncle told him that.
He was showing me the way
to be human.
At his house he played for me
the tape of our last real leader
listing the qualities of a worthy chief:
“Your people should always see smoke
drifting from the smoke hole.”
The voice was calm and sweet
like water. It was satisfying.
In Tlingit.
He played its length and studied me,
“Did you hear it? Did you hear?”
I said, “But it was in Tlingit.”
He pointed to his heart.
In my teacher’s presence I felt so safe,
like sitting at the fire pit.
I would have to design the dance staff
to tell our story.
Our story, Tsaagweidi!
I struggled with it for nights,
pinning worn out photos
to the clothesline I strung:
the Kake dancers, their drums, their paint,
elders long gone, old regalia, old Kake . . .
They were fading.
I wanted it. I wanted it to come back;
for Topsy’s memories to be my memories.
So I played the songs, I turned it real loud,
till the house itself sang,
till the photos began to dance and sway,
till the designs came on their own
just like the sockeye in July
just like the whale met us at Skanax.
I saw it floating in front of me –
Two killer whales, two houses.
There were two killer whales joined by a single tail
and seals in the body, Tsaa2[2]
It came to me.
That’s how it is: connected, not disjointed.
When Topsy came from the hospital,
I wanted to be the man he described.
I confessed, “That’s not me.”
He put his hand on my heart,
“You just have to listen, nephew.
It will all come to you, if you stop fighting so hard.
It will.”
CARVING
Kaashaan, old man, master carver –
perched on alder chopping block,
sleek killer whale dives in his palm.
Slice, chip, gouge, flick . . .
pungent cedar escapes.
“My tools stay so sharp this way, just from use,” Kaashaan explains.
Is he playing with me? I can’t tell.
He puffs into the blowhole,
cedar shavings spray.
Pointing with the tip of his knife, he tells me
the importance of design – the overlapping form line,
how the central ovoid repeats itself.
At his feet, haphazard curled spirals,
circles, and intermittent commas form,
like some kind of calligraphy,
or magical equation.
The carver leans toward me, “Does the wind around raven sculpt raven,
or does raven sculpt the wind around himself? Do the tide flats emerge,
or is that Tide Woman pulling back her blanket? What matters
is not what’s left to the eye, but what’s taken away.”
That mistake, that little slip I made yesterday, good or bad, is what I’m left with now:
Kaashaan swimming in my head, casting out
my urgent things of the day.
I can’t listen too long to Kaashaan without getting lost.
I don’t tell him.
What we omit, sometimes, is of the same consequence as what’s brought out.
VILLAGE BOY
He was village boy. Years later he’s Village Boy.
Keex kwaan. Kake people. Aa.á[3].
Didn’t talk much then.
Still doesn’t.
His high school year, they moved to the city.
He was dumb in school.
Dumb village boy!
Oh, he was so ashamed . . .
Ashamed of who he was, where he was from.
There were names for people like him.
He made himself thin,
missing everyone between classes.
I studied him like a foreign language.
Waiting all day for the end of the day
when Carving came.
At the end of the day is when I saw village boy’s designs,
when he finally took out his hands.
“Killer whales,” he told me, making his arm a fin slicing waves.
Carving Teacher went to school with Charlie Pride.
He was really shop teacher, no Native teachers then.
Carving Teacher drops his jaw:
“By golly, sure looks like Kwak-tootle[4] art there, Bob!”
Village Boy’s head turns,
“You talk funny. And I can’t carve.”
Carving came to them, like it had to, both of them.
It fixed everything. Kept him from slipping.
They put together the first bentwood box with dovetail joints.
Pretty good! How the carvings made his designs swim!
School dismissed. Village Boy went home.
He finally went home.
Village Boy said goodbye. Carving Teacher said thank you.
The way this story goes, decades later
Village Boy sits with Carving Teacher’s grandson. Shows Grandson his cuts.
Now Village Boy’s eyes flood with thank you when Grandson leaves.
The things we need come when we need them most.
If you took away our knives,
our hands would be just fists.
HE WAS A DANCER
He was a dancer. All over the floor.
The bed of hemlock that was the ocean.
He rode it. Swimming through air
with fists of feathers.
Seventy years and still lithe.
I wanted to move like him
bare feet coming down exactly
to the skin tight drum.
Cawing like Raven. He had long silver hair
that whipped and kept
your eyes from stopping
on the old dance blanket.
I wonder where he kept it hidden, his only property –
his shack by the humpy[5] creek?
The smokehouse after the fire?
It was a hard life for him after his wife died.
He made his rounds at just the right time.
Returning home with gunny sacks of canned goods
tossed over his shoulder.
He was a dancer,
wool and sweat.
He died drunk, sprawled with no blanket
in a fire-gutted house.
Indian village, Sitka, 1975.
No teeth, almost deaf.
Death grip on wine jug.
Once again
somewhere
he makes the rattle sing,
sealskin, ermine headdress, button blanket
unfolding themselves.
Once again
somewhere
the singers recapture their notes,
their persistent songs
pulsing with the diving figure,
his arms outstretched.
BLIND MAN
The old man rocked on the rickety porch
staring behind dark black glasses.
He always faced the water,
as if it were telling him something.
He lived in a little world, everything within reach.
Blind Man could sample a tray of seaweeds
and name the rocks they came from.
In his day, every point of land had a name,
every cliff, even big rocks.
You memorized these things,
you spoke to the places because they kept you alive.
He never got it wrong,
it was more than taste.
We played a game,
creeping under the stairs to tug a pant leg.
He did not lurch. Never smiled, never got angry.
Just rocked. And stared.
We weren’t trying to be mean; we were village kids.
Becoming men, we feel something strange
curling like smoke that has to come from somewhere –
anger and cruelty just below the surface
coming from a place
we could not see,
that we had no names for.
We’re people familiar with the outside world.
We want to hunt and gather for ourselves,
We hunger for delicacies dipped in seal grease.
But rendering fat draws company
insisting on the same generosity as the sea.
We talk guns and horsepower now.
Numbers are everything now.
Another time
it would have been clearer,
that the sources of sustenance
have more to do
with the taste of seaweed
and the place of its harvest.
WARRIORS
In the beginning was Raven.
All the water in the world
was contained in a single drop
hoarded by Ganook.
Waiting for Ganook to drift off to sleep,
Raven smudged him with shit,
then shook Ganook to taunt him.
When Ganook dropped his guard
Raven flew off with the water,
laughing and spilling drops
all over the world.
Even then Raven knew
if you trick someone
you don’t even have to fight.
The new warriors battle full court press
in the courts of the ANB[6] Halls.
A framed photograph near the concessions
shows early heroes
dressed for convention,
in this corner
smart young natives
resolved
to make gains
for a new generation.
The brass placard lists each of them.
Hanging nearby
the Hall of Fame lineup
you can hear the roar
coming from the stands.
It is carried
by its own power
beyond the walls
into corporate offices
where secret societies
shuffle paper
dividing the spoils,
pleased that the crowd gets their money’s worth.
GLOBAL WARMING
September in Barrow
my wife anticipates polar bear,
huge white forms humping across ice fields.
But the ice is rotten and refuses the bears,
according to the elderly Eskimo woman
who smiles at the tourist in the tropical palms
some prankster fashioned from baleen of whale
and planted like an absurd Stonehenge here.
The old woman warns
of huge footprints she’s seen:
that my wife should find a big stick.
Then she shrinks
on the back of a 4-wheeler
headed for town
where all kinds of people come
to be on top of the world.
Back in the Alexander Archipelago
our garden spent
the entire summer
struggling to push out any color
to break the monotonous cold gray
drizzle, a steady sheet
we look through like the plastic
flapping over our windows.
The climate will turn
these failed flowers
into a garden of its own,
one that can survive a drowning island
we look for relief from.
From the hacienda window
we can almost shake hands
with Mazatlan, its spectrum of colors.
It is so clear and bright
we shade our eyes
searching for whales
that drift like logs from Alaska.
The ocean view is breathtaking!
In September the desert behind
grows green and flourishing.
In the hills, perhaps a peasant
looks down on our resort,
past his coveted agave.
In the shimmering city, perhaps señoritas
twirl Flamenco skirts
to Mariachi trumpets
for careless tourists.
We could almost live here, we agree.
The cold air blasts into our room.
The pipes knock
as though even water needs permission to enter.
SEATTLE BLUES
Yesterday morning, on waking
I thought I was gazing at a shimmering creekbed,
shadow and sunlight swirling over rocks.
But it was the cherry tree
dancing on the stark wall
with its resident starlings
lifting themselves to the ripest fruit,
the hardest to reach.
Every moment has its details,
every place requires adaptation.
Downtown, studied gentlemen in the secret café
trade the best words
for the chicken parmigiana and strong espresso.
Their discussion covers good literature
between mouthfuls.
Golden Garden Park in the evening
diners find the boathouse popular.
Northbound trains pound though plate glass
and right below,
flush men caress hulls in the boatyard.
Out of sight,
fishers are propped with lines
hoping the surf gives something for the effort.
When I tire of this district
I put myself back at my creek,
my home in the woods of old-growth,
a place still unpopular,
small creatures undisturbed at its banks,
feeding themselves
with anything good they can find.
DANGER POINT, BAINBRIDGE ISLAND
You lead me into approaching night
down to eelgrass reefs,
leave behind safe house lights.
Channel marker’s strobes
punctuate our thoughts
Between each pulse
the red lid of the sky
slowly closes, blinks.
Then we, like irritating specks
are suddenly gone.
All that remains
a deepening trail,
naked footprints
so close together
in the mudflats at Danger Point.
After-image of bone colored moon
shaken from its mooring
by waves folding over and over.
I make out my voice
going on about the painters, the poets,
derelicts who straggled all the way to death.
About the channel markers,
all the intrepid seamen
who have vanished just-like-that.
Now the odor of seaweed begins to rise.
Now the madrones reclaim all light.
A cry from the invisible sea bird
echoes off the wall of darkness.
This is the point
the sea draws up on either side.
At this point time hangs momentarily,
then surges around you.
This is any time,
the point where I start to whisper
how this feels all too familiar,
that we might turn back now,
while the tracks that led us here
are still recognizable
as our own.
TO DRAW MY HAND
In my study a mirror hangs on the door
glass etched with praying hands;
in the center, a hole trembles and bleeds.
I wanted to draw them, in vermilion ink
I wanted to draw them Tlingit-style, something that graceful –
that familiar.
If I can draw my hands like that
eccentric ovoid palms, fingers pressed,
tipped with waxy feathers
that will not fall apart.
My model is not innocent.
It needs to confess
its trespasses,
who it has taken from,
where it’s been,
what things it has signed away;
it wants to apologize for itself.
Hands cannot hide their guilt.
The ambivalent hand holds the pen
no longer looking like it belongs to me.
DIVISION
The geodetic map’s accurate
quadrants make plain
the plots that cut the tribal houses apart.
The clansman accepts his lot.
Surveyors diagram invisible lines like intent palm readers.
They turn the men to grains way down there
by the red ink.
You can see them drifting and settling
making their own kind of sense.
Guide yourself over that topography
the primal woodland, the forest people;
that world, yes.
The fire pit children dance against adzed walls.
The house is like a cedar box
preserving precious at.oow[7], sacred clan treasures
even as you watch it splinter.
Disgruntled Raven shakes his rattle,
scrambles for the smoke hole
that turned him black, that once breathed and exhaled.
You hear his feet starting to stomp?
His pounding steadfast feet draw on the earth,
even, then uneven
even, then uneven.
By HIS dance the land is shaped,
By HIS dance the world is arranged.
That river of feet hastens mapmakers’ scratchings,
where lines are drawn,
how dissection determines the destiny
of pursuant land holders
wanting, wanting
to claim new life.
Shhh! Down there wrinkled auntie crouches.
She harvests sweet cloudberries in spruce root basket,
so deep in the bushes
they blot out completely
the increasing storm of agents
demanding the exact amount of blood in her body.
KAKE TOWNSITE SURVEY 3851
Last summer the Swainson’s thrush
sang its final notes.
I was saying goodbye to our lot in the woods.
The last light of summer
drifted down like dust
through the old hemlock
on every side of me.
In your startling absence
I cup the space in front of me
trying to believe it is just a fragile insect
confused about where to land,
that my hands aren’t desperate.
They said I’d get used to it.
But the flies exhaust me!
There’s so much silence . . .
Beetles chew on the cottonwood.
Leaves crash at my feet.
Even the dust settling
makes its own little breath.
Labrador tea used to calm me,
the moss used to comfort me.
Now I hear it colonizing the forest
as I wait in my shack
in the woods
no longer simple woods,
in this mis-named silence
that keeps opening to more silence,
that will soon crescendo.
ROCK OF AGES
On his way to town,
the stumbling man passes the tennis court,
drawn to the petroglyph rock
heaved upward from buried tide flats.
Something calls him back.
At first, he guessed it was the signs chiseled in stone.
Signs he found one day in some accidental light.
Someone told him it was a calendar.
Those signs tracked time maybe,
mapped old worlds maybe,
recorded sea monsters thrashing, half-men grunting.
The drunk hears these things,
shaking fingers tracing ridges and valleys,
circles inside circles.
It became a habit.
The Tlingit tell of floods that covered the earth,
of starting all over,
of rivers that led them
under ice sheets
down to Pacific tidelands.
On the other side of the rock, in that raw land,
a lone man in bear hide
strikes stone on stone . . .
making coherent the vast distance they came.
I’ve seen him return.
Over and over, roaming those ages.
He shifts from foot to foot in winter’s slush,
depending on the rock for balance.
He navigates geological eras.
He follows a far-off-yet-not-far-off
crunch of feet in snow –
a small band of furry men,
staggering across Asia. Hunting.
There was a bridge between those worlds,
the tracks of woolly mammoth
trudging homeward.
I watched this curious bruised drunk,
ear to stone, eyes filling up.
His hands on their own, making circles in the air.
The rock sings to him, swollen with history;
impaired enough to simply see
if DNA from petroglyphs were even possible,
at some point upright man would emerge!
This drunk has felt the blood of ancestors,
the ancient procession, the higher laws –
Beyond libraries, beyond tectonics, magma and fossil.
Men parked in uniforms see something wrong,
demand of this drunk the nature of his business.
“Simply following the law,
keeping my balance, being upright.”
The uniform spins his fingers to his temple,
dismissing the shameless drunk,
“Son, you’ve got rocks in your head.”
Tire tracks disappear.
MONSTER
In mythological time, at Auk Village there lived a monster –
a sea monster, Gunakadeit, part wolf part whale.
Carcasses piled up behind the village.
A good-for-nothing son-in-law
trapped the monster, took his skin.
In the dark, wrapped in the ocean in the skin of Gunakadeit,
Good-for-nothing did his deeds.
Beaches turned to fresh meat for that hungry village.
The mother-in-law took the credit.
Her people owed her their lives.
To prove her power she increased her demands,
commanding the sea to surrender.
To prove his worth the son hunted harder.
He should have been done before daylight,
free from the skin before Raven cried. It was impossible.
He dragged himself ashore, half in half out,
part monster himself.
To win favor did him in.
His exposure brought two deaths.
The woman’s shame brought her end
when the people put it together.
In real time
a boy came into the world
birth marked burgundy red, like dog salmon,
foot to head.
When life slapped its first breath into him
the hands on him stayed hidden.
People were mean.
In the company of men,
his bruises were hidden,
the wine covered it up.
In the dark
the hands disappeared.
When the heaving monster thrust,
even the ocean shuddered,
his blood sounding like waves.
That’s when Dog Salmon boy
fled to the land of stories, of Gunakadeit.
The stories saved him, as stories will.
As stories restore the powerless.
He too would undo his skin,
his heroic exposure would bring down the monster.
But his forgiveness would deliver the final blow
before the cry of Raven.
LEVELING GRAVE ISLAND
Some of the arms flew
up to where legs belong. Some
thighs smashed to ribs.
A few skulls smiled into their own pelvises.
Not a hundred years ago
the placement of bones, each particular
stance was the position for entering death country.
Broken knees and elbows to fit to chests,
placed on the platform
that floated back to earth evenly in time.
Bodies churn and roil in the earth.
The giant spruce, the eagle trees
the points of reference go up in smoke.
Nothing is so random.
We lose our direction.
I watch this destruction daily.
Gravemarkers donated to museums.
Trees explode.
The dozer that was ferried across
has leveled the entire island.
The living destroy the dead,
as the dead claim the living,
like going off in the distance,
growing smaller and vanishing,
like rituals without origins,
like this island that never was and always will be.
[1]. Tsaagweidi hero who created the first killer whales to exact vengeance on his treacherous brothers-in-law.
[2]. Seal (Tlingit). Hence, Tsaagweidi.
[3]. Yes (Tlingit)
[4]. Variation of Kwakiutl, or Kwagiutl
[5]. Pink salmon
[6]. Alaska Native Brotherhood, est. 1912 to fight for Native rights. A central part of the ANB halls was the basketball courts.
[7]. The most prized clan possessions (Tlingit)