"I'll come around," Chickadee said. "Make gardens for me."
The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak
"Will I ever see Coyote?"
"I don't know," the Grandmother replied.
The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, "Can I keep my eye?"
"Yes. You can keep your eye."
"Thank you, Grandmother," the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope towards the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way a little bird flew, black-capped, lightwinged.
Three Rock Poems
The first thing about rocks is, they're old. What a geologist calls a "young1 rock may be older than the species of the individual who picks it up to look at or throw at something or build with; even a genuinely new bit of pumice, fresh from the mouth of Mt. St. Helens, which spat it out into the Columbia River in 1981 to drift down and be picked up on a beach south of the rivermouth, is potentially (if one may say so) old -- able to exist in its shapeless, chaotic thingness for time to come beyond human count of years. In the wonderful passage in T.H.
White's Sword in the Stone where young Arthur the Wart learns to understand what the rocks are saying what he hears them whisper is, "Cohere. Cohere." Rocks are in time in a different way than living things are, even the ancient trees. So I was thinking when I came to the last line of the poem "Flints." But then, the other thing about rocks is that they are place (hence the next-to-last line). Rocks are what a place is made of to start with and after all. They are under everything else in the world, din, water, street, house, air, launching pad. The stone is at the center.
The man and woman who survived the Greek Flood were told, "Cast your mother's bones behind you and don't look back." When they had figured out what their mother's bones were, they did so; and the rocks softened, and took form, and became flesh: our flesh. And this is indeed what happened, between the Pre-Cambrian Era and this week: the matter of Earth, rock, softened, took form, opened eyes, stood up, stooped down to pick up a rock in soft, warm, momentary fingers...
55
56 JT BUFFALO GALS The Basalt
This rock land poured like milk.
Molten it flowed like honey.
Volcanoes told it,
their mouths told all the words of the story, continuous, tremendous, coherent, brimming over and flowing as easy as milk and as certain as darkness.
You can pick up a word and hold it,
opaque,
untranslated.
Flints
Color of sun on stone, what color, grey or gold?
In winter Oregon
on Wiltshire flints in the window the same sun. The same stones:
the standing woman,
the blind head,
the leaner, the turner, the stranger.
Bones of England, single stones
that mean the world,
that mean the world is old.
Wont You Come Out TonightA 57 (1982)
(1986)
Mount St Helens/ Omphalos
O mountain there is no other where you stand the center is
Seven stones in a circle Robert Spott the shaman set them the child watched him
There stands the Henge a child plays with toy cars on the Altar Stone
There stands the mountain alone and there is no other center nor circle's edge
0 stone among the stars the children on the moon saw you
and came home Earth, hearth, hill, altar, heart's home, the stone is at the center
(1972)
"The Wife's Story" and "Mazes"
"Mazes" is a quite old story, and "The Wife's Story" a more recent one; what they have in common, it seems to me, is that they are both betrayals. They are simple but drastic reversals of the conventional, the expected. So strong is the sway of the expected that I have learned to explain before I read them to an audience that "The Wife's Story" is not about werewolves, and that "Mazes" is not about rats. Perhaps what confuses people in "Mazes" is that the character called 'the alien'is from what we call 'the earth,'and the other one isn't. The source of the resistance to the reversal in "The Wife's Story" may lie somewhat deeper.
Mazes
1 have tried hard to use my wits and keep up my courage, but I know now that I will not be able to withstand the torture any longer. My perceptions of time are confused, but I think it has been several days since I realized I could no longer keep my emotions under aesthetic control, and now the physical breakdown is also nearly complete. I cannot accomplish any of the greater motions. I cannot speak. Breathing in this heavy foreign air, grows more difficult When the paralysis reaches my chest I shall die: probably tonight The alien's cruelly is refined, yet irrational. If it intended
61
62 JT BUFFALO GALS If
IP
all along to starve me, why not simply withhold food? But instead of that it gave me plenty of food, mountains of food, all the greenbud leaves I could possibly want Only they were not fresh. They had been picked; they were dead; the element that makes them digestible to us was gone, and one might as well eat gravel. Yet there they were, with all the scent and shape of greenbud, irresistible to my craving appetite. Not at first, of course. I told myself, I am not a child, to eat picked leaves! But the belly gets the better of the mind. After a while it seemed better to be chewing something anything that might still the pain and craving in the gut So I ate, and ate, and starved.
It is a relief, now, to be so weak I cannot eat
The same elaborately perverse cruelty marks all its behavior. And the worst thing of all is just the one I welcomed with such relief and delight at first: the maze. I was badly disoriented at first, after the trapping being handled by a giant, being dropped into a prison; and this place around the prison is disorienting spatially disquieting the strange, smooth, curved wall-ceiling is of an alien substance and its lines are meaningless to me. So when I was taken up and put down, amidst all this strangeness, in a maze, a recognizable, even familiar maze, it was a moment of strength and hope after great distress. It seemed pretty clear that I had been put in the maze as a kind of test or investigation, that a first approach toward communication was being attempted. I tried to cooperate in every way. But it was not possible to believe for very long that the creature's purpose was to achieve communication.
It is intelligent, highly intelligent, that is clear from a thousand evidences. We are both intelligent creatures, we are both maze-builders: surely it would be quite easy to leam to talk together! If that were what the alien wanted. But it is not I do not know what kind of mazes it builds for itself. The ones it made for me were instruments of torture.
Mazes ~63
The mazes were, as I said, of basically familiar types, though the walls were of that foreign material much colder and smoother than packed clay. The alien left a pile of picked leaves in one extremity of each maze, I do not know why; it may be a ritual or superstition. The first maze it put me in was babyishly short and simple. Nothing
