Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series

Poems

Tiffany Midge

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780826356536
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry, Midge deftly weaves Plains Indian myths into the present day and seeks to define love, the nature of desire, and identity in the twenty-first century. The book includes a series of poems, each titled "Considering Wakatanka, " that weave together the themes throughout the book. The Woman Who Married a Bear showcases the wholly individual voice of a talented poet.

Considering Wakantanka #1

The last time you saw him—a week
before he drowned—he gave you
a gift: an hourglass.
It was
a decorative desk-
top embellishment with small,
blue flowers entombed in the resin.

A Song for Conjuring Shelter

She asks if you believe in the stories

the wind tells you, or if you know

how they arrive: a battery of dark birds

illuminated by the body of the world.

She wants to remember the stars most of all,

how they tumbled into the small houses of gods

and looked out over the hands of trees,

those gestures, soft shapes above the current.

Come in from the rain, come in, Sweet,

before the lightning takes you—

that embrace, all of life wanting in,

song for water, song for breath.

She can carry on, one body held together

by pins; she can draw maps and voyage

on the geography of dreams just as she can bow

humbly to her failures, offer up tobacco and bread.

And even in the coldest pocket of sky, even

in the collapse of stone, dull ache of spine,

she can hold what is already there, what has always

been there, in all the faces of the moon.

Imagining Yes

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

—e e cummings

I want to simplify certain yeses in the world:

the military yes, the ill-gotten yes, the marital yes,

every yes really meaning no, the coy, the deceived,

the tablets of yes, the stacks of divine, the chimes of gods.

There is a catacomb of yes lying in the Crypt

of the Sepulchral Lamp; the city’s last yes that ever was,

shrouded in silk handkerchiefs. Rio de Janeiro’s Cristo

Redentor was toppled by excessive yeses,

now the city’s weak to the black dooms of no.

I want to know the old melodies of yes. The affirmations,

proofs positive, the absolutions. Even the hymns of swallow

and finch, even the peacock offers enchantments—

the power of yes. There is a eulogy of yes

spread thick on the bread of yearning and want,

the heart quiet but wanting to shout.

What are the skeletal remains of yes?

What of the ghosts? Where do all the yeses go

after the benedictions, after the harvests? If I lie very still

will yes tremble next to me, be born, not buried,

not mourned, but hold me tightly in the dark, alive?

Night Caller

The mollusk inching toward my door,

its body a broad wet muscle of rain and ascent,

reminds me how all things are possible,

just as the rain foretells certainty

in a language of unquestionable voice.

I hear the night break, the moon

toss back her hair. I hear the hum

of contentment shuddering in the grass.

The mollusk seeks direction, drinks

in the door’s pool of light, charts

a course for warmth, its horns

pivots of radar, exclamation points,

exquisite attachments puzzling out the smell

of water and storms. In the last twenty-four hours

there’ve been slews of visitors to this porch:

half-drowned spiders, stinkbugs, furious horseflies.

We’ve discarded them tenderly, others

mercifully tended and killed, unnamed shadows,

unmarked graves, wings and songs put to rest,

lunacies of want laid down. You turn in sleep,

then wake and tell me about tropical weddings

and masked brides, guests who speak only

the warbled tongue of sparrows, and fall back again

dreaming your night stories, hosting the night visits—

each with its own small creature,

each with its own grand light.

In Praise of Our Humble Kingdom

It just so happens that the cup that longs

to be a goblet pales next to the spoon

dreaming another life as a shovel—

the spoon who thinks if only the fork didn’t carp

so much he might have been a sled.

From the dim hall the mirror covets the TV—

oh, to be so valorized, so worshipped.

While from the half bath under the stairs

a sink dares to imagine a receptacle of oceans.

Solitude seems a perfect kingdom for a chair

distanced from its table, a digital clock separated

from its morning bell. What is a pair of mismatched

socks that aspire for a bouquet of wool, but settle

instead for the odd argyle out of step with its mate?

The teacups doubt their saucers’ fidelity

just as the sugar bowl complains to the cream,

tries to recall how they arrived to this place.

What tokens can be offered, what assurances exchanged?

It just so happens that nothing is immune

to its own vanity. All yearn, hope, or design

for something better. Even quartz

and oak reach for their grand roles, yet in the end remain

attached, devoted. Even cotton, even porcelain,

remain proud of their humble estates.

A Love Story

The bloodstain on the towel.

After making love left.

The impression.

Of a perfectly shaped pair of cartoon lips.

The cartoon kiss a shock of crimson.

I took...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Woman Who Married a Bear
• The Foolish Girls
• Considering Wakantanka #1
• A Song for Conjuring Shelter
• Imagining Yes
• Night Caller
• In Praise of Our Humble Kingdom
• A Love Story
• Identifying the Beast
• The Cut
• Considering Wakantanka #2
• The Draw
• Teeth in the Wrong Places
• Teton Valley
• Considering Wakantanka #3
• An Interior of Mythical Territory I Seek to Believe
• Desire: An Inventory
• Trigger Warning: An Aubade
• Considering Wakantanka #4
• Funeral for a Sioux Elder
• Distress
• The Boy with No Eyes
• Soothe
• Mayflower
• Considering Wakantanka #5
• Antiquing with Indians
• Code Name Geronimo
• (Dis)beliefs Suspended
• Considering Wakantanka #6
• Abstraction
• After Viewing the Holocaust Museum’s Room of Shoes and a Gallery of Plains’ Indian Moccasins: Washington, DC
• Considering Wakantanka #7
• A Postcolonial Irony
• What Is the Sound of America?
• Spring Valley Reservoir
• Her Kind of Horses
• The Night Horse
• For the Lummi Girl Who Found Her Magic in Horses
• Considering Wakantanka #8
• Hinhan
• Planting Tulips the First Autumn after Your Death
• Considering Wakantanka #9
• Scenes from a Naturalist’s Sketchbook
• Famine
• Whatcom Creek
• Considering Wakantanka #10
• Acknowledgments