Copper Yearning

Kimberly Blaeser

• Publisher: Holy Cow! Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781513645681
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Copper Yearning invests itself in a compassionate dual vision—bearing witness to the lush beauty of our intricately woven environments and to the historical and contemporary perils that threaten them. Kimberly Blaeser's fourth collection of poetry deftly reflects her Indigenous perspective and a global awareness. Through vividly rendered images, the poems dwell among watery geographies, alive to each natural nuance, alive also to the uncanny. Set in fishing boats, in dreams, in prisons, in memory, or in far flung countries like Bahrain, the pieces sing of mythic truths and of the poignant everyday injustices. But, whether resisting threats to effigy mounds or inhabiting the otherness of river otter, ultimately they voice a universal longing for a place of balance, a way of being in the world—for the ineffable.

IV.
ALCHEMY INHERITED

On Climbing Petroglyphs

i.

Newly twelve with size seven feet

dangling beside mine off the rock

ledge, legerdemain of self knowledge.

How do I say anything—magic

words you might need to hear?

With flute-playing, green-painted nails

your child’s fingers reach to span the range

of carmel-colored women in our past.

Innocently you hold those ghost hands:

each story a truce we’ve made with loss.

How can I tell you there were others?

Big-boned women who might try

to push out hips in your runner’s body.

Women who will betray you for men,

a bottle, or because they love you

love you, don’t want to see you disappointed

in life, so will hold you, hold you hostage

with words, words tangled around courage

duty or money. When should I show you

my own flesh cut and scarred on the barbs

of belonging and love’s oldest language?

ii.

No, let us dangle here yet, dawdle

for an amber moment while notes shimmer

sweetly captured in turquoise flute songs—

the score of a past we mark together.

No words whispered yet beyond these painted

untainted rock images of ancients: sun, bird, hunter.

Spirit lines that copper us to an infinity.

Endurance. Your dangling. Mine.

Before the floor of our becoming.

Perhaps even poets must learn silence,

that innocence, that space before speaking.

Veteran’s Day

In the blaze orange of autumn

tall marsh grasses lie flattened.

Close here where deer will bed

I bend, sniff, search for other sign.

This safety where I too have sheltered

cast in the hollow of other lives.

Burst milkweed pods spill white

and burrs cling like unrecited prayers.

Hunter’s air taunt now with expectation,

and cardinal, too, wearing Christmas red

for protection, as some crisp fear lingers

ever at the edge of boot steps and finite vision.

This earth will always vibrate with absent names

called in autumn and scented with gun shot.

In glacial kettles old grasses reseed each season:

where deer bed, some like wolves will wait.

Fire, After Fire

Evening’s amber light among the lily pads. We paddle the narrow pathways of Pagami Creek. Still-charred trees lean against a perfect August sky, as if held up by the very clouds. At every turn—fireweed. Hills flaming scarlet, whisper to me a secret about survival.

I picture mad crown fires. All that has burned in our lives: Sacred sites. Subversive books. I think of all “noble” causes and their aftermath. Each scorched earth campaign.

But here is nature’s cycle: A lightning strike. 93,000 acres aflame. And renewal. Yes, life is persistent in the northern forests. After the fire: Wood-boring beetles feed on burnt trees. The hungry black-backed woodpecker follows. Here taps its peripatetic song—the chorus a you you you—what did you do?

Ah, praise shrewdness of buried seed. Watch sweet succession of ground plants, of shrubs—raspberry and blueberry. Three years and—abracadabra! Pin cherry and paper birch trees rising—again.

Could we but phoenix ourselves as easily. And patiently await the flowering.

Bawaajige

Whispers through my tributaries—

crane voices and stale pow-wow jokes,

Native tragedy and the “great white road.”

I won’t cliché you, betray you

with the spent hopes of language.

I am the mirror of your indecision:

Your legs are clan longing

and the echo of honor song beats,

your hands the arithemitized remnant

the treaty-tamed blood formula

of civilized greatness.

Rich man, poor man,

Beggar man, thief.

Somewhere in the fray of the tweeted everyday

Doctor, lawyer

Indian Chief.

we parse and compute identity

in columns of the colonized.

Tinker, tailor—

Halfbreed maker.

Now I am the whisper of a whisper

of old crane voices calling

loud, lusty, and long, the Echomakers

calling across captured ledger marks

like Marion prisoners drawing spirit lines

of imagined motion, riding the regalia of horse nations

overruling simplest computations of victory.

Remember you are the tributaries

the many branchings of tribal nations;

you are the blood passage of belonging.

Do not debate this.

I am not made of bones and teeth.

The fibers of my willow hair

cannot be dissected or carbon dated.

You are not made of Xs and Ys.

Your name is not a formula

or test tube fantasy.

You are the misspelled prescription

written to save the Santa Maria from oblivion.

You might debate this.

The spark of Anishinaabeg stars

the Ponca flame, amber and ancient

ignite the obsidian memory of tribal fires:

The burning wolf eyes of clan brothers

the sweet sage scent of hand drum sisters

the hawk cry of hunters,

the partridge drum and turtle rattle songs

the porcupine quill becoming

of our intricately embroidered liv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Proem
• I. Geographies of Longing
• II. Hunger for Balance
• III. Frayed Histories
• IV. Alchemy Inherited
• V. Black Ash and Resistance
• VI. Refractions of Spirit
• Envoi
• About the Author