Pictograph

Poems

Melissa Kwasny

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781571319081
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

The prize-winning poet evokes the spirit of nature in this collection inspired by the sacred sites around her rural Montana home. "If you would learn the earth as it really is, " N. Scott Momaday writes, "learn it through its sacred places." With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites across Montana. In Pictograph, she captures the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight through the trees become a reminder of the impermanence of life, the controlled burn of a forest a sign of the changes associated with aging. Unlike traditional nature poets, however, Kwasny acknowledges the active spirit of each place, agreeing that "we make a sign and we receive." Not only do we give meaning to nature, Kwasny suggests, but nature gives meaning to us. As the collection closes, the poems begin to coalesce into a singular pictograph, creating "a fading language that might be a bridge to our existence here."

III.

If you would learn the earth as it really is, learn it through its sacred places.

N. SCOTT MOMADAY

THE MISSOURI BREAKS

Some things should be seen at a distance: plains cottonwood in their river row, the only tree for miles. The arabesque of white pelicans, each large as a child, one facing downstream, one feeding up. The wind stops when we are not pushing against it. The sky is covered by one plain cloud. We drift, our boats together, your wrist our only hinge. Backwards. Sideways. Past the bank of silver mint and the bright thorns. What message? What duty? The figures of Virgelle sandstone, the volcanic dikes and sills, have emerged on either side of us over millenniums. Rock face resting between forms. To get too close is to lose sight of them: the row of tall robed women, the perched, staring eagles, the climbing child, the slow turn they accomplish when they sense us. Into bisque-colored river. Into unglazed statuary of the shore.

TRAVELING PETROGLYPHS: EAGLE CREEK

What does it mean that we are seeing them, that they have left the wall? Left the wall with their spears, hence, before the bow and arrow, with their horns and beaks and tails, with their points and their enhancements—god-shapes grown into the shale, bird-shapes we lure with our eyes, silence the dead wear, with its deep folds. The air is heavy with clay smell. We clap our hands to scare away snakes. And though the sun is bright, hot, it is in memory. Impossible to not see this landscape as one of ruined temples. Sandstone altars. Hoodoos. Pedestals and pillars. That we are here enshrined in earth, an earth of shrines. What is it that we recognize in them? A body, not a plant, something emerging, crudely formed, and yet with presence. Which people this valley of bone.

MADISON BUFFALO JUMP

Snow collects in the creases so that the oldest trails are marked, suddenly visible in the lengths of yellow foothills. To feel oneself into a place the way the pale grasses feel themselves into their long fading from fall. Snow so dry it crumbles into pebbles. We are safe now, the soldiers far gone to their cold beds, the rattlesnakes asleep under warm earth. Only us and the ghosts, who are forgiving and soft, as if we have been allowed to enter time here before the curse. Shoshone first, then Salish, later the Blackfeet, and the Cree, and if we speak, it is in a whisper, pointing out what we almost see, the body permeable, breachable, with pores. If we knew we would be given only one day to be on earth, it would dazzle us so we couldn’t breathe. Wind bites our uncovered faces on the climb up to the cliffs, but is mysteriously gone where we expect it strong. Then the creatures fall out of us. The buffalo falls out of us.

PICTOGRAPH: THE FALLING BUFFALO

Finger-pads pawed the crusted stone, wetted with ochre and tallow, smeared finger-lines to bind them, as if the side that were alive needed contact with the other half. Here in our beds, covered with wool, and there, the stars. We, who were once rock, are moving now, though we are supported by bone. We, road-weary and indoors in our minds, the indoor mind, the social one, worried about others. The finely painted buffalo is drawn upside down, which could signify that it is dead. Or, caught in the vortex of trance, what the painter might have made of the electric register. We were grazing, then running, then the ground, which is all we know, suddenly opened up and betrayed us. Violence of hard earth. The massive heaviness of the others. Body count, the oldest count of all.

THE GROUND, WHICH IS ONLY HEAVY WIND

The women of the interior prepare themselves for pain by igniting small piles of fir needles on their wrists. I, too, want to age in the mountains, though all my life, I have avoided the extreme. When I turn away in public from the women with white hair, I become less public presence. To stumble on time: the biographic tradition, rift in the concrete I hit with my boots. I have been traveling away from home. I must return to it. Buffalo are the animals women were taught to emulate. They take care of their young. They mate for life, not like the deer, who are flighty and promiscuous. What causes the winds? I thought I knew until today when I distinctly felt them as earth’s breath. Hours of shade, grass flattened by early snow, everything tending toward heaviness or lightness. What would we do in this big house alone? How could we possibly keep it?

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LONELINESS AND SOLITUDE

You think they are opposite, that loneliness is incomplete. How fitting to have the conversation here. Walking atop Ulm Pishkin, snow dust streaming completely down, land empty though never lonely for rain. The Blackfeet believe that anything that casts a shadow is alive. Raven call, but mostly silence, filled with that metallic ring I sometimes think is sky but often is my own blood pressure in my ears. Solitude: our histories, our families wrap the willows in pink light, enlarge the room with a gesture of their far hands. I think I am lonely. Do I have enough buffalo in store? Snow struggles through the sharp-etched particles of air. But what is the difference between solitude and isolation? Last winter, I was busy. This winter, I talk to you. I tell you solitude contains loneliness as a sweetener.

PETROGLYPH: THE HOOFPRINT TRADITION

Thirty thousand years ago, the day was made of ash, powdered bone, fat, and soil, then fired, and fern-like shapes became thoughts. Delicate doe-prints, pretty stamps into the snow—their congregation a crisscross of the social. When did danger enter? Dog tracks (snowflakes), horse tracks (long-legged birds), boots (heavy and nationally patterned). Since the trees have died, trucks have infiltrated the mountains. The rib cages of six deer dumped beside the road. Boulders white with the droppings of feeding ravens. An anthropologist writes that the so-called weapons drawn on cave walls might instead be plants, periodicities of a female sky. Hooves, sliding under it, with horns. Humans, as we had always been, peripheral to the great herds. Their hoofprints, gouged and wind-rocked in the rocks.

THE BLACK CALF

The black calf wakes into a world it has no memory of: adamantine, February cold. Above it, a coarse blue. Into a feedlot with hundreds of others. To wake, one is fortunate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• I.
• II.
• III.