“Because We Come From Everything”
for Juan Felipe Herrera
Because every earthdiver nation somersaults in origin waters
I claim the holy swimming—dark becoming we share.
Because all the begets and begotten separate by sect
I smudge every line feet dancing each side, erase the divide.
Because we come from everything
from copper earth and the untranslated songs of air
from deep and ancient fires burning now in each traveler’s eye
from water’s fluid whispers and uncounted beats of silence
the held breath
between border and freedom
between wave and shore
between boat and land
between leaving and arriving.
Because we come from everywhere
from White Earth and Somalia, from Yemen and Cuba and the Yucatan
our mythic pockets stuffed with blessings for safe passage.
Because alphabet measures of entry and exit
document power
because documents: CDIB Passport Visa DACA Green Card,
block barricade segregate fence enclose—
wall.
Because bans
because directives executive orders
because paper decrees say detain say deport.
Look in the mirror and say Halt!
You are under arrest. There must be a law.
because within your bodies illegal blood migrates
because air sneaks through narrow passages
because water seeps into every pore—
build a wall! remove the bad elements, keep nasty out.
Because color-coded dolls and pop-gun mentality teach empire
Because the tweeting talleys of alternative fact infect like plague
Because for some fantasized greatness equals uniform whiteness
Because power, greed, and fascism live on the same block
Because good fences make better metaphors than neighbors
I say wrong to “right-of-way,” no eminent domain, no wall.
Because I breathe in your air, you breathe in mine
You give me your breath, I give you mine
Because we share the same elemental dependence
belonging together to this alive place—aki, nabi, noodin, ishkode
earth water air fire and the blessed arrival and departure of seasons
the comings and goings of each animal relative
skies hung now with bineshiinyag, winged songs of return
no paper trail of identity; only this—
the essential migration of all being.
Because we come from everywhere
We claim this safe earth for all,
in every language—Anishinaabemowin, Arabic, Español, Braille, Dakota,
English—we say provide shelter, grant a haven
name me a sanctuary city.
Of Eons and Epics
I.
We wake with arrowheads—
our hands clamped around dreams,
dreams of hummocky bodies
glacial names tattooed
on each blue-rivered forearm.
What does it mean to hunger
for shards,
a glossary to story us?
I tell it this way:
the sculpting,
the whittle-form of earth—
say kettle with a hard k.
Something is always taken,
something left behind;
it becomes you—literally.
You tombolo, you esker.
We are all debris—
our story a remnant
of what moved across us.
What bounteousness!
We are glacial terrain,
marked pathways—myth.
What does it mean for my fingers, eyes, tongue?
to brim with a telling,
the silk-voiced dream
of one body moving against another?
II.
Sometimes the story is simple:
the etched back of Turtle that holds us—
it asks only belief.
Earthdivers one and all—sleek
water bodies surfacing,
emerge to sing on holy ground.
But the way they tell it
we are land animals,
humanity a paradise of aloneness:
a solved mystery, a locked garden
a departure—
that story the walking away.
The way they tell it
the flood always recedes
from impossible watery origins.
But who fixes the science of meaning?
The truth is:
awake and asleep we betray our small selves
wander beyond borders—
is water bird a metaphor?
III.
I tell it this way:
The diving for survival
(mahng, amik, nigig
together with mink and Nanaboozho).
Their feathered and furred bodies.
Ours. Gathering tiny grains of copper—
sand and sky’s minstrel breath;
Noodin whirling from four directions,
until this:
small magic we call earth.
But feel the fire and flexing beneath us—
the rumble-voiced pulse of this planet,
the vibration of our tectonic bodies?
Remember, we too are still motion—
burning wet and storied,
mythic like Turtle Island.
Imagine with me metamorphic becoming,
each miraculous emergence:
tetrapod limbs
from gelatinous tadpole bodies,
oceans and islands
rising receding rising
in their dance with volcanic force.
Our lives, too, servant to the alchemy
to the carving gusts of wind and water,
time—and telling.
IV.
Sing me again the saga of sin
and separation,
of humans and hierarchies;
I’ll sing you
the ballad of glacial bodies
of many creatures made of water and belief—
the one about transformations
about eons and epics—
these sacred cycles and everyday survivals.
The truth is:
we amphibious, we minstrel-born
wear the spiraling path of legends
on each whorled fingertip.
Like the trace of time on the clay of earth—
the drumlin swarms, the conical hills;
we too rise new each day from sleep
to storied lives—to archetypes and anthems,
to the spectacular castings of destiny.
Recite with me each rhapsody history or rumor—
our ancient epic inked now
pigment on rock-face, carbon on parchment,
memory on skin.
