Original Fire

  of my haunches, as I powerfully gathered

  my tongue unfolded in a blur,

  a sticky lasso,

  and plucked a fly from his lapel—

  my last wifely act.

  2 Control

  At first, I hated this body,

  my lung-thin skin, my temptress spots.

  I wanted red silk and you gave me this!

  Advantages—my bones are bendable straws

  through which I drink sun,

  golden yolk, food of inner life, heat, tremendous wish.

  And there is night and the many voices

  seething delirium

  universal mirrors that are my eyes

  implacable gold

  What you change cannot love you.

  I told him that. He kissed me anyway.

  3 Origin

  I was hungry, so the author of all things

  gave me the flies of sorrow to eat.

  Gave me the underslung heroic couplets

  of a man’s breast to drink from.

  Gave me the perfect nothing

  of my own original soul

  to dive and dive in never touching bottom.

  Sometimes I have the memory of what it was like

  to be truly lovely

  to dance by candlelight and tear the filmy cotton lace

  off my nipples and draw you in.

  Sometimes I have the memory of what it was like

  to be another kind of food.

  4 King Black Snake

  My god, my predator,

  to get away from you I change shapes.

  I become the laughter at my core.

  Time

  My breasts are soft.

  My hair is dull.

  I am growing into the body

  of the old woman who will bear me

  toward my death,

  my death which will do me no harm.

  Every day the calico cat returns from the fields

  with a mouse in her jaws.

  After every bite of the tender lawn, the ground squirrel

  jerks and flinches,

  but no hawk drops out of the sky.

  The fat creature continues to eat, nervously

  stuffing itself with pleasure.

  I watch him as I drink from a bottle of grassy wine.

  Why do I long

  to be devoured and to forget

  in life rather than in death?

  What is the difference?

  Spring Evening on Blind Mountain

  I won’t drink wine tonight

  I want to hear what is going on

  not in my own head

  but all around me.

  I sit for hours

  outside our house on Blind Mountain.

  Below this scrap of yard

  across the ragged old pasture,

  two horses move

  pulling grass into their mouths, tearing up

  wildflowers by the roots.

  They graze shoulder to shoulder.

  Every night they lean together in sleep.

  Up here, there is no one

  for me to fail.

  You are gone.

  Our children are sleeping.

  I don’t even have to write this down.

  Blue

  I have moved beyond my life

  into the blueness of the tiny flower

  called Sky Pilot.

  The sheer stain of the petals

  fills the sky in my heart.

  Over the field,

  two bluebirds pause

  on shivering wings.

  They could as well have been a less glorious

  color, and the flowers too.

  Why were we given this unearthly radiance, this blueness,

  if not to seek it out, to love it with all our hearts?

  Thistles

  for Persia

  Under ledge, under tar, under fill

  under curved blue stone of doorsteps,

  under the aggregate of lakebed rock,

  under loss and under hard words,

  under steamrollers

  under your heart,

  it doesn’t matter. They can live forever.

  The seeds of thistles

  push from nowhere, forming a rose of spikes

  that spreads all summer until it

  stands in a glory of

  needles, blossoms, blazing

  purple clubs and fists.

  Best Friends in the First Grade

  I’m brave.

  I’m kind.

  These are our powers.

  Boys are coming!

  How about we lead them into a trap and run?

  We’re both the bravest twins.

  Identicals.

  Only you like blue.

  And I like orange.

  Remember you have to act like

  me and I have to act like you?

  Don’t kill the spider.

  I forgot the crocodile hole!

  We both can’t die.

  Our special rope tells us what to do.

  I got you. I won’t let you fall.

  I’ll shoot the jump rope over to the other side.

  The king is chasing.

  The rainstorm has heard our plan. Oh,

  they are following us. We will have no choice

  but to marry now. You will be a daughter.

  I will be the rainstorm’s wife.

  But watch out.

  The king has poisonous teeth.

  Little Blue Eyeglasses

  for Aza

  Little blue eyeglasses,

  I give you the honored task

  of assisting my youngest daughter

  in her work, which is to see not only

  general shapes but specific details

  and minute variations in the color and texture

  of objects ranging from immense

  (Ocean. Sky.) To very tiny.

  (Invertebrate hidden at edge of carpet)

  Little blue eyeglasses,

  I charge you with the solemn responsibility

  of depth perception. Guide her steps

  through dim corridors

  and allow her to charge down

  the staircase into my arms

  without injury. Above all,

  little blue eyeglasses,

  train her eyes upon the truth

  and let her eyes rest in the truth

  and help her see within the truth the strength

  to bear the truth.

  Grief

  Sometimes you have to take your own hand

  as though you were a lost child

  and bring yourself stumbling

  home over twisted ice.

  Whiteness drifts over your house.

  A page of warm light

  falls steady from the open door.

  Here is your bed, folded open.

  Lie down, lie down, let the blue snow cover you.

  Wood Mountain

  for Abel

  The sky glows yellow over the tin hump

  of Mount Anaeus, and below on the valley floor

  the fog cracks and lifts.

  Beyond it the throat of the river flares.

  The river shakes its body

  of terminal mirrors.

  I saw you walk down the mountain yesterday.

  You were wearing your stained blue jacket,

  your cheap, green boots.

  You disappeared into a tree

  the way you always did, in grief.

  I went looking for you.

  In the orchard floored with delicate grass,

  I lay down with the deer.

  A sweet, smoky dust rose

  from the dead silver of firs.

  When I stand in the circle of their calm black arms

  I talk to you. I tell you everything.

  And you do not weep.

  You accept

  how it was

  night came down.

  Ice formed on your e
yelids.

  How the singing began, that was not music

  but the cold heat of stars.

  Wind runs itself beneath the dust like a hand

  lifting a scarf.

  Mother, you say, and I hold you.

  I tell you I was wrong, I am sorry.

  So we listen to the coyotes.

  And their weeping is not of this earth

  where it is called sorrow, but of another earth

  where it is known as joy,

  and I am able

  to walk into the tree of forgiveness with you

  and disappear there

  and know myself.

  Advice to Myself

  Leave the dishes.

  Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator

  and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.

  Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.

  Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.

  Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.

  Don’t even sew on a button.

  Let the wind have its way, then the earth

  that invades as dust and then the dead

  foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.

  Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.

  Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles

  or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry

  who uses whose toothbrush or if anything

  matches, at all.

  Except one word to another. Or a thought.

  Pursue the authentic—decide first

  what is authentic,

  then go after it with all your heart.

  Your heart, that place

  you don’t even think of cleaning out.

  That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

  Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth

  or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner

  again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,

  or weep over anything at all that breaks.

  Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons

  in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life

  and talk to the dead

  who drift in through the screened windows, who collect

  patiently on the tops of food jars and books.

  Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything

  except what destroys

  the insulation between yourself and your experience

  or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters

  this ruse you call necessity.

  Morning Fire

  My baby, eating rainbows of sun

  focused through a prism in my bedroom window,

  puts her mouth to the transparent fire,

  and licks up the candy colors

  that tremble on the white sheets.

  The stain spreads across her face.

  She has only one tooth,

  a grain of white rice

  that keeps flashing.

  She keeps eating as the day begins

  until the rainbows are all inside of her.

  And then she smiles

  and such a light pours over me.

  It is not that white blaze

  that strikes the earth all around you

  when you learn of the death

  of one you love. Or the next light

  that strips away your skin.

  Not the radiance

  that unwraps you to the bone.

  Soft and original fire,

  allow me to curl around you in the white sheets

  and keep feeding you the light

  from my own body

  until we drift into the deep

  of our being.

  Air, fire, golden earth.

  Asiniig

  The Ojibwe word for stone, asin, is animate. Stones are alive. They are addressed as grandmothers and grandfathers. The universe began with a conversation between stones.

  1

  A thousand generations of you live and die

  in the space of a single one of our thoughts.

  A complete thought is a mountain.

  We don’t have very many ideas.

  When the original fire which formed us

  subsided,

  we thought of you.

  We allowed you to occur.

  We are still deciding whether that was

  wise.

  2 Children

  We have never denied you anything

  you truly wanted

  no matter how foolish

  no matter how destructive

  but you never seem to learn.

  That which you cry for,

  this wish to be like us,

  we have tried to give it to you

  in small doses, like a medicine, every day

  so you will not be frightened.

  Still, when death comes

  you weep,

  you do not recognize it

  as the immortality you crave.

  3 The Sweat Lodge

  We love it when you sing to us,

  and speak to us,

  and lift us from the heart of the fire

  with the deer’s antlers, and place us

  in the center of the lodge.

  Then we are at our most beautiful,

  Powerful red blossoms,

  we are breathing.

  We can reach through your bones

  to where you hurt.

  You call us grandfather, grandmother.

  You scatter bits of cedar, sage, wikenh, tobacco

  and bear root over us,

  and then the water

  which cracks us to the core.

  When we break ourselves open—

  that is when the healing starts.

  When you break yourselves open—

  that is how the healing continues.

  4 Love

  If only you could be more like us

  when it comes to the affections.

  Have you ever seen a stone

  throw itself?

  On the other hand

  whose idea do you think it is

  to fly through the air?

  Mystery is not a passive condition.

  To see a thing so perfectly what it is—

  doesn’t it make you

  want to hold it,

  to marvel, to touch

  its answered question?

  5 Gratitude

  You have no call to treat us this way.

  We allow you to put us to every use.

  Yet, when have you ever

  stopped in the street to lay your forehead

  against the cool, black granite facade

  of some building, and ask the stone

  to bless you?

  We are not impartial.

  We acknowledge some forms

  of consideration.

  We open for those

  who adhere to our one rule

  endure.

  6 Infinite Thought

  Listen, there is no consciousness

  before birth or

  after death

  except the one you share

  with us.

  So you had best learn

  how to speak to us now

  without the use of signs.

  Remember, there will be no hands,

  except remembered hands.

  No lips, no face,

  except remembered face.

  No legs and in fact no

  appendages, except

  the remembered ones,

  which always hurt

  as consciousness hurts.

  Now do you understand what it is?

  Your consciousness

  is the itch, the ghost of consciousness,

  remembered

  from how it felt

  to be one of us.

  About the Author

  LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of ten novels, as well as volum
es of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  ALSO BY LOUISE ERDRICH

  NOVELS

  Love Medicine

  The Beet Queen

  Tracks

  The Bingo Palace

  Tales of Burning Love

  The Antelope Wife

  The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

  The Master Butchers Singing Club

  Four Souls

  WITH MICHAEL DORRIS

  The Crown of Columbus

  POETRY

  Jacklight

  Baptism of Desire

  FOR CHILDREN

  Grandmother’s Pigeon

  The Birchbark House

  The Range Eternal

  NONFICTION

  The Blue Jay’s Dance

  Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

  Copyright

  The author would like to thank and acknowledge the editors of Georgia Review, in which “Time” originally appeared in slightly different form.

  ORIGINAL FIRE. Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition August 2006 ISBN 9780061751400

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-06-093534-0

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