The Northern Sun

Search for me in a ravine, on a cliff's edge reaching for the sun. Find me on the hood of a car racing through the stars, on the velvet nose of a horse seeking its dead master waiting with saddle and bridle.

It is necessary to see the reflection of birds on the temporary ponds of melting snow. Grandfather. You named each mesa as if it were an old sister, brother, friend, and I steered onto the pavement knowing that our silence unwound with each mile. We all let you choke, not knowing that inside our houses, the rain would clear and our fragrance would leap from our pores and into the canyons to be covered by crumbling black rocks.

The bridge protects wet seals from the acid rain, and my mattress soaks up the daily news before my eyes meet the eyes of a Zapatista woman clothed in her bullet wounds burying her child with her broken fingers in a grave lined with bloodied pillows and torn blankets.

Sometimes the mud on my boot breaks over fresh carpet, the payroll forgets our names, while the insects on our lips find our hidden names inscribed on their wings, and we roll through thorns to find the patterns of our loneliness scribbled on our bodies like the images of dragons tattooed on rocks in a Route 66 mineral shop.

After this, you will reach to scratch your back and feel nothing but a black hole, spiraling like the agitators in an empty washing machine, and you will bend backwards with your mouth pressed to the linoleum whispering, Sister, I need a sister. But you will not be able to reach her, you will be ten inches away and never have you knelt low enough to hear the undercurrent of a breeze lost to twilight summers.

The cigarette ignites the bed sheets and I write my last sentence. Lampshades cover me; my eyelashes wriggle in my pant pockets. Your vocabulary is like the breakfast menu of a science convention. Bricks ripple underfoot, the moon reveals her daughter for the first time in 28 days, born with fists instead of hands.

A writer breaks every pen he can steal from the hen house, disappointed, he returns to the hospital and informs the nurses he should be pulled from the flames immediately. He sweats, points at his right foot, and says that he regrets flying back to earth obscenely underdressed, to witness what he calls, a malnourished theater, eating its own legs for dinner.

This is what I deserve: A white anthropologist sitting beside me at a winter ceremony. Listen. Your people speak like weeping Mongolians. Perhaps it is because we have been staring at airplanes too long, I tell him, that our throats have turned into hollowed-out spider legs extending over the rough wings of a salivating moth, who rejected its cocoon as a child, saying how ugly it made him feel to be in a bed that resembled an anchor rusting in the shadow of a feeble cloud.

This time we feel the padlocks snap. Prison inmates untie their imaginations, which can sometimes be seen, in the high desert of Arizona, luke warm magma flowing through the sky at a 90 degree angle. The last time I saw the sun reflected red, I was pulling a screaming baby from her clutching drunk mother on highway 77, at noon. As the mother bounced off the pavement, I shut the baby's eyes and kicked the dead driver's foot from the gas pedal. The rear tires spun backwards.

The beer in my refrigerator still smells like bread in the morning. My mother's goose bumps continue to make me shiver when she tells me to scratch her back. The IHS doctors gave her some lotion but it doesn't help, so we scratch and scratch and scratch....

I just wanted a decent cup of coffee and a cheaper view of the Washington Monument which loomed like a bright sun stream in a forest where the dark holds you like the wind holds you in a desert canyon. The cab driver asked if I was an American Indian, I said no, I'm of the Bitter Water People.

Would it hurt to camp on her skin for one night, to be a mosquito in her hair and to give her a baby that didn't look as dark as me, or bring back the monarch butterflies that flew south for winter and returned as cocoons melting on the pavement, melting onto our soles as we slip downward, pulling the lamps from the shelves, slipping down past unnatural landscapes resembling the inside hollow of a raku pot on a warm summer night when moths strain to focus on a candle that burns half as bright as the morning star on a cloudy day?

The glittering world, this place that we fly into where traffic lights play tag with my eyes when we lay back singeing our faces with the light of passing freight trains. What's there but rum and coke, bottle walls standing knee deep in confusion and rat traps disguised as dream catchers?

Five years ago, my language hit me like saw toothed birds reaching to pull my tongue from my mouth. I didn't know what to expect when my grandmother picked corn from her fields, poured gasoline on the leaves and then fired it, saying this is the last time I'll ever harvest. It was the way sunset caught her cracked lips, the way her lips folded inward, which made me realize that there were still stories within her that needed to be told, stories of when we still wove daylight onto our bones, and did not live like we do now, as night people.

Somewhere in here, our minds glow like foglights, a Coke can bleeds sugar and the eyes of a turtle ooze from a high school water fountain. Somewhere in Chinle, Arizona, a blender is surrounded and pelted with gravel and cement stones by children whose parents drift through cheap wine bottles, like steam rising from the necks of hemorrhaging antelope.

Frogs smell a rainstorm clumped against a shield of ocher clouds. Two AM, the first flakes of ash surround a family of beetles dining in the cracks of a hogan's fading walls, the flashlight of a policeman siphons dark waters from the spit can of an old medicine man singing the last four songs of his life. Inward, I can feel gravel in my veins soften.