Read Online Original Fire by Louise Erdrich - Free Book Online Page A

died.
    Saint Odium of the hundred-proof blood
    and Saint Tremens of the great pagan spiders
    dripping from the light fixtures.
    You powerful triumvirate, intercede for us
    drunks stalled in the bars,
    float our asses off the cracked stools
    and over to the tribal college,
    where the true saints are ready to sacrifice their brain cells
    for our brain cells, in that holy exchange which is called learning.
    Saint Microcephalia, patron of huffers and dusters,
    you of the cooked brain and mean capacity, you
    of the simian palm line and poor impulse control,
    you of the Lysol-soaked bread, you sleeping with the dogs
    underneath the house, hear our prayers
    which we utter backwards and sideways
    as nothing makes sense
    least of all your Abstinence Campaign
    from which Oh Lord Deliver Us.
    Saints Primapara, Gravida, and Humpenenabackseat,
    you patrons of unsafe teenage sex
    and fourteen-year-old mothers,
    pray for us now and at the hour of our birth,
    amen.

The Fence
    Then one day the gray rags vanish
    and the sweet wind rattles her sash.
    Her secrets bloom hot. I’m wild for everything.
    My body is a golden armor around my unborn child’s body,
    and I’ll die happy, here on the ground.
    I bend to the mixture of dirt, chopped hay,
    grindings of coffee from our dark winter breakfasts.
    I spoon the rich substance around the acid-loving shrubs.
    I tear down last year’s drunken vines,
    pull the black rug off the bed of asparagus
    and lie there, knowing by June I’ll push the baby out
    as easily as seed wings fold back from the cotyledon.
    I see the first leaf already, the veined tongue
    rigid between the thighs of the runner beans.
    I know how the shoot will complicate itself
    as roots fill the trench.
    Here is the link fence, the stem doubling toward it,
    and something I’ve never witnessed.
    One moment the young plant trembles on its stalk.
    The next, it has already gripped the wire.
    Now it will continue to climb, dragging rude blossoms
    to the other side
    until in summer fruit like green scimitars,
    the frieze of vines, and then the small body
    spread before me in need
    drinking light from the shifting wall of my body,
    and the fingers, tiny stems wavering to mine,
    flexing for the ascent.

Ninth Month
    This is the last month, the petrified forest
    and the lake which has long since turned to grass.
    The sun roars over, casting its light and absence
    in identical seams. One day. Another.
    The child sleeps on in its capsized boat.
     
    The hull is weathered silver and our sleep is green and dark.
    Dreams of the rower, hands curled in the shape of oars,
    listening for the cries of the alabaster birds.
    All is silent, the animals hurled into quartz.
    Our bed is the wrecked blue island of time and love.
     
    Black steeples, black shavings of magnetized iron,
    through which the moon parades her wastes,
    drawing the fruit from the female body,
    pulling water like blankets up other shores.
     
    Then slowly the sky is colored in, the snow
    falls evenly into the blackness of cisterns.
    The steel wings fan open that will part us from each other
    and the waves break and fall according to their discipline.
     
    Breath that moves on the waters.
    Small boat, small rower.

Birth
    When they were wild
    When they were not yet human
    When they could have been anything,
    I was on the other side ready with milk to lure them,
    And their father, too, each name a net in his hands.

New Mother
    1
    I am here to praise this body
    on loan from the gods
    by which we know the god in us
    and see the god made earth,
     
    pulled out blue and stunned into the lights.
    2
    Sometimes in the frenzy of first events
    there comes to me a strange
    declamatory awareness
    as though my consciousness has stirred
    from the heap of broken toys
    and new toys
    that is my baby’s existence.
    When I look into her eyes I see below
    the surface of things
    into the water of the other surface
    through the layers of that surface
    to the original fire.
    3
    When you wake sometimes,