Original Fire by Louise Erdrich Read Free Book Online

pot.
    I must be tireless as rust and bold as roots
    growing through the locks on doors
    and crumbling the cinder blocks
    of the foundations of his everlasting throne.
    I must be strange as pity so he’ll believe me.
    I must be terrible and brush my hair so that he finds me attractive.
    Perhaps if I invoke Clare, the patron saint of television.
    Perhaps if I become the images
    passing through the cells of a woman’s brain.
     
    I must be very large and block his sight.
    I must be sharp and impetuous as knives.
    I must insert myself into the bark of his apple trees,
    and cleave the bones of his cows. I must be the marrow
    that he drinks into his cloud-wet body.
    I must be careful and laugh when he laughs.
    I must turn down the covers and guide him in.
    I must fashion his children out of Play-Doh, blue, pink, green.
    I must pull them from between my legs
    and set them before the television.
     
    I must hide my memory in a mustard grain
    so that he’ll search for it over time until time is gone.
    I must lose myself in the world’s regard and disparagement.
    I must remain this person and be no trouble.
    None at all. So he’ll forget.
    I’ll collect dust out of reach,
    a single dish from a set, a flower made of felt,
    a tablet the wrong shape to choke on.
     
    I must become essential and file everything
    under my own system,
    so we can lose him and his proofs and adherents.
    I must be a doubter in a city of belief
    that hails his signs (the great footprints
    long as limousines, the rough print on the wall).
    On the pavement where his house begins
    fainting women kneel. I’m not among them
    although they polish the brass tongues of his lions
    with their own tongues
    and taste the everlasting life.

The Sacraments
    1 Baptism
    As the sun dancers, in their helmets of sage,
    stopped at the sun’s apogee
    and stood in the waterless light,
    so, after loss, it came to this:
    that for each year the being was destroyed,
    I was to sacrifice a piece of my flesh.
    The keen knife hovered
    and the skin flicked in the bowl.
    Then the sun, the life that consumes us,
    burst into agony.
     
    We began, the wands and the head crowns of sage,
    the feathers cocked over our ears.
    When the bird joined the circle and called,
    we cried back, shrill breath
    through the bones in our teeth.
    Her wings closed over us, her dark red
    claws drew us upward by the scars,
    so that we hung by the flesh
     
    as in the moment before birth
    when the spirit is quenched
    in whole pain, suspended
    until there is no choice, the body
    slams to earth,
    the new life starts.

2 Communion
    It is spring. The tiny frogs pull
    their strange new bodies out
    of the suckholes, the sediment of rust,
    and float upward, each in a silver bubble
    that breaks on the water’s surface
    to one clear unceasing note of need.
     
    Sometimes, when I hear them,
    I leave our bed and stumble
    among the white shafts of weeds
    to the edge of the pond.
    I sink to the throat,
    and witness the ravenous trill
    of the body transformed at last and then consumed
    in a rush of music.
     
    Sing to me, sing to me.
    I have never been so cold
    rising out of sleep.

3 Confirmation
    I was twelve, in my body
    three eggs were already marked
    for the future.
    Two golden, one dark.
    And the man,
    he was selected from other men,
    by a blow on the cheek
    similar to mine.
    That is how we knew,
    from the first meeting.
    There was no question.
    There was the wound.

4 Matrimony
    It was frightening, the trees in their rigid postures
    using up the sun,
    as the earth tilted its essential degree.
    Snow covered everything. Its confusing glare
    doubled the view
    so that I saw you approach
    my empty house
    not as one man, but as a landscape
    repeating along the walls of every room
    papering over the cracked grief.
     
    I knew as I stepped into the design,
    as I joined the chain of hands,
    and let the steeple of fire
    be raised above our heads.
    We had chosen the costliest pattern,
    the strangest, the most enduring.
    We were