Original Fire by Louise Erdrich Read Free Book Online Page B

night.
     
    I seek you, I find you everywhere, in the white day,
    and in the relentless throat call
    of physical love.
    Our bodies in winter, our skin dry as paper,
we are stroking the urgent message
written in the subskin, the rat-brain, subcortex,
written there in lemon juice that heat of touch
turns visible, written in the print
of a child detective.
     
    Dragging a cart of splinters,
    tin nailed to the soles of your feet,
    you walk over me. You strike flame from my body.
    I burn at the magnetic center as the leaves fall
    steps of fire
    leading down into the earth.
     
    I find you in my newborn child,
    harnessed to my breasts with cotton, small and molten.
    Her need for me as pure as my need for you.
     
    I find you in the miraculous dung of the horned beetle
    which cures the heart of anguish
    I find you in the ash I must become melting in the rain,
    new rain, descending.
    Call me, speak from the water
    lit by spilled oils
    Sing to me from the mouth of the fish artfully arranged
    on smashed ice.
    Sing from the empty seas.
     
    Behind us, before us,
    in all things now I praise you.
    Gold One. Prime Mover. Boring Prima Facie.
    I praise you in Jack Daniel’s at the foot of the bed
    and in the isolation of this dream.
     
    Thing of holes, thing of lies, thing of shoulder pads,
    thing of beautiful smashed mouth
    thing of drenched fabric,
    thing unmade by woman in her own body:
    I fall face down into the sweet slab of cake
    into the roaring flesh, licking crumbs off you
    Face down in the yard, in the dust of sexual heat.
    I praise you.
     
    In the word
    and in the void between words.
    You are the pause, the synaptic skip.
    You are the meaning between the syllables.
    Walking up the water drops until I reach the cloud,
    Walking up the leaves
    until the crown of the tree is massed
    like a cloak around me. Following snow
    to the place of snow,
    of course I praise you,
    there is nothing else,
    there is no other task.
     
    When I first began listening to your voice I was huge,
    I was a child.
    I sat in the ash tree as light froze in the sky
    and willed you to leave the kitchen.
    Then, suddenly, you were around me in the leaves.
    I thought there was laughter in the hissing wind
    and I was afraid, I saw
    my name written on the dark surface.
     
    Gold One. Mother. Boring Prima Facie.
    You and I are dust of cellular radiance,
    of intricacy and rushing noise.
    Hammer of time, hammer of love.
    You rise in the bones of my husband.
    You fall in the hands of the silver clock.
    You fly off the grasses and you seed the water.
    I praise you in the old red-brick house of my childhood
    crumbling to rose,
    to silver, to agate, to sludge.
     
    Black tar. Deep tar. Cozening preserver.
    Steep cliff ignited in the halo
    as the sun tips its hood of fire.
    I praise you in the cicatrix of sex
    and the brilliant umbilical happiness
    of sleek, heavy snakes
    twining and untwining in the grass.
     
    I praise you in my iron shoes,
    magnetized and grounding me.
    I praise you in my shoes forged of steam,
    in my shoes of dripping felt, my shoes of bottle caps,
    my garbage shoes, my shoes of wood ash and velvet,
    my uncomplaining shoes, my whore’s shoes
    that set me above you.
    I praise you underneath me, walking,
    my reflection in the unreflecting ground,
    moving below me through dirt and ledge.
    My twin of the grave.
    My death glove. My other.
    I praise you in the longing of my infant,
    in my children, whom I have brought here to search you out,
    who have begun, already, starting with my own face.
     
    God, I have killed you in myself
    again, again, dragging you to light by the tail,
    I have hammered you to one thin ribbon.
    Now I release you!
    Blue and coiling in the simple world.
     
    I praise you in the power of these words
    to seize your image, to abandon mine.
    Every motion of your dance is the dance
    of my daily life, and yet you hide yourself.
    I praise you in the roaring veil.
     
    How weak I have become walking in my heavy shoes.
    You will have to lift