Three Poems
Muskeg
Muskeg consists of dead plants in various states of decomposition (as peat), ranging from fairly intact sphagnum moss, to sedge peat, to highly decomposed humus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muskeg
That brown waterthere’s nothing in itno fish
Water brown with tanninshot through with golden light
green moss belowseen through reflection
of blueness grayness redness
There’s nothing in it
where it’s water
where it is not
Deeper than it looks
the gathering ground
the medicine place
There’s everythingin it
that placethat water
mashkiig – a swamp, a muskeg
(verb of abundance) mashkiigokaa – there are muskegs, it is marshy
mashkiki – medicine, a medicine, a drug
(verb of making) mashkikiike – s/he makes medicine
(applicative) mashkikiikaazh – doctor h/, treat h/ medically
(verb of being) mashkikiiwi – s/he is a medicine; s/he has medicine on h/ self
Not the Memory but the Memory of Remembering
Sailboat curtains white triangles in a blue fieldcoded flags
on our porch our glassed porch or storage porchroll-aways boxes bikes barrels
on a mattress on our porch besides sailboats when just before I hurt the worst
went limp when just before light hurt through me so hot went white behind my eyes
against the pipe the burn now opened below my belly eye my button shut
One of the boys laughs at boy pokes at
seared full thickness my flinch salve smells looks like mustard how did it
hold her crawl space dark so smallkick away
then limp the pipes jump in that old house the boy didn’t know
how hot how dark how small how scarred
Women of Water: Run Dry
Work days:
The well of work’s so deepI never saw the bottomyet
Our jobthey sayto care for the water we women
In this desert we women take care
of what water may be
#
Nights later:
smell of desert sky
everything inverted
sky the water
earth full of metal
Earth maps an unknown world
Moon is not working any lake I can hear
I wonder how she waves
When we see each other
Moon turns the blue of day
over spikes of plants I once knew
in another desert
Turned upside down glad for my heaviness
my willingness to cling and climb
nothing rooted here makes a handhold
all thorn and barbI cannot fall
until I sleepI can’t let go
#
Perhaps the Same Day:
Doves talked to me Why people say they cry or sob or mourn or coo
I do not know
Listen they said and I heard
She-birdsthe roar of a crowd at kids’ sports
then the strangled sound of males approaching
How does that racket attract?
It does notshe and she and she say
Watch us nowdo we submit?
You do notI notedisturbed
The He-dove cries as if yanked by the throathe dives
She-doves scatter and thenin fact
they do complain
sound plaintive communal
Hurry over here dears
He’s come for another one of us
This way, oh- go away! You see?
We are never free of him!
#
Another Day:
A knotted juniper treeoffering treeits own tree
#
Final Day:
The well of work’s so deepI never saw the bottomyet
This desertand Ione of the women of water
We have one concern
as above as below
wide and worrisome
—all we know is to run and run and run
and even when we can no longer run
still we run when we run dry
Heid E. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Her new poetry collection Little Big Bully won a National Poetry Series award in 2019 and was published by Penguin in 2020. Heid edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations which won an American Book Award. Heid’s work has won awards including a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship and two Minnesota Book Awards for poetry. Heid teaches in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program of Augsburg University. She is the 2021 Glasgow (virtual) Visiting Professor at Washington and Lee University.