Original Fire by Louise Erdrich

me, you will have to be my body.
    There is only one perfect love, that between
    an infant and its protector.
    All else is magical failure.
     
    I sift my thoughts into this perfect zero,
    into the silken core between minus and plus.
    I walk through the terminal number
    backward, into the negative
    where deep snow falls.
    Again I am a child. I stand in the snow
    and all around me is the snow
    I stand there until I turn to snow.
    And then, for a moment, I know you.
     
    You were made by women.
    You were made because we needed someone,
    a man, to blame.
    You were struck from our hands
    and kneaded to your man-shape like dough
    Then you rose and rose and doubled to enclose us
    in the God-shape, the myth.
     
    Perfect light, manuscript of ions, come toward me.
    Advance, shaking, futile.
    I remember.
    After the rape I went to my chair.
    I sat, looking at the carpet.
    I felt the angel of forgiveness unfurl her iron wings.
    Her feathers ripped through my back like razors
    Now, when I close my wings over you—
    Know how it is to be a woman,
    to fight your way out of the body
    only to be cast between the ribs of a man again.
     
    Light of my brain burning day and night,
    I praise you as a driver loses the road
    in snow and drives across the fields
    of snow, the snow absolving human presence.
    Star. Failing light. I praise you,
    as I’m sitting here, praise you fervently,
    and without hope, every day.
     
    The first waves rushed in, immaculate and foaming.
    The child was given up to love.
    Pressed deeply against the sound of the world,
    she breathed the dark spores
    of earth, slept underneath the twelve-branched heart.
     
    Let us go down into the earth every night.
    Let us bite down,
    let us chew the bitter wood to paste
    as deer in their winter yards circulate, stripping
    everything into themselves
    until they drift out,
    in spring, wise and ravenous.
     
    I lie down in the grass, watching, and when the coyote turns
    her ass to the wind, looks at me across her shoulder,
    that is when we regard each other,
    as the snow bleeds white around the base of Sweetgrass.
     
    You are everything. There is nowhere
    I do not praise you.
    In bed, in the body.
    You rise toward me in the bones
    of my wife, my husband, my lover.
    Paging through the white flesh, the black, the brown,
    which we wear as we dance the skin dance
    Someone please!
    Remove my beer-can vest, my skin of vinyl sheet music!
    Speak from the water, speak from the fucking.
    I praise you in the body out of the body.
    Ash I must become in new rain descending.
    Child, dear raven’s heart, new messenger.
     
    Hammer of love, hammer of time,
    self I’ve killed you in myself,
    again, again, dragging you to light by the tail,
    pounding you to one thin ribbon.
    Now I release you,
    blue and coiling in the simple world.
     
    How sad I have become walking in my heavy shoes.
    You will have to kill me, you will have to be my body.
    Our love like all love is magical failure.
     
    Perfect light, manuscript of ions.
    I write your praises
    on my own skin
    with the stylus of a sharpened nail.
     
    I wake in the blue hours once again,
    my whole life spilling through me,
    as loons pour
    the cold green tea of their laughter
    across the rose-slabbed lakes of Ontario.
    I am one thing. I am nothing you can name.
    I pray in the woods, begging to be taken,
    the way leaves and stones are
    whirled into your rushing mouth.
     
    River of snow, river of twinned carp,
    Sky of three holes, sky of white paper.
    I praise you the way shadows
    of deer move beyond the cut lawn
    stripping everything into them, flowers, bark,
    the frail blossoms of the poke, the weeds,
    yew trees, cedar, lythrum, tender new labia of phlox.
    Shadow of my need, shadow of hunger,
    shadow infinite and made of gesture,
    my god, my leaf,
    graceful, ravenous, moving in endless circles
    as the sweet seeds hang waxen yellow in the maple.

Avila
    Teresa of Avila’s brother, Rodrigo, emigrated to America in 1535 and died in a fight with Natives