BOSTON

PUBLIC
LIBRARY
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2016 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/shehadsomehorsesOOharj
She Had
Some
Horses
 Joy
Haijo

She Had
Some
Horses

Thunder’s Mouth Press

New York
Copyright © 1983 Thunder's Mouth Press
SIXTH PRINTING. 1989
under International and
All rights reserved
Pan American Copyright Conventions.

Published in the United States by Thunder's

Mouth Press. 54 Greene St.. 4S
New York. N.Y. 10013

Design by Bob Feie

Cover painting “Memories of Ruffian” by

Sherman Drexler

Acknowledgment is gratefully given to the

following publications in which some of these
poems originally appeared.

Magazines:
Heresies
Spawning the Medicine River
Contact II
Com Soup
Frontiers
Conditions
The Beloit Poetry Journal
Cedar Rock
Greenfield Review
River Styx
Midwest Alliance Newsletter
National Women Studies Newsletter
Anthologies:
Artists For Survival
Coyote's Journal
Songs From Turtle Island
Native American Literature (Twayne U.S.
Authors Series)
The Woman Poet

This publication made possible by a grant

from the Illinois Arts Council.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication

Data:

Harjo, Joy.
She had some horses.

Poems.
I. Title.
PS3558. A62423S5 1982 811 '.54 82-17064
ISBN 0-938410-06-7 (pbk.)
ISBN 0-938410-07-5
For Meridel LeSueur and for my
Great Aunt Lois Harjo Ball 1906 - 1982

And For All the Beautiful Horses

Thanks to the National Endowment

for the Arts for their support
 Contents

1. Survivors

Call Fear 13
It

Anchorage 14
What Music 16
Rain 17
For Alva Benson and For All Those Who Have Learned to Speak
,
18
Backwards 20
Night Out 21
The Woman Hanging from the Th irteenth Floor Window 22
One Cedar Tree 24
The Black Room 25
White Bear 27
Leaving 28
Cuchillo 29
Skeleton of Winter 30
Connection 32
Kansas City 33
Friday Before the Long Weekend 35
Song for Thant og 36
Heartbeat 37
Nandia 38
Remember 40
Vision 41
New Orleans 42
Nautilaus 45
She Remembers the Future 46

2. What I Should Have Said

Untitled 49
What Should Have Said 50
I
Moonlight 51
Jemez 52
Late Summer Leaving 53
Motion 54
Alive 55
Your Phone Call at 8 A.M. 57
The Poem I Just W
rote 58
The Returning 59
September Moon 60
 3. She Had Some Horses

I. She Had Some Horses 63

II. Two Horses 65
III. Drowning Horses 66
IV. Ice Horses 67
V. Explosion 68

4. I Give You Back 73

 1
Survivors
 —
Call It Fear

There is this edge where shadows

and bones of some of us walk
backwards.
Talk backwards. There is this edge
an ocean of fear of the dark. Or
call it

name it with other songs. Under our ribs

our hearts are bloody stars. Shine on
shine on, and horses in their galloping flight
strike the curve of ribs.
Heartbeat
and breathe back sharply. Breathe
backwards.
There is this edge within me
saw it onceI

an August Sunday morning when the heat hadn’t

left this earth. And Goodluck
sat sleeping next to me in the truck.
We had never broken through the edge of the
singing at four a.m.
We had only wanted to talk, to hear
any other voice to stay alive with.
And there was this edge
not the drop of sandy rock cliff

bones of volcanic earth into

Albuquerque.
Not that,
but a string of shadow horses kicking
and pulling me out of my belly,
not into the Rio Grande but into the music
barely coming through
Sunday church singing
from the radio. Battery worn-down but the voices
talking backwards.

13
 Anchorage
for Au dre Lorde

This city is made of stone, of blood, and fish.

There are Chugatch Mountains to the east

and whale and seal to the west.
It hasn’t always been this way, because glaciers

who are ice ghosts create oceans, carve earth

and shape this city here, by the sound.
They swim backwards in time.

Once a storm of boiling earth cracked open

the streets, threw open the town.
It’s quiet now, but underneath the concrete

is the cooking earth,

and above that, air
which is another ocean, where spirits we can’t see
are dancing joking getting full

on roasted caribou, and the praying

goes on, extends out.

Nora and go walking down 4th Avenue

I

and know it is all happening.

On a park bench we see someone’s Athabascan
grandmother, folded up, smelling like 200 years
of blood and piss, her eyes closed against some
unimagined darkness, where she is buried in an ache
in which nothing makes
sense.

We keep on breathing, walking, but softer now,

the clouds whirling in the air above us.
What can we say that would make us understand
better than we do already?
Except to speak of her home and claim her
as our own history, and know that our dreams
don’t end here, two blocks away from the ocean
where our hearts still batter away at the muddy shore.

And I Avenue jail, of mostly Native

think of the 6th
and Black men, where Henry told about being shot at
eight times outside a liquor store in L.A., but when
the car sped away he was surprised he was alive,

14
no bullet holes, man, and eight cartridges strewn
on the sidewalk
all around him.

Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,

but also the truth. Because who would believe

the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival
those who were never meant
to survive?

15
 What Music

would have loved you then, in

I

the hot, moist tropics of your young womanhood.

Then
the stars were out and fat every night.
They remembered your name
and called to you
as you bent down in the doorways of the whiteman’s houses.
You savored each story they told you,
and remembered
the way the stars entered your blood
at birth.
Maybe it was the Christians’ language
that captured you,
or the bones that cracked in your heart each time
you missed the aboriginal music that you were.
But then,
you were the survivor of the births
of your two sons. The oldest one hates you, and the other
wants to marry you. Now they live in another language
in Los Angeles
with their wives.
And you,
the stars return every night to call you back.
They have followed your escape
from the southern hemisphere
into the north.
Their voices echo out from your blood and you drink
the Christians’ brandy and fall back into
doorways in an odd moonlight.
You sweat in the winter in the north,
and you are afraid,
sweetheart.

16
 Rain

Bobby flew out from his body

on Nine Mile Hill.
You could say was a Navaho semi
it

careening down the earth

or his wife, pregnant and drunk
who caused his lick of death.

But what captured him was a light in the river

folding open and open
blood, heart and stones
shimmering like the Milky Way.

And then it rained.

What went down sucked the current,
took hold.

Now southern California falls into the ocean.

Now Phoenix struggles under water.

Something has been let loose in rain;

it is teaching us to love.

17
 For Alva Benson, And For Those
Who Have Learned To Speak
And the ground spoke when she was born.
Her mother heard it. In Navajo she answered
as she squatted down against the earth
to give birth. It was now when it happened,
now giving birth to itself again and again
between the legs of women.

Or maybe was the Indian Hospital

it

in Gallup. The ground still spoke beneath

mortar and concrete. She strained against the
metal stirrups, and they tied her hands down
because she still spoke with them when they
muffled her screams. But her body went on
talking and the child was born into their
hands, and the child learned to speak
both voices.

She grew up talking in Navajo, in English

and watched the earth around her shift and change
with the people in the towns and in the cities
learning not to hear the ground as it spun around
beneath them. She learned to speak for the ground,
the voice coming through her like roots that
have long hungered for water. Her own daughter
was born, like she had been, in either place
or all places, so she could leave, leap
into the sound she had always heard,
a voice like water, like the gods weaving
against sundown in a scarlet light.

The child now hears names in her sleep.

They change into other names, and into others.
It is the ground murmuring, and Mt. St. Helens

erupts as the harmonic motion of a child turning

inside her mother’s belly waiting to be born
to begin another time.

18
And we go on,keep giving birth and watch
ourselves die, over and over.
And the ground spinning beneath us
goes on talking.

19
 Backwards

The moon that night was thrown

off the bridge, the one near Mesita
the tracks crawl under
I was driving over when I saw it;

white skeleton laying on the

blood ground,
fallen moon rolling up
the bone railroad
whirring of soft seeds and thunderstorms
caught in stiff skin rattles.

Something tries to turn the earth

around. Blue dawn to the yellow west.
California to New York.
This has been going on
since I don’t know when,
baby.

“. . .when the dance is over, sweetheart

I will take you home in my one-eyed Ford. .
.”

The moon came up white, and torn

at the edges. I dreamed when I was
four that I was standing on it.
A whiteman with a knife cut pieces
away
and threw the meat
to the dogs.

20
 Night Out

I have seen you in the palms of my hands

late nights in the bar
just before the lights.
are about to be turned on. You are powerful horses
by then, not the wrinkled sacks of thin, mewing
spirit,
that lay about the bar early in the day
waiting for minds and bellies.
You are the ones who slapped Anna on the back,
up
told her to drink
that it didn’t matter anyway.
You poured Jessie another Coors, and another one
and another.
Your fingers were tight around hers
because she gave herself to you.
Your voice screamed out from somewhere in the
darkness
another shot, anything to celebrate this deadly
thing called living. And Joe John called out to bring
another round, to have another smoke, to dance dance it good
because tomorrow night is another year
in your voice.
I have heard you in my ownself.

And have seen you in my own past vision.

Your hearts float out in cigarette
smoke, and your teeth are broken and scattered in my hands.
It doesn’t end

For you are multiplied by drinkers, by tables, by jukeboxes

by bars.
You fight to get out of the sharpest valleys cut down into
the history of living bone.
And you fight to get in.
You are the circle of lost ones
our relatives.
You have paid the cover charge thousands of times over
with your lives
and now you are afraid

you can never get out.

21
 The Woman Hanging From The
Thirteenth Floor Window

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor

window. Her hands are pressed white against the
concrete moulding of the tenement building. She
hangs from the 13th floor window in east Chicago,
with a swirl of birds over her head. They could
be a halo, or a storm of glass waiting to crush her.

She thinks she will be set free.

The woman hanging from the 13th floor window

on the east side of Chicago is not alone.
She is a woman of children, of the baby, Carlos,
and of Margaret, and of Jimmy who is the oldest.
She is her mother’s daughter and her father’s son.
She is several pieces between the two husbands
she has had. She is all the women of the apartment
building who stand watching her, watching themselves.

When she was young she ate wild rice on scraped down
plates in warm wood rooms. It was in the farther
north and she was the baby then. They rocked her.

She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of

herself. It is a dizzy hole of water and the rich
live in tall glass houses at the edge of it. In some
places Lake Michigan speaks softly, here, it just sputters
and butts itself against the asphalt. She sees
other buildings just like hers. She sees other
women hanging from many-floored windows
counting their lives in the palms of their hands
and in the palms of their children’s hands.

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window

on the Indian side of town. Her belly is soft from
her children’s births, her worn levis swing down below
her waist, and then her feet, and then her heart.
She is dangling.

22
The woman hanging from the 13th floor hears voices.
They come to her in the night when the lights have gone
dim. Sometimes they are little cats mewing and scratching
at the door, sometimes they are her grandmother’s voice,
and sometimes they are gigantic men of light whispering
to her to get up, to get up, to get up. That’s when she wants
to have another child to hold onto in the night, to be able
to fall back into dreams.

And the woman hanging from the 13th floor window

hears other voices. Some of them scream out from below
for her tojump, they would push her over. Others cry softly
from the sidewalks, pull their children up like flowers and gather
them into their arms. They would help her, like themselves.

But she is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window,
and she knows she is hanging by her own fingers, her
own skin, her own thread of indecision.

She thinks of Carlos, of Margaret, of Jimmy.

She thinks of her father, and of her mother.
She thinks of all the women she has been, of all
the men. She thinks of the color of her skin, and
of Chicago streets, and of waterfalls and pines.
She thinks of moonlight nights, and of cool spring storms.
Her mind chatters like neon and northside bars.
She thinks of the 4 a.m. lonelinesses that have folded
her up like death, discordant, without logical and
beautiful conclusion. Her teeth break off at the edges.
She would speak.

The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for
the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the
sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago.
She thinks she remembers listening to her own life
break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor
window on the east side of Chicago, or as she
climbs back up to claim herself again.

23
 One Cedar Tree

The cedar tree outside the window

is one
of many.
What prayers are said to it?

What voices are raised

to sacred blue sky
within its branches?
Stars
illuminate its form. The moon comes around
in a repetitious pattern,
and the sun
slopes down into a sea
that those who pray are familiar with. . .

(They know the tree must be the one god

because of its life they are sure.)
What do I know?
Only the prayers I send up on cedar smoke,
on sage.
Only the children who are bone-deep echoes
of a similar life.

Only the woman who sleeps generations

in my bed.
A continuum flows like births
because somehow
the sun gallops in most mornings on the
eastern horizon.
The moon floats familiar
but changing.
And I eat, breathe, and pray to some strange god
who could be a cedar tree
outside the window.

24
 The Black Room
She thought she woke up.
Black willow shadows for walls
of her room. Was it sleep?
Or the star-dancer come for her dance?
There are stars who have names, who are
dreams. There are stars who have families
who are music. She thought she woke up.
Felt for skin, for alive and breathing blood
rhythm. For clothes or an earring she forgot to
take off. Could hear only the nerve
at the center of the bone —
the gallop
of an elegant horse. She thought she woke
up. Black willow shadows for walls she
was younger then. Her grandmother’s house
sloped up from the Illinois River in Oklahoma.
The house in summer motion of shadows breathed in cool
wind before rain rocked her. Storms were always
quick could take you in their violent hard rain
and hail. Gritty shingles of the roof. Rat
rat rat ratting and black willow branches twisting
and moaning and she lay there, the child that she was
in the dark in the motion. She thought she woke up.

Joey had her cornered. Leaned her up against the

wall of her room, in black willow shadows his breath
was shallow and muscled and she couldn’t move and
she had no voice no name and she could only wait
until it was over —like violent summer storms
that she had been terrified of. She thought she
woke up. Maybe there were some rhythms that weren’t
music; some signified small and horrible deaths
within her —and she rode them like horses into
star patterns of the northern hemisphere, and
into the west.

25
This morning she thought she woke up.
Alarm rang and some motion, some
fit into voice
within her other being a dream or —
the history of one of the sky’s other stars.
Still night in the house, she opens
herself for the dark. Black horses are slow
to let go. She calls them by name but she fears
they won’t recognize hers, and if the dance
continues in nets of star
patterns
would it be sleep?

26
 White Bear

She begins to board the flight

to Albuquerque. Late night.
But stops in the corrugated tunnel,
a space between leaving and staying,
where the night sky catches

her whole life

she has felt like a woman

balancing on a wooden nickle heart
approaching herself from here to
there, Tulsa or New York
with knives or corn meal.

The someone talked

last flight
about how coming from Seattle
the pilot flew a circle
over Mt. St. Helens; she sat
quiet. (But had seen the eruption
as the earth beginning
to come apart, as in birth
out of violence.)

She watches the yellow lights

of towns below the airplane flicker,
fade and fall backwards. Somewhere,
she dreamed, there is the white bear
moving down from the north, motioning her paws
like a long arctic night, that kind
of circle and the whole world balanced in
between carved of ebony and ice

oh so hard

the clear black nights

her daughter’s eyes, and the white
like
bear moon, cupped like an ivory rocking
cradle, tipping back it could go
either way
all darkness
is open to all light.

27
 Leaving

Four o’clock this morning there was a call.

She talked Indian, so it was probably her mother.
It was. Something not too drastic, tone of voice,

no deaths or car wrecks. But something. I was

out of the sheets, unwrapped from the blankets,
fighting to stay in sleep. Slipped in and out of her
voice, her voice on the line.
She came back to me. Lit cigarette blurred in the dark.
All lights off but that. Laid
down next to me, empty, these final hours
before my leaving.

Her sister was running away from her boyfriend and

was stranded in Calgary, Alberta. Needed money
and comfort for the long return back home.

I dreamed of a Canadian plain, andwarm arms around me,

the soft skin of the body’s landscape. And dreamed
I

of bear, and a thousand mile escape homeward.

28
 Cuchillo

cuchillo
sky
is blood filling up my belly

cuchillo
moon
is a white horse thundering down
over the edge
of a raw red cliff

cuchillo
heart
is the one who leaves me
at midnight
for another lover

cuchillo
dog
is the noise of chains and collar
straining at the neck to bite
the smell of my ankles

cuchillo
silver
is the shell of black sky
spinning around inside
my darker eyes

cuchillo
dreams
are the living bones that want out
of this voice dangling
that calls itself
knife
(cuchillo).

29
 Skeleton Of Winter

These winter days

I’ve remained silent
as a whiteman’s watch
keeping time
an old bone
empty as a fish skeleton
at low tide.
It is almost too dark

for vision
these ebony mornings
but there is still memory,
the other-sight
and still I see.

Rabbits get torn under

cars that travel at night
but come out the other
side, not bruised
breathing soft
like no fear.

And sound is light, is

movement. The sun revolves

and sings.

There are still ancient

symbols
alive

I did dance with the prehistoric horse

years and births later
near a cave wall
late winter.

A tooth-hard rocking
in my belly comes back,
something echoes
all forgotten dreams,

in winter.

30
I am memory alive
not just a name
but an intricate part
of this web of motion,
meaning: earth, sky, stars circling
my heart

centrifugal.
 Connection

A hawk touches down

the humming earth before Miami,
Oklahoma.
You old Shawnee, I think
of your rugged ways
the slick-floored bars and whiskey
sour nights when the softer heart
comes apart.
The Spokane you roam isn’t City of the Angels
but another kind of wilderness.
You speed in aFord truck and it’s five
in the morning, the sun and dogs
only ones up
and you go home to red earth
when you see a hawk
crossing wires

touching down.

32
 Kansas City

Early morning over silver tracks

a cool light,Noni Daylight’s
a dishrag wrung out over bones
watching trains come and go.
They are lights, motion
of time that she could have
caught
and moved on
but she chose to stay
in Kansas City, raise the children
she had by different men,
all colors. Because she knew

that each star rang with separate

colored hue, as bands of horses
and wild
... like the spirit in her—
that flew, at each train whistle.
Small moments were cycles
at each sound.
Other children elsewhere
being born, half-breed, blue eyes,
would grow up with the sound
of trains etched on the surface
of their bones, the tracks
cutting across Kansas City into hearts
that would break into pieces
in Cheyenne, San Francisco
always on the way back home.
Early morning,
if she had it to do over

she would still choose:

the light one who taught her
sound, but could not hear his
own voice, the blind one
who saw her bones wrapped
in buckskin and silver,
the one whose eyes tipped up
like swallows wings
(whose ancestors laid this track,
with hers),

33
all of them,
their stories in the flatland belly
giving birth to children
and to other stories
and to Noni Daylight
standing near the tracks
waving
at the last train to leave
Kansas City.

34
 The Friday Before The Long
Weekend

You come in here

drunk child
pour your beer
down the drain,
“apple juice”,
bullshit.
I can see you,
I can see
you, what you
are doing to yourself
is something
I can’t sing about.
I can point
to the piss yellow
drops in the sink.
I can see the stagger

in your eyes
glasses askew
your voice loud
cawing
uncertain bravado
and you come in here
to be taught
to take writing
but hell,

what can I teach you

what can I do?
Something shaky and terrible
starts in my belly.
The sour reality rolls over
in my throat.
I do anything
can’t
but talk to the wind,
to the moon
but cry out goddamn goddamn
to stones
and to other deathless voices
that I hope will carry
us all through.

35
 Song For Thantog
for Keith Wilson

Thantog
you are jaguar priest
spirit of fire, of the edge of light that occurs
in the swift falling down of day
into night. Forever
is yours but this night I watch out the dark with you,

tend the fire with my fingers,

stir the cool wind
and you pray:
for the return of the sun

for the spirit of the moon

for life,

and, it is all good, you say

as you stand up on your hind legs, Thantog
and pray
that those yellow eyes in motion in the night

that those spirits behind the eyes who know us better

than our mothers

you pray

that they come out from their hiding and devour us,

because they are fire, Thantog

they are own skin and blood
and what better life is this
than to so stand up singing
with no blade edge
against ourselves
other than voices
out of the fire.

36
 Heartbeat

Noni Daylight is afraid.

She was curled inside her mother’s belly •/

for too long. The pervasive rhythm

of her mother’s heartbeat is a ghostly track
that follows her.
Goes with her to her apartment, to her sons’
room, to the bars, everywhere; there is no escape.
She covers her ears but the sound drums
within her. It pounds her elastic body.
Friday night Noni cut acid into tiny squares
and let them melt on her tongue.
She wanted something
to keep her awake so the heartbeat
wouldn’t lull her back.
She wanted a way to see the stars
complete patterns in her hands, a way to hear
her heart, her own heart.
These nights she wants out.
And when Noni is at the edge of skin she slips
out the back door. Qjh e goes for the hunt, tracks the
heart sound on the streets
of Albuquerque.
She steers her car with the hands her mother gave her.
The four doors she leaves unlocked and the radio
sings softly
plays softly and Noni takes the hand of the moon
that she knows is in control overhead.
Noni Daylight is afraid.
She waits through traffic lights at intersections
that at four a.m. are desolate oceans of concrete.
She toys with the trigger; the heartbeat
is a constant noise. She talks softly

softly
to the voice on the radio. All night she drives.
And she waits
for the moment she has hungered for,

for the hand that will open the door.

It is not the moon, or the pistol in her lap

but a fierce anger

that will free her.

37
 Nandia

Over McCartys
a crow flies north
near the house
you lived in with Tony.
I think of you,
see old bones of lava beds,
a train going towards
Gallup,
radio fading out
only wind, and
thisdry mouth
whisper thin,
like leaves.

We traveled this road

before. Sixty-six
or other names in the time
you breathed. Knew
red rock mesas, Indian tea
stalks dried and empty
and the hardened
black ashes
of the Malpais.

You took me once

to an older part of earth
I’dnever seen
where monsters were born
and killed.
They sacrificed everything
and nothing
for a taste of this
life.

38
I remember
you held your baby
tight.
He was yours and Tony’s
a pointinbetween
hot baked earth
and Oklahoma.

We crawled a fence
found a barren
Laguna corral where years
back sheep birthed and slept
and were kept by an old man
and woman whose children
have grown old in L.A.

To the Rio Puerco

deep blood of silence
where the sun fell
to the western horizon
and your voice and mine
echoed laughter;
carried children.

Now footprints are mere ghosts

washed over in the river
and there are wings
slapping wind
that force sound through me.

I drive this road again

my children older
and this ache
this trembling ache
haunts me endlessly
like you.

39
 Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her
in a bar once in Iowa City.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who allhave their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe. I heard her singing Kiowa war
dance songs at the corner of Fourth and Central once.
Remember that you are all people and that all people
are you.
Remember that you are this universe and that this
universe is you.
Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember that language comes from this.
Remember the dance that language is, that life is.

Remember.

40
 Vision

The rainbow touched down

“somewhere in the Rio Grande,”
we said. And saw the light of it
from your mother’s house in Isleta.
How it curved down between earth
and the deepest sky to give us horses
of color
horses that were within us all of this time
but we didn’t see them because
we wait for the easiest vision
to save us.

In Isleta the rainbow was a crack

in the universe. We saw the barest
of all life that is possible.
Bright horses rolled over
and over the dusking sky.
I heard the thunder of their beating

hearts. Their lungs hit air

and sang. All the colors of horses
formed the rainbow,
and formed us
watching them.

41
 New Orleans
This is the south. I look for evidence
of other Creeks, for remnants of voices,
or for tobacco brown bones to come wandering
down Conti Street, Royale, or Decatur.
Near the French Market I see a blue horse
caught frozen in stone in the middle of
a square. Brought in by the Spanish on
an endless ocean voyage he became mad
and crazy. They caught him in blue
rock, said
don’t talk.

I know it wasn’t just a horse

that went crazy.

Nearby is a shop with ivory and knives.

There are red rocks. The man behind the
counter has no idea that he is inside
magic stones. He should find out before
they destroy him. These things
have memory,
you know.

I have a memory.
It swims deep in blood,
a delta in the skin. It swims out of Oklahoma,

deep the Mississippi River. It carries my

feet to these places: the French Quarter,
stale rooms, the sun behind thick and moist
clouds, and I hear boats hauling themselves up
and down the river.

My spirit comes here to drink.

My spirit comes here to drink.
Blood is the undercurrent.

42
There are voices buried in the Mississippi
mud. There are ancestors and future children
buried beneath the currents stirred up by
pleasure boats going up and down.
There are stories here made of memory.

I remember DeSoto. He is buried somewhere in

this river, his bones sunk like the golden
treasure he traveled half the earth to find,
came looking for gold cities, for shining streets
of beaten gold to dance on with silk ladies.

He should have stayed home.

(Creeks knew of him for miles

before he came into town.
Dreamed of silver blades
and crosses.)
And knew he was one of the ones who yearned
for something his heart wasn’t big enough
to handle.
(And DeSoto thought it was gold.)

The Creeks lived in earth towns,

not gold,
spun children, not gold.
That’s not what DeSoto thought he wanted to see.
The Creeks knew it, and drowned him in
the Mississippi River
so he wouldn’t have to drown himself.

43
Maybe body is what I am looking
his for
as evidence. To know in another way
that my memory is alive.

But he must have got away, somehow,

because I have seen New Orleans,
the lace and silk buildings,
trolley cars on beaten silver paths,
graves that rise up out of soft earth in the rain,
shops that sell black mammy dolls
holding white babies.

And I know I have seen DeSoto,

having a drink on Bourbon Street,
mad and crazy
dancing with a woman as gold
as the river bottom.

44
 Nautilaus

This is how I cut myself open

— with a half pint of whiskey, then
there’s enough dream to fall through

topure bone and shell

where ocean has carved out

warm sea animals,

and has driven the night
dark and in me

like a labyrinth of knives.

45
 She Remembers The Future

“We are closer than

blood”, Noni Daylight
tells her. “It isn’t
Oklahoma or the tribal
blood but something more
that we speak.”

(The otherself knows

and whispers
to herself.)

The air could choke, could

kill, the way it tempts
Noni to violence, this
morning. But she needs
the feel of danger,
for life.

She sky
feels the
tethered to the changing
earth, and her skin
responds, like a woman
to her lover.
It could be days, it could
be years, White Sands
or Tuscon.

She asks,
“Should I dream you afraid
so that you are forced to save
yourself?

Or should you ride colored horses

into the cutting edge of the sky
to know

that we’re alive

we are alive.”

46
 2
What I
Should
Have Said
 Untitled

Either a snails moist web

of moonlight, or someone’s
hot breath at four a.m.
when the night has been
too much, has eaten
you whole.
This is for you,
my life. has been
It

sifted through the bones

of my body, through
blood.
It is all that
I have.

49
 What I Should Have Said

There’s nothing that says you can’t

spend the weekdays teaching
call. I

and moving my children from breakfast

to bedtime. What else, I feel like a traitor
telling someone else things I can’t tell
to you. What is it that keeps us together?
Fingertip to fingertip, from Santa Fe
to Albuquerque?
I feel bloated with what I should say
and what I don’t. We drift and drift, with
few storms of heat inbetween the motions.
I love you. The words confuse me.

Maybe they have become a cushion

keeping us in azure sky and in flight
not there, not here.
We are horses knocked out with tranquilizers
sucked into a deep deep sleeping for the comfort
and anesthesia death. We are caught between
clouds and wet earth
and there is no motion
either way
no life

to speak of.

50
 Moonlight

I know when the sun is in China

because the night shining other-light
crawls into my bed. She is moon.
Her eyes slit and yellow she is the last
one out of a dingy bar in Albuquerque
Fourth Street, or from similar avenues
in Hong Kong. Where someone else has also
awakened, the night thrown back and asked,
“Where is the moon, my lover”?
And from here Ialways answer in my dreaming,
“the last time I saw her was in the arms
of another sky”.

51
 Jemez

Sometimes it is like
facing the dreamer
who knows the you
of blood and stars
and you talk out
the winter,
horses neighing
at the razor sky.

And the dreamer leaves.

Maybe you never see

the dreamer again
but coming toward you
are Jemez Mountains
opened red
like the sun going down
against
soft earth.

52
 Late S ummer Leaving

Iwoke up and turned on the light.

You were dreaming
of white birds.
Hibernating.
Your face tilted a soft angle
to the light.
Even in
your sleep you sense direction.
Your eyes are closed to the brightness
but you breathe in sun
like sunflowers do.
(The sense of light is like another
kind of touch,
and water to the
like air skin.)
I am dressed now and see myself walk
aw ay from you
r

in an arc.
I see a war shield on the wall
round and feathers leaning out.
There are geese in the north
cleaning their wings
in preparation for flight south,
and I can hear you
another voice in your dreaming
like birds
talking about some return home.
You turn your head
one more time before I go.
Your body shifts itself like a boat
on a strange tropical sea.
You face east.
The sun
comes up over the Sandias on star time.
It is another year,
another morning.
I watch it return in you
and say one last song to return home on.

53
 Motion

We get frantic
in our loving.
The distance between
Santa Fe and Albuquerque
shifts and changes.
It is moments;
it is years.
I am next to you
in skin and blood
and then I am not.
I tremble and grasp

at the edges of
myself; I let go
into you.
A crow flies over
towards St. Michaels,
opens itself out
into wind.
And I write it to you
at this moment
never being able to get
the essence
the true breath
in words, because we exist
not in words, but in the motion
set off by them, by
the simple flight of crow
and by us
in our loving.

54
 Alive

The hum of the car

is deadening.
It could sing me
to sleep.

I be sung to:
like to
deep-throated music
of the south, horse songs,
of the bare feet sound
of my son walking in his sleep.

Or wheels turning,
spinning
spinning.

Sometimes I am afraid
of the sound
of soundlessness.
Like driving away from you
as you watched me wordlessly
from your sunglasses.
Your face opened up then,
a dark fevered bird.
And dived into me.
No sound of water
but the deep, vibrating
echo
of motion.

I try to touch myself.

There is a field
of talking blood
that I have not been able
to reach,
not even with knives,
not yet.

55
“I tried every escape”,
she told me. “Beer and wine
never worked. Then I
decided to look around, see
what was there. And I saw myself
naked. And alive. Would you
believe that?
Alive.”

Alive. This music rocks

me. I drive the interstate,
watch faces come and go on either
side. I am free to be sung to;
I am free to sing. This woman

can cross any line.

56
 Your Phone Call At 8 AM
Your phone call at eight a.m. could
have been a deadly rope.
All the colors of your voice
were sifted out. The barest part flew
through the wires. Then tight-roped
into the comfort of my own home,
where I surrounded myself with smoke
of pirion, with cedar and sage.
Protected the most dangerous places,
for more than survival, I always
meant. But what you wanted, this morning
you said, was a few words
and not my heart. What you wanted. . .

But the skeleton of your voice

clicked barely perceptible,
didn’tyou hear it?
And what you said you wanted
was easy enough, a few books
some pages, anything, to cancel
what your heart ever saw in me that you didn’t.
But you forgot to say that part.
Didn’t even recognize it when it
came winging out of you
the skeleton’s meat and blood,
all that you didn’t want to remember

when you called at eight a.m. . . .

But that’s alright because

this poem isn’t for you
but for me
after all.

57
 The Poem I Just Wrote

The poem I just wrote is not real.

And neither is the black horse
who is grazing on my belly.
And neither are the ghosts
of old lovers who smile at me
from the jukebox.

58
 The Returning

I know
don’t
who Hugo Wolf is.
I don’t even know who

you are, maybe coyote who

has fooled himself
again, and me
into believing
the trickery of the heart.
What I am saying is

that it smells like almost

rain, and I am here in this office
set off from Cerrillos Road. I
study and read poems and try to put
myself in them.
But you keep coming back
scratch your fingers at the
door and that voice that you always
had, arching into me.
Raw red cliffs that you
stumbled down into your own shadow
haven’t kept you away, or soft
red lights and strange electrical
music that I play. I am always
in danger. A painting of Blues Man
hangs on the wall in front of me.
The sky swirls down against
a nippled earth in a drawing
that Leo sent, Che, and these words
that I keep trying to follow back
to their original patterns.
But your half-grin
is the only image that comes clear.
All thewords lead to that, even
the coming rainsmell sets your voice
not mine, into motion. You can
call Maybe
yourself anything you want.
you are Hugo Wolf going mad the way Bukowski
said it. Or maybe you are my own life
scheming desperately to climb
back in.

59
 September Moon

Last night she called and told me

about the moon over San Francisco Bay.
Here in Albuquerque it is mirrored
in a cool, dark, Sandia sky.
The reflection is within all of us.
Orange, and almost the harvest
moon. Wind and the chill of the colder
months coming on. The children and I
watched it, crossed San Pedro and Central
coming up from the state fair.
Wind blowing my hair was caught
in my face. I was fearful of traffic,
trying to keep my steps and the moon was east,
ballooning out of the mountain ridge, out of smokey clouds
out of any skin that was covering her. Naked.
Such beauty.
Look.
We are alive. The woman of the moon looking
at us, and we looking at her, acknowledging
each other.

60
 3
She Had
Some
Horses
c*
I She Had Some Horses
She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.

She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with long, pointed breasts.

She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.

She had horses who thought they were the sun and their
bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet
in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.

She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made
them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren’t afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped
bare of their tongues.

63
She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, “horse”.

She had horses who called themselves, “spirit”, and kept
their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her
bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.

She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

64
II Two Horses

thought the sun breaking through Sangre de Cristo

I

Mountains was enough, and that

wild musky scents on my body after
long nights of dreaming could
unfold me to myself.
I thought my
dance alone through worlds of
odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew
would sustain me. I mean
I did learn to move
after all

and how to recognize voices other than the most familiar.

But you must have grown out of
a thousand years dreaming
just like I could never imagine you.
You must have
broke open from another sky
to here, because
now I see you as a part of the millions of
other universes that I thought could never occur
in this breathing.
And I know you as myself, traveling.
In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars
and other circling planet motion.
And then your fingers, the sweet smell
of hair, and
your soft, tight belly.
My heart is taken by you
and these mornings since I am a horse running towards
a cracked sky where there are countless dawns
breaking simultaneously.
There are two moons on the horizon
and for you
I have broken loose.

65
Ill Drowning Horses

She says she isgoing to kill

herself. I am a thousand miles away.
Listening.
To her voice in an ocean
of telephone sound. Grey sky
and nearly sundown; I don’t ask her how.
I am already familiar with the weapons:

a restaurant that wouldn’t serve her,

the thinnest laughter, another drink.
And even if I weren’t closer
edge of the talking
to the cliff
wire, I would still be another mirror,
another running horse.

Her escape is my own.

I tell her, yes. Yes. We ride
out for breath over the distance.
Night air approaches, the galloping
other-life.

No sound.
No sound.

66
IV Ice Horses

These are the ones who escape

after the last hurt turned inward;
is

they are the most dangerous ones.

These are the hottest ones,
but so cold that your tongue sticks
to them and is torn apart because it is
frozen to the motion of hooves.
These are the ones who cut your thighs,
whose blood you must have seen on the gloves
of the doctor’s rubber hands. They are
the horses who moaned like oceans, and
one of them a young woman screamed aloud;
she was the only one.
These are the ones who have found you.
These are the ones who pranced on your belly.
They chased deer out of your womb.
These are the ice horses, horses
who entered through your head,
and then your heart,
your beaten heart.

These are the ones who loved you.

They are the horses who have held you
so close that you have become
a part of them,
an ice horse
galloping
into fire.

67
V Explosion

The highway near Okemah, Oklahoma exploded.

There are reasons for everything.

Maybe there is a new people, coming forth
being born from the center of the earth,
like us, but another tribe.

Maybe they will be another color that no one

has ever seen before. Then they might be hated,
and live in Muskogee on the side of the tracks
that Indians live on. (And they will be the
ones to save us.)

Maybe there are lizards coming out of rivers of lava

from the core of this planet,

coming to bring rain

to dance for the corn,

to set fields of tongues slapping at the dark
earth, a kind of a dance.

But maybe the explosion was horses,

bursting out of the crazy earth
near Okemah. They were a violent birth,
flew from the ground into trees
to wait for evening night
mares to come after them:

68
 then into the dank wet fields of Oklahoma
then their birth cords tied into the molten heart
then they travel north and south, east and west
then into wet white sheets at midnight when everyone
sleeps and the baby dreams of swimming in the
bottom of the muggy river.
then into frogs who have come out of the earth to
see for rain
then a Creek woman who dances shaking the seeds in
her bones
then South Dakota, Mexico, Japan, and Manila
then into Miami to sweep away the knived faces of hatred

Some will not see them.

But some will see the horses with their hearts of sleeping volcanoes
and will be rocked awake
past their bodies

to see who they have become.

69
4
 I Give You Back

I release you, my beautiful and terrible

fear. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you
as myself. I release you with all the
pain I would know at the death of
my daughters.

You are not my blood anymore.

I give you back to the white soldiers

who burned down my home, beheaded my children,
raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.
I give you back to those who stole the

food from our plates when we were starving.

I release you, fear, because you hold

these scenes in front of me and I was born
with eyes that can never close.

I release you, fear, so you can no longer

keep me naked and frozen in the winter,
or smothered under blankets in the summer.

I release you
I release you
I release you
I release you

I am not afraid to be angry,

I am not afraid to rejoice,
I am not afraid to be black,
I am not afraid to be white,
I am not afraid to be hungry,
I am not afraid to be full,

I am not afraid to be hated,

I am not afraid to be loved.

73
to be loved, to be loved, fear.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.
You have gutted me but I gave you the knife.
You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

You held my mother down and raped her,

but I gave you the heated thing.

I take myself back, fear.

You are not my shadow any longer.
Iwon’t hold you in my hands.
You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice
my belly, or in my heart my heart
my heart my heart

But come here, fear

I am alive and you are so afraid

of dying.

74
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1951, and is of the
Creek Tribe. She left Oklahoma to attend high school at the
Institute of American Indian Arts, and later received her B.A.
from the University of New Mexico, and her M.F.A. from the
Iowa Writers Workshop. She has taught Native American
Literature and Creative Writing at the Institute of American
Indian Arts and Arizona State University, and has participated
in numerous workshops across the United States. She serves
on the Board of Directors for the National Association of Third
World Writers and is on the Policy Panel of the National
Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of The Last Song ,

and What Moon Drove Me To This both collections of poetry.

,

Currently she lives in Santa Fe and is working on a screenplay

and a new poetry collection.
Also from Thunder’s Mouth Press

America Made Me Hans Koning

Dos Indios Harold Jaffe
From Sand Creek Simon J. Ortiz
The Mojo Hands Call/1 Must Go Sterling Plumpp
Somehow We Survive Sterling Plumpp (ed.)
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Poetry/Women’s Studies
ISBN 0-938410-06-7

This is not a book. an opening into woman light, into hatching, into
It is

awakening. The ruined & dismembered, imprisoned, dispossessed, ride out

on a bright thundering of horses in a light of illumination & love. Who
touches this book touches a woman. If you want to remember what you never
listened to & what you didn’t know you knew, or wanted to know, open this
sound & forget to fear. A woman is appearing in the horizon light.

Meridel Le Sueur

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