Slow Fire

look at me
i am not a separate woman i am a continuance
of blue sky
i am the throat
of the mountains
a night wind
who burns
with every breath
she takes 

—Joy Harjo

One Village, Many Hearts mural (detail) by Kari Johnson, 2018, Eugene

Tracing path

kindled blaze

sunrise then set

leading into light.

Stealing fire red

pearling raven’s beak

kindred eye

black night eye.

How many languages

have a word for fire

following fear in translation

desire.

No two flames the same

every ember becoming…

…

Reverse the image: Racing past

Daring fire

Lavablack unseeing simmers

Every flame one flame

Prometheus, outdoor sculpture by Jan Zach (1958), UO. (Image-color-shifted)

Child

You are in a blind 

desert     child 

your "too-muchness" is written 

in the Torah 

child    it is written

in the pit 

written in black fire 

on white fire 

deer star 

black star 

third star 

who sees

— Jean Valentine

NOTES

—Photos public art/street art, poem Tracing path, Douglas Beauchamp

—Joy Harjo from the poem Fire in What Moon Drove Me to This? (1980)

—Jean Valentine, Child in The Cradle of the Real Life (2000) 

Below:

—Sandy Denny from Who Knows Where The Time Goes (1967)

Across the purple sky, all the birds are leaving

But how can they know it's time for them to go?

Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming

I have no thought of time

—Sandy Denny

To behold the dawn of the universe

Webb will always face Earth’s night side to keep its infrared detectors as frigid as possible. … At 1 million miles away, the Webb Space Telescope is more than four times as distant as the moon.—APNews, January 24 2022

And if the Further Heaven— 

Be Beautiful as they prepare 

For Those who worship Them— 

It is too difficult a Grace— 

To justify the Dream—

—Emily Dickinson

                    And the Earth keeps up her
dancing and she is neither perfect nor exactly in time.
She is one of us.

And she loves the dance for what it is. So does the Sun who calls the Earth beloved. And praises her with light.

—Joy Harjo

Photos Malheur County, SE Oregon, Douglas Beauchamp

NOTES

The OTHER Side: Of Signalings and Metaphors

—The telescope was launched from French Guiana on Christmas.

—Besides making stellar observations, Webb will scan the atmospheres of alien worlds for possible signs of life.

—The primary mirror has 18 hexagonal segments, each the size of a coffee table

APNews: New space telescope reaches final stop million miles out. Marcia Dunn, Jan 24 2022. https://apnews.com/article/nasa-james-webb-telescope-arrives-space-9ea15e4bddaead131d4fcb6b07c53529

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/

—Joy Harjo from her poem In Praise of Earth in How We Became Human (2002)

—Emily Dickinson’s poem:

I reckon—when I count it all— 

First—Poets—Then the Sun— 

Then Summer—Then the Heaven of God— 

And then—the List is done— 

But, looking back—the First so seems 

To Comprehend the Whole— 

The Others look a needless Show— 

So I write—Poets—All— 

Their Summer—lasts a Solid Year— 

They can afford a Sun 

The East—would deem extravagant— 

And if the Further Heaven— 

Be Beautiful as they prepare 

For Those who worship Them— 

It is too difficult a Grace— 

To justify the Dream—

Mapping Future Ancestors

Arrival as circle. Journeys become legends, fusing time, places, memory. This presence appears dynamic, a glimmer of larger cycle. As I observe a variety of petroglyphs of a morning in a spring canyon I see figures marking presence. Occasionally a rock art motif appears as a temporal mapping, a narrative of journey, mimicking a path of movement.

This petroglyph may story a cycle or an arrival. he image may be metaphoric, indicating thresholds of personal emergence. To know oneself. The looping circle may indicate family, group ties, relations, bondedness. It may function as remembrance or to assist remembering as a mnemonic device. A journey may be imagined or anticipated as future event, a new era. Making worlds visible. An invocation and guide to future wayfarers. An inspiration.  

My speculations framed with my own projected logic surely miss the intention of the maker. Standing back, standing forth, for a sunrise, I am lucky to share her or his vision.

Linear Process: poem by Gwen Nell Westerman

Our elders say

the universe is a

circle.

Everything 

returns to its

beginnings.

But where do we go

from here? 

Where are 

our beginnings?

                        Our parents were stripped

                        of their parents
                        names tongues       prayers,

                        lined up for their meals

                        clothes      classes tests.

                        When it was our turn 

                        to come into this world,

                        they did not know
                        what family meant

                        anymore. 

                        They did not

                        know.
                        Yet even 

                       from here, 

                      we can 

                     see that the 

                  straightest line

                on a map

               is a circle.

Who will say the circle poem in 2120? As Peter Brannen reminds is: “No animal in the history of the planet, and possibly in the visible universe, is ever found itself at so consequential a crossroads as ourselves.” I wonder, crossroads as point on a circle?  How do we speak of now and then?  

If there is an ancestral tense to poetics, a pastpresentfuture tense embodied a vision, it may well be Joy Harjo’s poem A Map to the Next World. Here, the last gleaming lines of the poem: 

    We were never perfect.

    Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

    once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

    We might make them again, she said.

    Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

    You must make your own map.

Where will a future-ancestor-poet place on the map? An aspirational songline of anguish, love, longing? Will there be a map? Or a vast cycle? 

Joy Harjo, beginning her third term as the nation’s Poet Laureate, will continue her project Living Nations, Living Words, launched November 2020. In her narrative to this interactive ArcGIS Story Map, Harjo says: "Now, we have a map. And you have learned you can begin anywhere. Know that this is only a thin portion of destinations, with few representations of the scope of Native Nations poets, and poetry of place. However, it is a beginning."

NOTES

[1] Gwen Nell Westerman, in Follow the Blackbirds (2013), Michigan State University Press. Also in New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018)

[2] Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World (2017 HarperCollins).  A Colorado-based writer, Brannen’s recent (The Atlantic, March 2021) overview:  The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record

[3] Joy Harjo.  “A Map to the Next World" from How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 1975-2001 (2002, WW Norton) 

[4] Living Nations, Living Words. About.  View MAP

[5] Background:  Joy Harjo, Blaney Lecture, October 9, 2015:  Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigenous Poetry and Poets. 

CODA

Joy Harjo: 

Vkvsamet hesaketmese pomvte
Mowe towekvs pokvhoyen yiceyvte
Mon vkerrickv heren
Pohkerricen vpeyeyvres
With praise for the Breathmaker, by whose intent
We arrive here, and by whose grace we leave.