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) [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.
