Myth of Arrival

To talk about what led to my medical evacuation while I was in Peace Corps requires longer, harder explanations and it is difficult to remember what happened. An event that leads up to another event? One is crystal clear, part of my personal mythology. The other — did it even happen? It must've. And yet — and yet — and yet.

It was the winter of 1996 in the mountain city of Gyumri, Armenia. Several of the orphans I had worked with had fallen ill that month and died at the Manga'toon, the "Children's House." I was so young myself and no way of keeping warm. There was frost on my pillow in the hut I lived in. On the last day of teaching English I packed a small bag full of chocolate and water and my hunting knife. I went over to Kent and Linelle's apartment (fellow Peace Corps volunteers) and explained I would like to borrow Kent's winter gloves (what had happened to mine?) since I was walking to Yerevan and needed to stay warm.

It's about 75 miles through mountains between Yerevan and Gyumri. I had heard once, during Soviet times, of a famous Armenian musician (pianist?) who had walked one summer from the two cities as a form of social protest. He had stayed at various friend's houses along the way. It sounded fun; one passes through the Armenian "bread basket," farming valley region in the shadow of Mt. Ararat and in summer it is beautiful. But this memory is not a summer one, it was one evening in late December, in the middle of a mountain blizzard. I recall sitting down all by myself at one point on the side of the road, those whirly clouds of snow playing tricks on my eyes for hours on end (about five hours into my hike I became obsessed with the idea something was following me along those abandoned mountain ridges). I had decided I was tired of walking. My water had long ago frozen and the chocolate wouldn't melt anymore in my mouth. My boots had filled with blood and later, on removing my socks, two toenails would pull away from my left foot.

I love flowers and during the summer months the shookas, the outdoor village markets, would be filled with flower sellers, tzaghckavatsha'rr. That was always a delight. Still, it was sad to sit in that snow-whipped darkness and realize there wasn't a flower around me for what felt like generations to come. But these memories, what of them? They are all part of a personal mythology I cannot recall very well.¹ They robbed me of voice for years to come.

***

[blister]

"tzaghi'k," [Zah-geek/; /Zaj- eek] Armenian for common flower

"bruises on the fruit. tender age in bloom." — nirvana

I.
Throat of blossom, scribe; now // is this dismal
hour that // all our hopes must — no: here
is the mouth stuffed with dahlias — no:
roses — no: orchids (not those damn
cherry blossoms) arctic // scrub along
the highway, sugar and snow: our flowers
are limp. Our flowers are taut. Our dahlias
are tangled. Scribe, there // are no dahlias
on Mount Ararat. No toenails in my boot
bloody root by root. No roses. Only sunflower.

I send you a postcard: that
clear-bellied poppy, Yukio
Mishima: Ba Ra Kei:
"Ordeal By Roses"
pinned above
your bed but
this is no
postcard,
sunflower.
Take your
full-bellied
pen. let me
be a lily.
Cornflower,
you were never
a cornflower — shut up!

Idiot! fool! moron! I
do not have the art to breathe
this divan of verse to breath,
impart life to each page, page
on page on page of blood, heart,
rhyme, the great yaw and yawn of
the sun, the mouthpart of my
cranium, salon of all
these words: blank, tart and brutal.

II.
Desire! lust rose! lime blossoms! let's talk
about the old days, making love in
the kitchen — no: there was no kitchen just
a little hut in the snow, I woke, dressed
went out and walked. Blizzard. Blood
in my boots, holy terror of overshoes — no:
there was no lime, no lust rose I
burn — no: scribe, scribble bestial words.
myrtle in the skull. red plum iris between
the legs, scribble over this book, this flower –

a book like a
flower words like

flowers skin boiling
with flowers a
book like a

flower words like
flowers skin searing
with flowers a
book like a
flower words like
flowers skin blister
with

tzaghi'k// a book like a flower
or open wound// bleeding marshes

words like flowers// this skin's blister
canker // a page, angry pages

releasing verbs, wit, gasses,
tzaghi'k? a book? or a flower?

"tzaghi'k" means flower// dahlias
burn under my skin// hives, itches,
words// like flowers skin blister

festering open// these urges
of verbs confuse me// who touches
tzaghi'k?// a book like a flower?

flowering book// our skin oozes
dahlias together// curses,
words// like flowers, skin blister.

blistering words// take my verses,
"tzaghi'k"// a book like a flower
words like, "flowers," "skin," "blister."

***

a
book
like
a
flower skin boiling with flowers
words
like –

III.

words like, "flowers," "skin," "blister." my
coffee black ice cottoned over, gladiolus
in the brain — no: metaphors are easy,
verbs are fools. O highway and
highway of my highway
little road stretching
from Yerevan to
Gyumri to Kars
to Baku; do you
recall "flowers"
"skin" "blister"
these boots
walking by
your side?
blood in
the boots,
what a drag,
fleas, body
lice, "flowers"
"skin" "blister" my
voice highway my
voice? Highway
blossoming throat
– do you recall
– blossoming throat
call — throat all
– all — ll

1. Something are literal. A friend had sent me a postcard of the naked Japanese author Yukiko Mishima from a collection of photographs ba-ra-kei / ordeal by roses (1961) which I pinned above my bed in my little hut next to a photo of Angela Y. Davis and the sacred Badlands of Wyoming. [back]

Personal Letter No. 3

(Sonia Sanchez)

nothing will keep
us young you know
not young men or
women who spin
their youth on
cool playing sounds.
we are what we
are what we never
think we are.
no more wild geo
graphies of the
flesh. echoes. that
we move in tune
to slower smells.
it is a hard thing
to admit that
sometimes after midnight
i am tired
of it all.

In case you haven't heard, the poets Sharon Olds and Sonia Sanchez will be this year's Fall Arts Celebration-Poetry Night tomorrow at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids.

When: October 11, 2006 7:00 p.m.

Where: L.V. Eberhard Center, Second Floor Robert C. Pew Grand Rapids Campus Followed by reception and book signing

Cost: Event is free and open to public.

GVSU's flyer reads as follows:

Sharon Olds, the award-winning author of eight volumes of poetry - most recently Strike Sparks, is a professor and permanent faculty member in New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program. Sonia Sanchez is the author of more than a dozen book of poetry, including "Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems" and "Does Your House Have Lions?," which was nominated for both the NAACP image and national Book Critics Circle Awards.

What I like about their poetry is not just their personal themes and/or subject matter they focus in on, but how the various issues each poet burns with are represented and explored. It is poetry that echoes Allen Ginsberg's line from his book "Howl:" [To] stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head …

I find that fascinating.

Virginal Orgy

(Sharon Olds)

In our Sophomore year, Solomon Wheat,
a Senior, Captain of the high school team,
carried us to the Tournament of Champions,
and we won. I left the game with my friend
the hourglass beauty, and her friend the President
of the Sophomore class. He put an arm
around each of us, as if there were two of him,
one for her one for me, and I felt,
through him, linked to her long, tilted
eyes and Scythian-bow lips
and cinched waist and the large globes of her
breasts. It was almost as if I could look
into a mirror held by Mike
and see myself as Liz, the way we had
seen ourselves as Solomon Wheat.
I felt that Mike was hugging me
partly so he could hug Liz,
as if I were a moderate price
he was paying for embracing her glory. But mostly
I felt his warm, male, popular
arm around me, it was April, we were walking near
a low, flowering tree, and he steered us
into, and under, and up inside it,
and he kissed Liz, I looked into the maze
of the living stems of the wild nosegays,
and then he turned, and kissed me,
and his lips were so much bigger and more tender
than my mother's, each of his lips was larger
than her whole mouth, and the skin of his lips was like
a newborn's skin, and the flesh of his mouth,
underneath, was so liquid that each lip
seemed, to be splashing like a bucket inside.
The back of my head got faint, early
Communion on an empty stomach, and that central
core, down inside me, did
the thing like a heavy gulp, with the rings
of hotness circling out. And then
he was kissing Liz, I was standing within
the standing bouquet, the orb of the tree not
estranged to me, the tightness and loose
burstness of its crowded petals
not unknown to me, and then
he kissed me again, and this time
I had forgotten my mother — this was my first
return, to him, my mouth already
wise in its hunger, feeling as if nothing
it would wish would be forbidden to it.
When he kissed Liz, I stood aside
enchanted in cherry-trance, waiting for what
was promised and would return, as if
by vow of the corporeal, the little central
throat gulping in emotion as if swallowing
tears. I would gaze, in the bower, and see
the twigs and branches of our canopy —
its angles, isosceles and right, and the dropping
down of a tryst hypotenuse —
in the cone of the tree I understood
Geometry, the Trinity,
Triune Love, and the fierce tingle
of the triangle I had whirl-struck
as a child. And now I knew the kiss,
and from it the hour when the other woman
would go her way, and his other arm
would come around, like the other half
of the sky, and all the angles would close, and the
wings of the sphere open, slowly burst open.

Arlie, host of the XM satellite radio show Hand of Grandfather, … a cutting edge weekly program featuring the Music of The First Nations…ALL TRIBAL, ALL THE TIME! posted this on her blog:

South Dakota Indian Leader Wants to Build Tribal Abortion Clinic (Baltimore Sun)

Sunday, April 2, 2006

In South Dakota, where lawmakers last month passed a near-total ban on abortion, the leader of one of the state's American Indian tribes is proposing to circumvent the legislation by establishing an abortion clinic on an Indian reservation — within reach of women who need the service, but outside the reach of the strict new law.

Cecelia Fire Thunder, a former nurse who is the first female president in the history of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, said it was "an eye-opener" when legislators approved a law that prohibits abortion in nearly all cases — even when the pregnancy results from rape or incest. The only exception is to save the woman's life.

"An Indian reservation is a sovereign nation, and we're going to take it as far as we can to exercise our sovereignty," said Fire Thunder, whose Pine Ridge Reservation encompasses 2.7 million acres in southwestern South Dakota. "As Indian women, we fight many battles. This is just another battle we have to fight."

Because federally recognized American Indian tribes are not, in many cases, required to abide by state law, a clinic could operate lawfully at Pine Ridge even with a ban in place, said South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long. Tribes are, in many respects, treated as foreign nations.

Fire Thunder is one of 15 co-chairs of the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, which formed last week with the goal of putting the abortion ban to voters.

The 59-year-old tribal leader, who said she has counseled rape victims, said it was legislators' insistence on prohibiting abortions for women who have become pregnant as the result of rape that drew her to speak out and to propose building "a Planned Parenthood-type clinic" on tribal land.

She first floated the idea to an American Indian columnist in South Dakota last week. Since then, it has been fodder for the local media and national blogs. Her e-mail inbox has filled up with people supporting the idea, she said.

"People need to open up their eyes in this country. Women are being raped at a tremendously high rate in this nation," she said. "In a perfect world, you will report the rape, the police will respond, they will take you to the emergency room. You will tell your story, you will get emergency contraception.

"We don't live in a perfect world. In rural America, that does not happen."

For now, it remains legal to get an abortion in South Dakota. About 800 a year are performed at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls, where doctors fly in once or twice a week from Minnesota, according to Marta Coursey, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota. It is the only abortion clinic in the state.

The state ban takes effect July 1. Meanwhile, it faces hurdles.

The South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families last weekend began a drive to collect the 16,728 signatures needed to place a referendum on the law on the November ballot — and gathered nearly 1,100 in a matter of days, said Nathan Peterson, the campaign's petition director. If the group gets the required signatures, the law would be on hold until the fall.

Should that fail, a lawsuit would be inevitable, said Coursey. Many expect a judge would stay the law indefinitely as the case works its way through the courts.

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2006/04/01/news/local/news02.txt

Today's blessings go out to Cecelia Fire Thunder, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Hand of Grandfather and everyone else who cares about women's rights and health. For the rest of you, please support this anyway and while you're at it go to Arlie's this blog and give her the kudos she deserves!

I thought about Hand Of Grandfather radio program yesterday as I sat on the grass at the The Nokomis Learning Center in Okemos, Michigan, listening to a friend of mine perform with Nswi Shkoden Nagamo Kwewag (Three Fires Women Singers) at the Nokomis Learning Center; an Anishinaabe hand drum trio.

What this story lacks, of course, is their music so you can hear how brilliant they sounded. The group hasn't recorded their songs (my friend Q says it might happen and might not) so it's hard to sing the praises of someone (literally) when all you have are words to go by but I loved their harmony, loved the presence they had at the microphone and had a marvelous time.

In passing, I am asking anyone might know for some help. I was told of a CD released this year from Michigan State University of an Ojibwe duo, Diva and Davis (?), who recorded popular rock and roll and country songs in Ojibwa. The CD comes with words both in Ojibwa and in English, so you can learn the language as you go along. I think this is a brilliant idea! I learn so much faster through song than by dry memorization. There is a catch, though …

… I have been combing Google looking for any references to Diva and Davis, but so far nothing. That is the problem with second hand information, I suppose (and the problem with the Internet — you might be very, very close to finding what you are looking for but if the word combinations are not right you might miss it anyway). The woman I was talking to wasn't sure if that was their real name or something close to it. Then someone said they weren't Ojibwa but Chippewa and so I am asking anyone in Cyberland who might read this for help. I would love to find this CD!

My friend, Ekaterina Evseyeva, wrote to me recently with a very interesting idea for a literary project.

Ekaterina is a Sakha poet, photographer and scholar living up near the Arctic circle in Siberia. She asked if we could collaborate together; she would send me one of her outstanding photos and I would write a poem in response.

This is the first; the photo, Runaway Winter, is of her Ekaterina herself. Outside my window autumn is here, soon snow. From the photo I began thinking of winter less as half a year of dread ice and slush but rather as a friend one must put up with, even, perhaps, enjoy. The Romantic poet Samuel T. Coleridge begins his poem, Frost at Midnight with the lines, "The Frost performs its secret ministry …" I liked that idea. The only downside to befriending winter is that sooner or later winter leaves you. That would be sad. Poor, lonely winter! Poor, lonely me …

all the opium Coleridge took for pain/
pain that old dun horse/ horse at the salt lick/
lick of brackish winter/ winter remain
with me here/ here everything is panic/
panic remembers out beyond the creek/
creek bed full of snow/ snow on my tongue/ tongue
in your mouth/ mouth full of words/ words lovesick
with my craving … was it craving that flung
winter away? was it these words that stung?
a wasp on the ice marsh? was it my mouth
winter dread? the glimmer of warmth among
kisses? or was it panic from the south?
blizzard bound horse? Was it Coleridge's frost
winter left me for? Winter! I am lost —