Absentee Indians and Other Poems

Passing Time

Passing Time The kitchen has a small table. Formica wood grain metal legs splayed out at each cornerwhere a transistor radio sits. This ancient platform holds ritual items of daily living stained and folded, napkins newspapers and grocery lists piled inconspicuously as history. Mornings we gather elbows planted like tent poles beneath our chins, all day rotating shifts as dreamers and window sill watchers, caught up in life's small dramas. Outside fox squirrels and jays battle each day in the pitifully scarred limbs of one old soldier amputee box elder. We are kitchen sentries on duty and call out when company comes. Biindigen. Visitors keep coming in the screen door revolving like seasons of the moon. Ode'mini-giizis strawberry moon, waatebagaa-giizis leaves changing color moon. 19 20 Voices speak into half empty cups. Biindigen. "Come on in." Company chair sits waiting beneath the teapot clock, hand-painted wooden stepping stool below the garden window, doorway space for standing or leaning. It's crowded sometimes, but good for talking, just right to gather within reach of gingersnaps and stovetop coffee, a place where fresh air blows in through all the windows and the open door. It's a cribbage kitchen. Worn cards always ready shuffled like players' faces like cribbage boards through the years. 1972, carved deer antler. 1984, three-handed ace. And the small spiral notebook meticulously lists 28 hands, double skunks, wins and losses. Games waver and cross the ghost space of memory, cross like voices calling and cards falling. Fifteen two,fijteenJour and there ain't no more. See one, play one. 1998, this low vision innovation: huge twenty-four inch board white rings circling each thumb-sized peg hole. That's a 80. II My uncle Bill came visiting. Sitting there by the fridge three weeks ago in November. Mother hunched on the company chair, Muff by the toaster, Daddy in the middle, and me perched on the stool. Muff brought me a war club. We passed it by the diamond willow handle admiring it and making jokes. Then Bill was talking ricing. Naming his poling partner, the lakes and rivers they paddled, telling how long they stayed out, how many pounds they harvested, where they slept each night. All those details the husk around a kernel. Do you ever just ache for something a sliver of beauty so tightly encased? Dance dance the rice. They had to come home early he said their car so small no room for another day another canoe bottom full 21 22 they had to come home while still he longed to go out. Bend and pound the rice. Eighty-three this year, he won't sell the rice. Next season he might not be able to go. And him with so many to support. All us rice relatives. Could he list us like dependents on his income tax? Never once made enough he laughs to pay taxes. Manoominike-giizis, ricing moon. He ended the rice talk then telling about a certain place pretty place down by Mille Lacs. It got dark early that day. They had to turn back at the narrows never got to rice the beds beds they knew were just there through the narrows just there on the next lake. "If! feel like I do now;' he said, "I'll go again." Winnow with your every' breath. My Auntie came that day. I gave her the stool passed her the war club. We were talkmg about birds now about the two great horned owls I kept stumbling upon last spring. I was sneaking up on one with my camera and baby behind me him imitating everything I did when we got within ten feet he took off running toward it yelling "Quack! quack! quack." For him every bird was still a duck. We all had bird stories to tell that morning in the time of the freezing moon while my hair was drying and I was drinkmg coffee and my little dying mother sat smiling beneath the teapot clock. Gashkadino-giizis. 23 ...