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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23.2 (2002) 150-151



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The Symptoms; Creation Story

Gloria Bird


The Symptoms

Riding the back roads from the reservation home, all senses are keyed in like the raging river that wipes the skin off this town. More vulnerable than usual these days, the ordinary taxes memory. I wander aisles in grocery stores, no interest in food for days on end, bring home the wrong things. When the pumpkin orange moon rose full bloom yesterday, I broke. Now, bright things catch my eye. I refuse to remain grounded in my body and spook even my children. What burns up phone lines reduces communication to soft moans. I pray to any god I think will listen, the word god of sleeping poets, god of love-sweated sheets, god of soap lather. I become slave to unnamed deserts, thrive despite the lack of rain. Every morning I awake in heat, crawl on all fours to the precipice. Spiraling downward, my past is destroyed like hunkering sacrifice, snuffed out.

I rise on cue to a nomadic pulse, know for certain nothing remains static in a world where humans dream. I watch the stars reform into different sets of constellations the results of which has not yet been discovered as the link to fools who commit mass suicide world wide, or the simple bond of love that defies distance and crystallizes in the world whole and fully formed. I speak in secret language to my distant lover whose whispers configure the walls of this fevered house. [End Page 150]

 

Creation Story

I awaken in shadowed morning of early winter within the yearning of unseasonal rain, thoughts of you peering from the edge of a dim cave. The question is will you come down, will you bend before a woman who dreams you seated in the heart of love? Today, I am unreasonable and need driven, sweetheart, please forgive me. When the musky scent rises from the heated body, I know it is the rhythm of love's desperation that sears us apart, and that only the body's affirmation can pull the broken pieces back together again. And that for me, I say, only your soft words can soothe the frenzy of my new salt sickness. Then it happens. You materialize in the wasted room, cover me like skin. Oh baby, this is the end of the reasoning world, a psychic break, and the thousand rigid miles between sense and losing it for good mean nothing. The ancestral memory flows in your veins where small things must be scratched from the surface of cracked earth. Mine is mountainous timberland overrun with wildlife. Together we must find safe ground from both famine and profusion, build our house of balance in the tilted world where even the smoldering fragments will burn red in the eye of god.

 



Gloria Bird (Spokane) is the author of Full Moon on the Reservation(1993) and The River of History (1997), for which she won the Diane Decorah First Book Award. She coedited Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America(1997) with Joy Harjo. She is an associate editor for the Wicazo Sa Reviewin which some of her critical work has appeared. Ms.Bird serves on the board of Wakiknabe Theater Company of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She lives and works on the Spokane Indian reservation in Washington state.

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