Runaway Dreams (12 page)

They say he learned to play by ear and that by the time he

made it to Minton's he was shellacking the keys with his whole

body as though the fingers splayed in gigantic stretches were

extensions of the spirit he pushed across the room, over the

tables, up to the rafters and down again to explode in the

souls of the ones lucky enough to hear him then. He was a

bear of a man, a grizzled veteran of the road, so that when he

laid down a note it meant more than the timbre of it against

the night, the room, the crowd, it meant a thousand nights

walking alone through darkened streets with shards of sound

borne down from streetlamps, up from the desolate alleys and

sluiced down the gutters and out to the black current of the

river to the sea where jazz is born in the tempest of things

and the toss and tide of fate made manifest in cigar smoke

and whiskey and seven octaves alive in the hands of a genius

who brooked no falsehood in notes or life. Monk played with

his whole body. You could hear that. He played every note in

sheer amazement of the one he'd played before. So that the

cascade of runs made that keyboard sound eighteen feet long

and standing looking out from the window at the shadow of

the mountains in the darkness, Monk, dead as hell for almost

thirty years, reaches out behind you and fills the corners of

the room with sound. Awesome, you think to be touched this

way and jazz becomes an Ojibway thing by virtue of the blues

built into it and the feeling of the moan of a song caught in

the throat and begging release to the land where all things

are born and all things return in the end and the belief we

hold that it can save us, the song spilled out upon the land.

Jazz and soul and hope and harmony and all things Ojibway

becoming one at once, everything alternating a semitone

apart, until the last note fades and you stand there in your

lack, waiting . . .

Great beards of air

moving slow

stretching as if tugged

by a child's hands

introducing trees

limb by limb

and crows placed

neatly along the power line

like a string of beads

hung around the neck

of the mountain

nothing but the air moves

until the sun intrudes

from the east

to show the deer

watching you from the trees

at the end of the driveway

the smoke of her breath

joined to the fog

leaving

no one ever pulled up

to heaven with a U-Haul

someone told you that once

and if you laughed about it then

here you come to understand

the utter sense of it

that this mosaic of things

the bits and pieces

of this life that move

you so

are what you carry with you

when you go

spirit lives in everything

there are no departures

only another joining

There's a wind from the southeast pushing

waves up to the edge of the beach

where you can see the full moon hanging

behind a bank of clouds set between

the humped shoulders of mountains

everything is indigo now

even the shadows have retreated to purple

as the silvered mercury of the moon

puts a sheen on the body of the lake

if you look long enough the motion

of the water makes it look as though

the moon were moving, drifting further

away across the depths of space

with the planet giving chase until

you come to feel yourself move

so you spread your arms and close

your eyes to feel the tractive tug of it

calling you forward outward beyond

all sense of where you are until

a part of you becomes moonbeam, star

dust, nebula and the tail of a comet maybe

and you laugh to feel that

it's not very Indian you say

to let yourself escape like this

to wander out across the universe

when all your issues are here on the planet

land claims, treaty rights, the clamour for a

place at the negotiating table on things

that affect us and dammit all Wagamese

there's people starving in Pikangikum

and eighteen people share a two-room house

without a proper toilet in Atawapiskat

and there's kids surrendering to gang life

glue and solvents and their parents

are drunk and can't give a damn

because the chief ran off with a few

hundred grand of the fiscal funding

in the new pickup truck he bought

his nephew's vote with who won't need

it until he gets out of jail anyway

and there's no one watching out

for shit like that even though it happens

everywhere and the people pay the price

as in the suicide rate that still hangs high

above the national average

(though why they even have a stat for that

boggles you at the best of times)

when you open your eyes there's

nothing before you but the land

and in its absolute stillness

there's the sound of wind on water

and as you push to hear it you discover

that you have to really want to

it doesn't just come to you

you have to crave it, yearn for it

ache for the luxuriant whisper that says

harmony happens on its own here

when you come to believe that it fills you

and you become beach and wave and lake

and mountains humped against the semi-dark

and a moon that sails across the sky like hope

another thing you have to really want

in order for it to happen

in the end it's as Indian as it gets

this reaching out to feel connected to imagine

becoming a part of things displaced

from you by issues and bothers and hurt

the Old Ones say that harmony and separation

cannot occur in the same time and place

and maybe that's it

this whole native issues thing

that you ultimately become

what you believe in most

even a planet chasing a moon

across time and space

The lake exhales a jubilant mist that carries

within it the desperate calls of loons

making preparations to wing south

and there's a bear ambled down

to drink and eye the yards hewn

from mountainside lush with blackberry

late season saskatoons and the trashcan

someone left the lid ajar upon

as an eagle cuts a slice out of the sky

then gives way to the osprey clan

hungry for trout and the muskrat who

claimed a home beneath your friend's dock

noses an expanding vee into the water

placid with chill and the feel of the

mist rising slowly above it all

like silent applause and the eagle

flies into the sun rising in a blunt

cleft between the ribs of

mountains

for the longest time I didn't know

that such a place existed

couldn't believe really

that it could even be imagined

let alone allow me to stand here

at this window with a mug looking

over it all stunned into believing

suddenly that beauty exists somewhere

beyond the vague hope you carry

that you can change the world

with words

you can't really

in the end it's just you

that you adjust to fit the situation

and mornings like this remind you

that ugliness has a reservation

to sit all churlish and smug

waiting for you to disbelieve

but you can't, not now

not after finding the way

this all sits between your ribs beating

like a second heart

calling you from the window

to the desk where you'll sit

and peck away like a frantic rooster

for the words to lift the sun

back into the sky and call September forward

because it's not really fall

when it elevates you so

Seventeen without a clue. Wandering like a tourist in my own

life, picking up whatever I thought might fit, might flesh me

out, give me meaning, when the old Indian across the table at

the Mission asked through a mouthful of thin stew and bread,

“What's with all the white shit?” Then in stir, six months for

stupidity, the native guy with braids and a “
today is a good day

to die
” tattoo above his heart leans on the bars of my cage,

studies my row of books and asks, “What's with all the white

shit?” Then, the girl I wanted so much to love, long flowing

black hair, angular face, obsidian eyes and a name like Rain

Cloud Woman in her Cree talk, wanders about my room

picking up the trinkets and the stuff, eyeing it like relics,

squints at the Beethoven records and the Judy Chicago print

on the wall, looks at me and laughs and asks, “What's with

all the white shit?” They cut me, those words. Sliced clean to

the bone, through the fat and gristle of the world to lay open

the glistening bone of fact and I studied my brown face in

the mirror in the hard yellow slant of the morning sun.

“What
is
with all this white shit?” I asked myself. And that's

when I turned Indian. That's when I became a born-again

pagan/heathen/savage, dancing, singing, turquoise- and

buckskin-wearing, chanting, drumming, guttural, stoic, hand-

sign talking, long haired, feather wearing, walking-talking

iconographic representation of the people, man. There was

no room in that for any white shit. But I was young then and

hadn't heard the voices and the teachings of my people and

hadn't turned my heart to truth. It would take some doing.

It would take some isolation and the loneliness that false

pride instills and it would take a desperate reaching out to

belong somewhere, anywhere, with anyone. Three decades

later I have seen some serious shit, man, and life is all

about the truth of things. So I sit drinking coffee on a deck

overlooking a mountain lake in a community of white folk,

surrounded by computers, a TV, music, books, a pickup

truck, a car, guitar, piano, appliances, conveniences and

responsibilities. But there's an Indian at the heart of me.

I feel him here where the crows speak Ojibway, where the

breeze carries hints of old songs sung around a fire in the

night, where a hint of sage in the air shows me the line where

ancient and contemporary meet, telling me that traditional

and cultural, in the end, becomes where you live, where you

set your soul to rest and I look around at fifty-five and see that

where I am is always where I wanted to be. Life has become

a ceremony and The Indian sans beads, sans feathers, sans

get-ups and trickery surrounded by white shit and glad of it.