Runaway Dreams (2 page)

walking the line of the Winnipeg River

as it snakes northward out of the

rough and tangle of the Canadian Shield jutted

like a chin that holds Wabaseemoong

in its cleft and empties legends born

in its rapids and eddies of
Memegwaysiwuk

the Water Fairies out of the belly

of Lake of the Woods

he dreams himself

talking to all the things he passes

singing their names sometimes

in the Old Talk

he won't awaken to understand

still, it's dream he walks through

and when he puts his hand upon

the pictographs set into stone

the iron oxide, bear grease

and pigment mixed to seal them

forever just above the waterline

on a cliff with no name

he feels the pulse of them on his palm

the sure, quick heartbeat of a thing

alive and captured squarely

in time, and wakes to find

his hand upon your hip bone

in the dim moonlight the stars

winking in a kind jest at the window

he dreams himself into being

as the Old Ones said

he would

in the teachings he holds as close

as you to the centre of himself

I

The Injun in this poem is planting flowers

kneeling like an acolyte at prayer

holding fragile life in his palms and wonders

looking up and around at this land

he's come to occupy at fifty-five how

he might have come to this shining

morning falling over half an acre

of mountainside with a digger in his hand

easing begonias and geraniums into earth

that dirts his fingers browner than they were

before he stepped outdoors into the flush

of light dappled by trees

containing birdsong and

wind song

the Injun in this poem holds the earth

up to his face and breathes the

musk and fungal fragrance that tells

stories of rock beings crumbled down to sand

and plant beings who surrendered themselves

in the Long Ago Time to become this rich

exhilaration of time and history cupped

neatly in his hand before easing it back down

using his fingers as a blade

to crater out a home for a new plant being

to become a hint of the chant that sings beneath

this eternal tale

the Injun in this poem is a hunter gatherer

hunkered down beside a ring of rock

that might have been a fire pit before

a Medicine Wheel or a ceremonial fire

where Grandfather stone

could scorch the ancient teachings

into his heart and mind and soul and take

him back into primordial time when this land

was still tribal land and the teachings sang

in everything and the idea of planting flowers

was unknown, considered nothing that

a native man would do, had no

need to do, when Creation

offered everything

but the Injun in this poem is planting flowers

happily, feeling much like a creator himself

in giving life a chance to express itself

this earth around his fingers becoming sacred

by virtue of his belief in it, his faith

that the teachings and the spirit

reside within it and that teachings come

over time to transcend even time itself

so that planting flowers becomes an Injun thing

by virtue of the Injun doing it

and believing it so

II

They say we cast our stories on the skin of birch trees once,

etching them there with the sharpened edge of a burnt stick

or pigments formed of earth and rock and plant material

that has never faded over time. I saw a birch bark scroll once.

The old man laid it out for me on a table top and traced a

line of history with one arthritic finger, telling it in the Old

Talk that I didn't understand. But I could translate his eyes.

In those ancient symbols was a world beyond worlds, of

legends alive, of a cosmology represented in the spirit of

everything, of teachings built of principles, built themselves of

rock and leaf and tree, bird and moose and sky, and Trickster

spirits nimble as dreams cajoling the Anishinabeg outward

onto the land toward themselves, toward him, toward me.

This is what I understood from the wet glimmer of his eyes.

This is what I carried away to here, to this page, stark in its

blankness, waiting like me to be imagined, to be filled.

III

The Injun in this poem stands washing dishes

looking out across a wide expanse of lake

and mountain while the sound of friends gathered

in the room beyond bubbles over jazz, Dvorak or the blues

and laughter like wavelets breaking over rocks

he wonders how this came to be

these nights when community happens of itself

and belonging is a buoyant bell clanging

in the harbour, the cove, the channel of his being

the way to here was never charted beyond

a vague idea of what might be possible if he were

blessed on one hand and lucky on the other

he did everything he could to break the charm

and he can laugh at that now, the folly of believing

in what he could convince himself as real

the task of being Injun not including

the spell of that charm, the lure of the desire he could
never

state because he hadn't learned the language yet

and travelling incognito, silent as a thief

so that home was always the lighted path that led

off the sullen concrete of the streets and in the end

belonged to someone else, their lights

shining through the open windows where sounds

like those he hears behind him now came

to haunt him as he shuffled off into the night

the Injun in this poem nods to himself

wipes a bowl and sets it beside the other

dinner plates, the formal ones reserved for nights

like this that have no haunting overtones

“I'm from a nomadic culture after all,” he says and laughs

hooks the towel on the rack and turns

into the current and joins the bubbling voices

in a room that belongs to him now

the nomad in his solitude

carried dreams of home

IV

take

this

hand

extended

curl its fingers in your palm

whisper to me now

tell me that night must pass

V

Medicine burns when touched by fire. The smoke and scent

of it climbing higher, curling into the corners of the room

where you sit watching it, following it with your eyes and a

feeling like desire at your belly and a cry ready at your throat.

There's a point where smoke will disappear and the elders

say this is where the Old Ones wait to hear you, your petitions

and your prayers, the Spirit World where all things return to

balance and time is reduced to dream. It vanishes. There's

a silence more profound than any words you've ever heard

or read and when you close your eyes you feel the weight of

ancient hands upon your shoulders and your brow and this

sacred smoke comes to inhabit you and in its burn and

smoulder, a returning to the energy you were born in —

and the room is filled with you.

VI

The Injun in this poem is talking

he's telling stories culled from a lifetime of travel

between worlds, between realities and ways of being

he's telling tales of desperate moons when his living

was like the harshest tribal winters with the howl

of the wind and the deepest freeze just beyond

the thin skin of a wigwam in the snow

he's spinning yarns of plenty when life provided life

and all he ever had to do was breathe as it was when

the Animal People came to offer up their flesh and teachings

so the Anishinabeg might survive and

travel forward to their destiny

he's telling spirit stories born of rock and water, air and sky

legends handed down from generations passed

and held in the hand like keepsakes

worn and rounded at the edges from use

he's offering anecdotes of everyone he's ever met

on the road of years that led him to this point in time:

Cree, Dene, Blackfoot, Metis, Ojib and Sioux

Hungarian, Finnish, Scot, Australian

Brit, Québécois and Swede

they all left him something to trundle down the road

and sort through later in private moments like luggage

he's recounting episodes of the serial drama

life became when choice was predicated on escape

harrowing nights of desperation drinking

and mornings blunt as dull axes

the hard clop of them against his chest

and then suddenly he's laughing like hell, knee-slapping crazy

telling everyone who'll hear it the folly

of it all and how in the end he discovered

that discovering himself meant everything he just said

so that now he's sombre, still as the pool of the sky

reflecting on the stories of a life told in hushed tones

around a fire with friends who see him as a shadow

and a light, become a Trickster too, somehow,

a teacher gambolling at the edges where the flames lick

darkness away and stories are born in the stark

cool caverns of the heart, stalactites mysterious everywhere

yes, the Injun in this poem is talking as he'll talk for years

story upon story creating landscapes out of living

like the Old Ones carving
dodems
out of wood

with something he's come to recognize as love

I never thought that I would see myself lugging armloads

of wood through three feet of snow to pound my feet at the

door of a cabin in the mountains to step into the warmth

and crackle of a woodstove set in the corner of a living

room with a window overlooking a lake where the gray of a

February evening eases to a purple hung with stars. Never

thought I'd see that. But then again I never thought I'd see

myself banging nails and sawing wood, hanging pictures or

planting flowers. I'm a warrior for God's sake. These hands

are meant for fluting stone to points for arrows or for spears.

For hauling gill nets out of water so cold the knuckles won't

bend and for flaying back the skin of bear or moose or fighting

back incursions, invasions, threats. That's what warriors do.

Instead, I stand at the sink when dinner's done washing dishes,

preparing the morning coffee, wiping counters and the table

and making sure the dog gets fed. These rituals and small

ceremonies I've come to. I never thought I'd come to see me

looking at myself as something more than I have ever been or

acknowledging that there is even more to the territory of my

being than I have come to see so far. I'm older now and quiet

feels better on the bones than noise and the only fight in me

is the struggle to maintain it all, to keep it close to my chest, to

give me another heart to beat against the cold. Never thought

I'd see that. Never thought I'd welcome it. But these days the

land beckons like highways used to and I've learned to step

outside the door and be here, rooted to place, grounded,

anchored by words like love and home that drop from my

tongue like beads of light, shining, showing me the path to

our door even through the darkest night where I've learned

to listen to your breathing while you sleep. Touch you. Feel

your skin against my palm and sing an honour song to the

energy that wraps itself around us, surrounds us, protects us.

I'd carry the world to you like those armloads of wood, one

sure step at a time. That's what warriors do.