A Map to the Next World by Joy Harjo

Author:Joy Harjo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Returning from the Enemy

for my father

1.

It’s time to begin. I know it and have dreaded the knot of memory as it unwinds in my gut.

Behind me the river is steady and laps the jetty. Winds purr through the grass.

The wake of history is a dragline behind me. I am linked to my father, my son, my daughter. We are relatives of deep water.

Even the ghost crab disappearing into white gravel cannot escape the weight. The clacking of his joints makes a staccato against the danger.

Even a friend beside me in this perilous part of the journey stumbles on the slick of knowledge.

And the enemy who pressed guns to our heads to force us to Oklahoma still walks in the mind of the people.

But I hear relatives’ voices in the wind as we gather for the reckoning. I carry fire in my hands to the edge of the water.

And continue to believe we will make it through the bloodstream to the ceremony for returning from the enemy.

It’s easy to respect our ancestors. They are not fully present here with all their flaws, though some have perfected knowledge and can walk back and forth through the walls of fire and history. They will not save us from ourselves, though they can manuever the pattern and allow meaning to emerge from the dark. When my father remembered he was descended from leaders he was ashamed he had hit his wife, his baby. When I was the baby I did not know my father as a warrior. I knew him as an intimate in whose face I recognized myself.

2.

In the flickering mirror of time all events quiver in layers.

Each tree, each trigger of grass,

each small and large wave of water will reveal the raw story.

We climb and keep climbing, our children

wrapped in smallpox blankets to keep

them warm. Spider shows us how to weave

a sticky pattern from the muddy curses of our enemy

to get us safely to the Milky Way.

We had to leave our homes behind us,

just as we were left behind by progress.

We do not want your version of progress.

There are other versions, says Spider who does not consider making webs

to sell to the highest bidder

but keeps weaving and thinking

and including us in the story.

And so my spirit began traveling in the dark before I learned to walk upon the earth that circles so precisely around the sun. This was part of the ritual of becoming human though many had forgotten the reason for being here, and how we influence the shape of the path with our thinking, our speaking and our songs. I was taken through many worlds so that I would remember that this world was not the largest or the most impressive and that it was often the most difficult because those here were prone to violence and forgetfulness. My father wanted to fly but had stopped trying after he was sent as a child to military school in Ponca City. So I was on my own while he partied up and down the green coast of Tulsa, his wings dragging in the parking lots after closing time.

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