Writing Red by Charlotte Nekola

Author:Charlotte Nekola
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

Twentieth-Century Americanism

Lies have been told about this American blood

making it seem like laughter or like some animal

couched with a golden throat in the desert. Our roots

push apart the bones of an Indian’s skull. Arrowheads

strike fire and flint sparks out of us. These lies,

these Indian rivers, these arrowroot sweet waters

seething in the blue flag. We have not drunk these rivers,

we have not chewed and eaten this earth. These ghosts

do not walk in our veins with painted feet.

Come now all Americans

kiss and accept your city, the harsh mother,

New York, the clamor, the sweat, the heart of brown land,

the gold heart and the stone heart, the beast of American blood,

the cat stretching out before a borrowed fire

beside the steam heat, in apartment houses.

We are not the dark cheekbone of the Indian

and there are no painted feathers for our killing

which happens grimly, beside clapboard and raw steel.

We are not the stone ribs underneath Manhattan

but we come and go swiftly in the sick lights of subways;

men with narrow shoulders, children and women,

Italians, Jews, Greeks, Poles, and even Anglo-Saxons

all worn down to the thin common coin of the city.

And our minds are made after new electric models

and we have no proud ancestors.

(Lost, lost

the deerskin heritage, the pioneer musket,

barn dance, corn harvest, breakers of new soil.

Lost the great night and thin assertive song

up from the campfire, lynxes drinking the Hudson,

bobcat in Westchester. What fish swim Manhattan,

what clean and naked rivers? lost and lost

the homespun and the patchwork quilt, the bread

risen in the home oven and smelling new.

Do not claim this for us. We have the radio.

We have the cat and the tame fire.)

Beside

the bedroom window long trains ride,

the harsh lights come and go outside.

And our minds

and the minds of our children. Give us the World Series,

the ballplayer with thick nostrils and the loose jaw

hanging heavily from a piece of chewing gum,

and when the baseball is over give us no time;

fill our mind with the Rose Bowl and Yale and Notre Dame

leaving no time for thought between the baseball and football seasons.

Feed us music to rot the nerves, make us twitch with music,

burrow with music beneath the comfortless brain and beneath

the aching heart and the worn heart and beneath

the honest gut and rot the gut with music

in the snake of nerve that sits in the knee reflexes,

wriggle in the dust with the snake’s belly. All night

delight us with the yellow screaming of sound.

And give us

the smile, the glitter of rich houses, the glitter,

porcelain teeth and skin smoothed by diffused lighting,

(skin-cream, face-food, oil of Peruvian turtles

bright and grinning out of all the subway advertisements)

the dark movie house and old cigarette smoke

and the knee of the stranger sitting in the next chair.

If you close our burlesque houses, we will reopen them

and watch twelve hours long the one crude smile

and the same silk uncover the same thigh.

And from the film

borne home to bed with the familiar wife

weary and good, and burrowing into night

into her breast with the blind face of a child;

out from the bed to the familiar daylight

the invoice the slick glass desktop the worn counter

and madam these goods guaranteed not to stretch.

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