Postcolonial Love Poem

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POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM

Also by Natalie Diaz

When My Brother Was an Aztec

POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM

NATALIE DIAZ

GRAYWOLF PRESS

Copyright © 2020 by Natalie Diaz

The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the McKnight Foundation, Target, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64445-014-7

Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-113-7

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2020

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933473

Cover design: Mary Austin Speaker

Cover photos: Natalie Diaz

Contents

Postcolonial Love Poem

Blood-Light

These Hands, If Not Gods

Catching Copper

From the Desire Field

Manhattan Is a Lenape Word

American Arithmetic

They Don’t Love You Like I Love You

Skin-Light

Run’n’Gun

Asterion’s Lament

Like Church

Wolf OR-7

Ink-Light

The Mustangs

Ode to the Beloved’s Hips

Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good at Basketball

That Which Cannot Be Stilled

The First Water Is the Body

I, Minotaur

It Was the Animals

How the Milky Way Was Made

exhibits from The American Water Museum

Isn’t the Air Also a Body, Moving?

Cranes, Mafiosos, and a Polaroid Camera

The Cure for Melancholy Is to Take the Horn

Waist and Sway

If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert

Snake-Light

My Brother, My Wound

Grief Work

I am singing a song that can only be born

after losing a country.

JOY HARJO

Postcolonial Love Poem

I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite,

can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this

when the war ended. The war ended

depending on which war you mean: those we started,

before those, millennia ago and onward,

those which started me, which I lost and won—

these ever-blooming wounds.

I was built by wage. So I wage love and worse—

always another campaign to march across

a desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skin

settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast.

I dismount my dark horse, bend to you there, deliver you

the hard pull of all my thirsts—

I learned Drink in a country of drought.

We pleasure to hurt, leave marks

the size of stones—each a cabochon polished

by our mouths. I, your lapidary, your lapidary wheel

turning—green mottled red—

the jaspers of our desires.

There are wildflowers in my desert

which take up to twenty years to bloom.

The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand

until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them

in its copper current, opens them with memory—

they remember what their god whispered

into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.

Where your hands have been are diamonds

on my shoulders, down my back, thighs—

I am your culebra.

I am in the dirt for you.

Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous,

two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash

before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood—

the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea.

Arise the wild heliotrope, scorpion weed,

blue phacelia which hold purple the way a throat can hold

the shape of any great hand—

Great hands is what she called mine.

The rain will eventually come, or not.

Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds—

the war never ended and somehow begins again.

We admitted that we were human beings

and melted for love in this desert.

MAHMOUD DARWISH

Blood-Light

My brother has a knife in his hand.

He has decided to stab my father.

This could be a story from the Bible,

if it wasn’t already a story about stars.

I weep alacranes—the scorpions clatter

to the floor like yellow metallic scissors.

They land upside down on their backs and eyes,

but writhe and flip to their segmented bellies.

My brother has forgotten to wear shoes again.

My scorpions circle him, whip at his heels.

In them is what stings in me—

it brings my brother to the ground.

He rises, still holding the knife.

My father ran out of the house,

down the street, crying like a lamplighter—

but nobody turned their lights on. It is dark.

The only light left is in the scorpions—

there is a small light left in the knife too.

My brother now wants to give me the knife.

Some might say, My brother wants to stab me.

He tries to pass it to me—like it is a good thing.

Like, Don’t you want a little light in your belly?

Like the way Orion and Scorpius—

across all that black night—pass the sun.

My brother loosens his mouth—

between his teeth, throbbing red Antares.

One way to open a body to the stars, with a knife.

One way to love a sister, help her bleed light.

These Hands, If Not Gods

Haven’t they moved like rivers—

like glory, like light—

over the seven days of your body?

And wasn’t that good?

Them at your hips—

isn’t this what God felt when he pressed together

the first Beloved: Everything.

Fever. Vapor. Atman. Pulsus.

Finally, a sin worth hurting for, a fervor,

a sweet—You are mine.

It is hard not to have faith in this:

from the blue-brown clay of night

these two potters crushed and smoothed you

into being—grind, then curve—built your form up—

atlas of bone, fields of muscle,

one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale,

both morning and evening.

O, the beautiful making they do,

of trigger and carve, suffering and stars.

Aren’t they, too, the carpenters

of your small church? Have they not burned

on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread

of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,

to nectareous feast?

Haven’t they riveted your wrists, haven’t they

had you at your knees?

And when these hands touched your throat,

showed you how to take the apple and the rib,

how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all,

didn’t you sing out their ninety-nine names—

Zahir, Aleph, hands-times-seven,

Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura,

Rubidium, August, and September—

and when you cried out, O, Prometheans,

didn’t they bring fire?

These hands, if not gods, then why

when you have come to me, and I have returned you

to that from which you came—white mud, mica, mineral, salt—

why then do you whisper, O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.

My Hundred-Handed One?

Catching Copper

My brothers have

a bullet.

They keep their bullet

on a leash shiny

as a whip of blood.

My brothers walk their bullet

with a limp—a clipped

hip bone.

My brothers’ bullet

is a math-head, is all geometry,

from a distance is just a bee

and its sting. Like a bee—

you should see my brothers’ bullet

make a comb, by chewing holes

in what is sweet.

My brothers lose

their bullet all the time—

when their bullet takes off on them,

their bullet leaves a hole.

My brothers search their houses,

their bodies for their bullet,

and a little red ghost moans.

Eventually, my brothers call out,

Here, bullet, here—

their bullet comes running, buzzing.

Their bullet always comes

back to them. When their bullet comes

back to them, their bullet

leaves a hole.

My brothers are too slow

for their bullet

because their bullet is in a hurry

and wants to get the lead out.

My brothers’ bullet is dressed

for a red carpet

in a copper jacket.

My brothers tell their bullet,

Careful you don’t hurt somebody

with all that flash.

My brothers kiss their bullet

in a dark cul-de-sac, in front

of the corner-store ice machine,

in the passenger seat of their car,

on a strobe-lighted dance floor.

My brothers’ bullet

kisses them back.

My brothers break and dance

for their bullet—the jerk,

the stanky leg. They pop, lock

and drop for their bullet,

a move that has them writhing

on the ground.

The worm, my brothers call it.

My brothers go all-worm

for their bullet.

My brothers’ bullet is registered,

is a bullet of letters—has a PD,

a CIB, a GSW, if they are lucky

an EMT, if not, a Triple 9, a DNR,

a DOA.

My brothers never call the cops

on their bullet and instead pledge

allegiance to their bullet

with hands over their hearts

and stomachs and throats.

My brothers say they would die

for their bullet. If my brothers die,

their bullet would be lost.

If my brothers die,

there’s no bullet to begin with—

the bullet is for living brothers.

My brothers’ feed their bullet

the way the bulls fed Zeus—

burning, on a pyre, their own

thigh bones wrapped in fat.

My brothers take a knee, bow

against the asphalt, prostrate

on the concrete for their bullet.

We wouldn’t go so far

as to call our bullet

a prophet, my brothers say.

But my brothers’ bullet

is always lit like a night-church.

It makes my brothers holy.

You could say my brothers’ bullet

cleans them—the way red ants

wash the empty white bowl

of a dead coyote’s eye socket.

Yes, my brothers’ bullet

cleans them, makes them

ready for God.

From the Desire Field

I don’t call it sleep anymore.

I’ll risk losing something new instead—

like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose.

But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing—

a wonder, a grief, or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined

fruit to unfasten from,

despite my trembling.

Let me call my anxiety, desire, then.

Let me call it, a garden.

Maybe this is what Lorca meant

when he said, verde que te quiero verde—

because when the shade of night comes,

I am a field of it, of any worry ready to flower in my chest.

My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused,

hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion

beneath the hip and plow of my lover,

then I am another night wandering the desire field—

bewildered in its low green glow,

belling the meadow between midnight and morning.

Insomnia is like spring that way—surprising

and many petaled,

the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow.

I am struck in the witched hours of want—

I want her green life. Her inside me

in a green hour I can’t stop.

Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth

green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending.

Green moving green, moving.

Fast as that, this is how it happens—

soy una sonámbula.

And even though you said today you felt better,

and it is so late in this poem, is it okay to be clear,

to say, I don’t feel good,

to ask you to tell me a story

about the sweetgrass you planted—and tell it again

or again—

until I can smell its sweet smoke,

leave this thrashed field, and be smooth.

Manhattan Is a Lenape Word

It is December and we must be brave.

The ambulance’s rose of light

blooming against the window.

Its single siren-cry: Help me.

A silk-red shadow unbolting like water

through the orchard of her thigh.

Her, come—in the green night, a lion.

I sleep her bees with my mouth of smoke,

dip honey with my hands stung sweet

on the darksome hive.

Out of the eater I eat. Meaning,

She is mine, colony.

The things I know aren’t easy:

I’m the only Native American

on the 8th floor of this hotel or any,

looking out any window

of a turn-of-the-century building

in Manhattan.

Manhattan is a Lenape word.

Even a watch must be wound.

How can a century or a heart turn

if nobody asks, Where have all

the Natives gone?

If you are where you are, then where

are those who are not here? Not here.

Which is why in this city I have

many lovers. All my loves

are reparations loves.

What is loneliness if not unimaginable

light and measured in lumens—

an electric bill which must be paid,

a taxi cab floating across three lanes

with its lamp lit, gold in wanting.

At 2 a.m. everyone in New York City

is empty and asking for someone.

Again, the siren’s same wide note:

Help me. Meaning, I have a gift

and it is my body, made two-handed

of gods and bronze.

She says, You make me feel

like lightning. I say, I don’t ever

want to make you feel that white.

It’s too late—I can’t stop seeing

her bones. I’m counting the carpals,

metacarpals of her hand inside me.

One bone, the lunate bone, is named

for its crescent outline. Lunatus. Luna.

Some nights she rises like that in me,

like trouble—a slow luminous flux.

The streetlamp beckons the lonely

coyote wandering West 29th Street

by offering its long wrist of light.

The coyote answers by lifting its head

and crying stars.

Somewhere far from New York City,

an American drone finds then loves

a body—the radiant nectar it seeks

through great darkness—makes

a candle-hour of it, and burns

gently along it, like American touch,

an unbearable heat.

The siren song returns in me,

I sing it across her throat: Am I

what I love? Is this the glittering world

I’ve been begging for?

American Arithmetic

Native Americans make up less than

1 percent of the population of America.

0.8 percent of 100 percent.

O, mine efficient country.

I do not remember the days before America—

I do not remember the days when we were all here.

Police kill Native Americans more