Raven Gets Meta by Laura Da’

from Tributaries

Raven’s making time in the public school system.
On the first day of instruction he forgets the syllabus,

improvises, tells the class a story about himself.
How, in his younger days, he was one of the many

who helped to stipple the night sky with light. Believe it,
or don’t. Many others presumed

to use the stars
to cast connect-the-dot sketches of their own likeness

onto the endlessly beckoning blackboard,
but he threw his lights

in a five-minutes-left-of-recess-heads-up frenzy.
Raven prefers his constellations wild

and that leads to tonight’s homework:
Sneak out of your beds.

Walk barefoot outside.
Look up. Raven smirks at the orange chairs left pushed out.

The personification of Raven as a public-school teacher is a great premise for a poem, and I appreciate the couplet structure as well as it gives the poem a quick moving momentum that matches the frenzied, wild perspective of the Raven who is working to undermine “scientific” understandings of the stars (everything has its one specific name) with a more chaotic, personal understanding.

Mid-semester, the administration calls Raven to the carpet
for a certain cavalier attitude

towards the test-prep curriculum. He slinks late
into the meeting, feathers rustling

at the Power Point projected on the bare west wall
assessing average reading scores

and annual measurable objectives.
Echoes come in from down the hall:

See the world in a grain of sand from the English classroom
and the science lab’s

butterfly flicker moving polar ice.
Raven’s been around the block, has wrapped talons

around stones so large
they made the cosmos.

I can’t help but repeat and revel in the sonic joy of “the administration calls Raven to the carpet / for a certain cavalier attitude // towards the test-prep curriculum,” and how it contrasts with the unpleasantness of the subject matter, almost like Raven is, through the language used, struggling to subvert and escape the administration.

Raven doesn’t give a shit
about his students making adequate yearly progress

on any standardized test.
But when asked to imagine seeing any one child contained

in the pixelated dot flicker on the bar graph
dancing across the projection screen,

a shrill caw
spirals up the length of him.

These tricksters.
Looking into galaxies and yearning for self-portraits.

The poem wraps up nicely by tying the constellations and stars to the pixels of the projector showing statistical averages of achievement, drawing back to that initial metaphor of the desire to use standardized measurements rather than taking joy in individual learning. The reference to the administration as “These trickers” by Raven (traditionally the trickster himself) is a nice touch, and I love the suggestion that they are really only interested in seeing reflections of their own achievements in the students rather than truly opening them up to the wonder and beauty of the world around them.

Poor Lazarus Shale by Laura Da’

Some of the themes from my previous write-up of Five Songs for Lazarus Shale provide a helpful backdrop to this post.

from Tributaries

Live long enough
and salt pork, beans,
yearling colts, honey and butter,
something will turn into a wedge
to bend your will.

Missionaries call for my sons to send off to school,
each season when the corn is green.
I tuck them into the rows
farthest to the north of my cabin.
Keep them busy with the threshing as I whisper
their true names into the ears we consume,
but I leave a path to them
like a snake
by slithering away through the sparse harvest.

Frost breaks under my mare’s hooves
when I ride to sign my name at the Neosho mission.
My sons and nephews
traded to industrial school in the north
for the release of seven barrels of winter rations.

This commerce—
makes me brother to dragons, companion to owls.

The themes of the corn as a reflection of the well-being of the people who cultivate it and the subject of names and naming continue into Poor Lazarus. This poem (like the previous one) is part of the second section of this book which is all about the period of removal.

The narrator in this poem is clearly conflicted between his desire to “tuck [his sons] away” while holding onto “their true names” whispering them “into the ears [of corn] we consume” and with the “wedge / to bend [his will]” that the “sparse harvest” increasingly creates. He compares himself to a snake, dragons, and owls in his decision to trade his sons and nephews “to the industrial school in the north / for the release of seven barrels of winter rations.”

I like the way that the poem uses the indention to specifically call attention to the narrator’s actions and feelings that move towards this trade vs. the purely descriptive language that is without indention.

The line about commerce also represents a significant typographically break from the form of the previous stanzas calling attention to the line and creatin a pivot point from which the rest of the poem moves onto the narrator’s mental state after making the trade:

Riding away from the mission,
I call to my sister’s youngest child,
the only one
still too young for school,
Come over here and ride with your old uncle.

The boy clambers up behind me,
bare toe notched into the girth for warmth and purchase.
My boots quiver along the sides of the horse’s flanks
as I endeavor to slip them into the stirrups
that frame the ground below in jerky patches.

Child, I keep repeating. Nephew.
The horse dances nervously,
sensing my frenzy.
To his credit,
the boy
keeps a steady hand on the reins.

The “jerky”, “[nervous]”, “frenzy” of the narrator’s relationship to his horse does an excellent job of conveying the mental anguish that he is suffering having traded away his children to the Indian School for rations, but I’m not entirely sure what to make of the strong image of the younger child and his stability.

I’m also not sure what to think of the title and who Lazarus is supposed to be in this poem (the narrator? one of the children sent to the Indian School? or the boy who is too young to go?), but I like the ambiguity as it emphasizes the generational nature of this kind of trauma. One of the ways it’s probably passed down is in situations like the one described in the end of this poem where a child too young to go to school is faced with the task of stabilizing and supporting his elders rather than the other way around (perhaps part of the reason for that final image?).

Five Songs for Lazarus Shale by Laura Da’

As a word of pretext, I’ve decided that reviewing books of poetry really does disservice to the poetry, so I am attempting a correction by reviewing individual poems.

from Tributaries

“It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlement is approaching to a happy consummation.”

— President Andrew Jackson, 1830

1.
There was a word for village
that meant all at once:
perfect home
perfect man
all human systems working in harmony.
A Shawnee village was a good genius society.
Names were to be guarded.

First memory:
clambering onto a horse
toes splayed for purchase
peering over the swayed back
at a curving glimmer of tributaries.
Listing rows of corn as far as the eye could travel.

I love this initial description of the nature of the village’s “good genius society” contrasted with the turn to “Names were to be guarded.” since in a way the first stanza is opening up the name “village” and what it means to the speaker of the poem. The invocation of memory here is important as the tension between the land pre- and post-colonization, as is corn which seems to act as a bit of a stand in for the land and the culture and identity of the indigenous inhabitants.

We’ll also assume here that the “curving glimmer of tributaries” (I <3 “curving glimmer”) of the land give this book its title, so I may refer back to this poem assuming I write about more from this book (likey, as I’m really enjoying this book!).

2.
Running on spindly legs
and speaking in a bubbling rush of Shawnee
the boy fled through can breaks
when the Indian Agent called.

A child’s arrow ripped with a gar’s fin
pointed to the eddy.

In the wilted moon,
the Quakers gave him the name.
Bible held hovering out of reach
as he grasped at the inked picture
of a man shouldering out of a stone tomb.

The agent sat in the back pew, sniffing the end of a quill,
a slim flask of ink between his knees.
wet trail of letters on the ledger: Lazarus Shale.

I had no idea what a gar was when I read this, so I figured that I might not be the only one.

I love the “spindly legs” and “bubbling rush of Shanee” here. Capitalization of the “Indian Agent” (unnamed and largely undescribed except for the brilliant “sniffing the end of a quill” image that paints him as potentially trying to intoxicate himself on the smell of the ink) works to invoke the force of the state rather than the work of an individual. The same with “the Quakers” who also are brought up in relation to “the inked picture”. The multiple references to ink reinforce the conception of Western reliance on written edicts and legality strip this child of their identity and produce the new one of Lazarus Shale, the official identity of the person on “the ledger”.

The first stanza suggests names needed to be guarded, but in this stanza “the Quakers” and the “Indian Agent” are guarding names using ink. Guarding identity.

3.
Tawny coffee beans, bolts of calico, molasses,
rations passed out the back door.
Speculation at the trading post
on the topic of removal:
Lewistown first, then Lima village
Hog Creek on down the curve of the river to Wapakoneta.

Sap moon cold.
Traders walking foundered horses over coals
anticipating army requestions.

Lazarus tracing letters in the ash,
his aunt stitching rounded meadow flowers onto doe skin:
pumpkin yellow, greasy blue and green, white-heart red beads.
The baby waking every so often to press a few grains into her chubby fingertips.
Tallow flicker across their mother.

Why, Sister, you’re beading in the old style.

In the rafters,
her fingers turning back to unbraiding.
The family’s dried corn falling in dusty ropes.

The sonic movements of the first two lines of this poem deserve extra special attention, so I recommended reading them aloud if you haven’t already. Here they are again:

Tawny coffee beans, bolts of calico, molasses,
rations passed out the back door.

Bringing back our theme around names… notice that the speaker follows the word “removal” with a list of formal names (perhaps from the “map” which is another version of the “ledger”). Meanwhile, Lazarus is forming his own words in the ash, writing words that will disappear in the wind.

His aunt is stitching a map in colors, and the “old style” is invoked here, mirror the question of memory and time (from what perspective is the speaker speaking? personal memory? imaginative memory? a person alive at the time?).

The conditions that Lazarus and his aunt are living under, their relationship to the army here to remove people like them from their land is not specified directly but invoked through the corn as “falling in dusty ropes”.

4.
Journeying cake.

In the morning,
Quakers pressed wrapped suppers into their hands,
reading from the Book of Ruth over the noise of the muster.

Generic native ash-caked baked in an open fire

Dig under the crust to find the varieties of corn
in the charred fields of Wapakoneta:
dent
flint
Boone County White
Bloody Butcher

Journeying cake Shawnee cake or every man’s cake becoming jonny or johnny cake.

Walking away, south along the Scioto
looking back often
Vivid shoots of green corn
rippling along the trail in a delicate commotion.
Fingers bent against the leather satchel
pinching at grains of corn bread.
Lazarus, who else could tell his story?

Naming invoked again and again here, emphasized by the italics. The types of corn destroyed by, presumably, the army’s burning of fields (a tactic used during removal to starve indigenous people and force them to leave their land) paralleled with the transformation in name through appropriation of a “Generic native ash-caked baked in an open fire”.

The question of who the narrator is and their relation to Lazarus is specifically invoked by the final line of this section. The “Vivid green shoots of corn” that “[ripple along the trail in a delicate commotion.” are a stark contrast against the “charred fields of Wapakoneta” suggesting that the speaker is revisiting the place where Lazarus lived once and the poem itself is engaged in an act of remembering him, perhaps conjuring his memory by “pinching at grains of corn bread.”

5.
In Shawnee tradition
one is cautioned to cross a river
quickly, without looking down
to tempt swift creatures
ready to rend the body in riparian embrace.
Underwater panthers.
Left to ponder such beings,
the mind balks.
Mad River.
Scioto.
Great and Little Miami.

Shawnee translations of the rivers of Wapakoneta.
Auglaize River: the falling timbers of the river.
Blanchard’s For of the Auglaize: claws in the water.

The final section ties up the poem nicely by, in a variety of different ways, naming those tributaries that give the book its title, that feed the corn, that invoke the memory of Lazarus, and that hold in them a spectral violence the likes of which the speaker undoubtedly senses the land holds today from the legacy of removal and colonization.