The Minor Odyssey of Lollie Heronfeathers Singer Read online

  (Lollie meets resistance to her quest)

  “Sit with me, mother,”

  He said

  “Before you go off to gather ghosts

  Before you try to hide your pain

  In miles

  From us.”

  “I’ve been still too long,” I said

  “Too many night, too many lifetimes

  At a kitchen table

  Wondering who was wrong

  And who had closed

  So many old doors in my life”

  “How can you not imagine this will not end

  In a thirty-dollar motel room

  Watching some all-night news

  A thousand miles further

  From your only son?

  Stay here. With us.”

  Yes, I thought, and

  Too soon I will be

  Last summer’s waves

  On last summer’s shores

  Last week’s sunlight

  On a garden wall

  Yesterday’s child

  Dancing in the rain

  “There are too many cobwebs upstairs,” I said, getting up

  “There are too many moldy boxes in dusty rooms

  I’ll send you a postcard.”

  Not Because

  (Lollie likes to think she has a wild and impulsive streak)

  Not because I promised myself

  Last winter, kicking snow off the car

  Not because I told myself I would

  When summer's heat was gone

  Not because of what I almost told

  My son’s wife on Tuesday

  Or because the verandah needs shingles

  And the garden should be turned over soon

  Maybe because the prices of apples

  Is less than the round of donuts

  And the sound of small birds

  Is soft, like melted copper drops

  Maybe I’m skipping out of this tame town

  Only because the road map was free

  This September day is warm, the tires a bit worn

  And the aspens such a darling shade of yellow.

  Part 2: Loon Lake

  Here Lollie arrives in Loon Lake, a small northern Ontario community near a Cree reserve. She’s at a loss as to what to do next, but fortunately, meets Tom Small Wolf. Tom’s returning to his native roots as a First Nations person. Tom introduces her to his native religion and offers to show her some petroglyphs during an overnight canoe trip. Lollie accepts. It’s a beginning.)

  I Think I Might Have Changed My Mind About the Whole Thing

  (Lollie prepares to meet her first natives in Northern Ontario)

  I like to think my ancestors were terrified to move

  out onto the plains

  I was petrified just getting out of my car

  In Loon Lake.

  Minnehaha

  (Lollie approaches her first native person, a woman behind a counter in a reserve crafts store)

  “Can I help you?” she asked

  Tan skin, dark hair behind the counter

  I hesitated, my light brown hair

  Out of place, out of place

  “One of my ancestors,” I said

  Looking at the moose mitts

  “Was a Cree.”

  “Ah,” she said, unsmiling

  In the August heat.

  “An Indian princess, of course?”

  “Minnehaha,” I said,

  “Laughing Water.”

  “We remember her well

  In our legends. She married

  Chief Maxihaha.”

  “Why yes! Her son,

  Medihaha, my great grandfather

  Was a famous warrior.”

  “Would you like to buy a dreamcatcher?” she asked

  “In honor of your native roots?”

  “Got one,” I said. “Real good one.

  Made in China.”

  “Best kind. Be good Injuns,

  Them Chinese, soon as

  We get them civilized.

  Moose mitts? Scalps? Lucky bookmarks?”

  “Moose mitts,” I said

  “Good idea. You never know:

  It might get cold.”

  She wrapped them carefully.

  An owl hooted once in broad daylight.

  We both paused to listen

  For the second call.

  Landfall

  (Lollie Meets Tom Small Wolf in a beer parlor in Northern Ontario)

  I am the lost child

  Of present time

  Arrived in a harbour

  Of strangers

  A million drops of salt water

  Have washed me here

  I order a coke and fries

  Sit at a corner table

  Don’t watch a roomful of

  Dark-haired men who

  Don’t watch me, carefully.

  This sense of shore

  I knew it would come to this

  They told me it would

  My retreat

  Is sudden but

  Blocked by a guy

  Offering me a beer

  It isn’t wings, but

  There’s only the sea behind me

  “Of course,” I said.

  Travel

  (Lollie has a few words with Tom over a Molson’s draft)

  I asked him if he’d traveled much

  he took out eight smooth rocks

  put them in a circle

  laid sweetgrass on them

  pointed

  “to the ends

  of the universe.

  And you?”

  I showed him the sticker

  On my camera bag.

  “Disney World.”

  He nodded, smiled:

  “Space Mountain’s pretty good.”

  Jerusalem

  (Tom Small Wolf tells Lollie about his religion)

  So you’re

  Returning to the old religions?

  Are you leaving

  The Good Book

  The World Tomorrow

  The smiling priest?

  Did you know, he said, that

  Jesus had tan skin

  Dark hair

  A big hooked nose

  Maybe

  When Jesus enters Jerusalem

  His black hair in braids

  And hooked Semitic nose

  Just a little out of place

  Among tourists from Toronto

  It’ll be time to talk again

  For sure

  If he’s riding a ’78 Skidoo

  We’ll hold a powwow

  Just for him.

  The Puzzle

  (Tom tries to tell Lollie what he thinks the future of First Nations Peoples will be)

  “Pretend,” he said

  “I’ve got five hundred boxes.

  Jigsaw puzzles, from the Goodwill store

  I take a handful of pieces

  From some boxes

  Two hands full from others

  None, from some.”

  Behind the church hall

  Powwow dancers practiced

  Laughing

  “What will be made,” I whispered

  “When it all gets assembled?”

  In his old aboriginal voice:

  “I don’t know. I don’t know at all

  But I think, on that day, even

  The manitous will hide.”

  “And on that day

  Where will I fit in?”

  “It’s a big puzzle.

  When we need to know where the white margins go

  Maybe we’ll look you up.”

  Ten Little Indians

  (Wasn’t anybody paying attention?)

  Ten little Indians north of the ‘Soo

  A few white men’s germs and then there were two

  Two little Indians, out in the sun

  Waited on promises, till there was one

  One tough little Indian, somehow alive

  A few years passed,
and then there were five

  Better watch, before it’s too late

  As the last powwow I counted eight.

  Peter, Water, and Church

  (Two media; two religions.)

  “Jesus,”I told him

  “Walked on water -

  At least that’s what the nun told me

  And anyone with a steel ruler

  Obviously measures truth

  Very carefully.”

  He nodded. “They told me that, too,

  And of course, my elders told me

  Just so I’d know, that

  Mishipizou, the great lynx serpent

  Swims through water. And rock.”

  “You’ve seen this monster?”

  “Not me. I think he’s waiting

  For Jesus to return

  So they can talk about

  The many uses

  Of water and rock.”

  The Canoe Becomes the Passage

  (Lollie takes up Tom’s offer to see some petroglyphs.)

  I was too old to be in that canoe

  Generations of friends groaned along the shore

  The sky was full of eyes and

  Two loons looked like nuns:

  Too old; far too old

  What the hell, I thought, that’s what a canoe is for

  To carry us to the very edge of cold fish and air

  To the edge of drown and sing

  And, in the long run, cold eyes hunt us all

  Life was always meant to be an edge of sorts

  A temporary challenge to the grave

  An act of bravery performed under a disapproving gaze

  I was too old not to be in that canoe

  Solid Rock, Creator’s Touch

  (Lollie and Tom visit a petroglyph site by canoe)

  He touched the red ochre on rock and

  When a crow called, he said

  "I am that crow, that song

  I am power in the water

  I am movement in the treetops"

  I forgave him; he was born

  Of loon cry and the pagan dark

  In old deep lakes

  I touched the red ochre painting

  But the cold rock

  Said nothing to me

  He forgave me; I was

  Chained to normal

  By a bearded old man

  Who once reached down to give

  Nothing but life

  To Adam

  Last Time We Came to Ground

  (Tom and Lollie go camping in the deep woods)

  When we came to ground

  There was a flat spot big enough

  For a tent, but the

  Hill loomed with forest and the

  Water was dark as a cave

  When we lit a fire

  I was defiant, but

  He laughed at me

  And the night came

  Anyway,

  And something howled its

  Soul out under the black water

  Soundlessly. I wished

  We’d pulled the canoe in;

  You should always hold close

  To your lifeline

  When the dark came

  There were no stars, so I

  Poked the fire and

  Listened to my heart;

  It fluttered

  In the aspen leaves;

  For a moment, I thought

  I'd heard a manitou whisper

  When I came to midnight

  He went down to the lake for water

  And noticed, suddenly

  That the black hills,

  Against the indigo skies

  Looked like teeth.

  Some Ancient Arts Survive

  (Lollie is less than shaken by the rock art she is shown, but is still satisfied with Tom’s efforts on her behalf.)

  She met a man by a far northern lake

  Who said, “You have a doctrinal ache

  A couple of nods

  And I’ll show you our gods

  And also my totem, the snake”

  Then he offered to “show her an etching”

  And she accused him of polytheological leching

  But she knew in her heart

  There’s more than one type of art

  And more than her theology needed stretching

  He put his heathen hand on her tush

  But she told him, “You don’t have to push

  I’ve taken your measure

  And I tell you there’s pleasure

  Just messing around in the bush”

  I won’t say she altered her religion

  But her theology changed just a smidgen

  And in between talkin’

  She saw those paintings on rock’n

  Managed some intercultural bridgin’

  Out by Otter Lake

  (Lollie has social intercourse with Tom Small Wolf)

  After the thunder

  The heat waning

  Resting in long grass

  Out by Otter Lake

  “So we’re maybe related?” I asked

  “Probably,” he said

  Passing me a beer

  “But you got a lot more

  White in you.”

  I nodded

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Nah,” he said

  “We were looking for a spy

  To go into the Tim Horton’s

  Find out what they’re planning.”

  Three Haikus About Noise

  (Lollie always found few things as dreadful as silence)

  Don’t be still, not now

  The woods are full of darkness

  And very still themselves

  Don’t be quiet, not yet

  Those old streets are far too hushed

  With midnights of lives

  Sing, sing crazy songs

  Till the last black crow has sprung

  Sunward, above life

  Music by the Lake

  (Lollie and Tom)

  Like a hurdy-gurdy organ tune

  To the silence by the lake

  Close to the grass, you hear

  The music lovers take

  Give me your hand, this score

  Rolls wild against the sky

  It holds all the songs we dared to sing

  Lovers, you and I

  Loons out by the islands

  Chickadees scattering seeds

  Saw the songs we dared to sing

  Lovers’ quiet needs

  Oh, we took chances by that water

  And laughed beneath that sky

  We mocked the cold and tuneless night

  Lovers, you and I

  The Foolish and the Brave

  (Tom explains about terrors)

  Yes, he said, here we still fear

  monsters

  The non-Christian monsters that

  thunder under the warm earth

  and take away so many

  of the unwary, who go in quest of

  the visions they get.

  The brave are lost first

  The young, next

  The caring, afterwards

  You don’t understand?

  Try the corner of Yonge and Dundas

  You’ll find the foolish and the brave

  In a place that makes the young old

  And the old, young.

  Of course, of course, you laugh

  but the rushing gut

  of bus and subway

  have swallowed more of my friends

  than any forest wendigo

  you’ll ever meet.

  Ravens I have Met

  (Lollie sees merit in First Nations religion)

  Ravens I have met

  Angels, no

  In my very own church

  No-one would have to believe anything

  That didn’t

  At least occasionally, bother

  To walk the good brown soil.

  Part 3: Heron Feathers Poems 1


  These are Lollie’s first poems about her mythical ancestor, Heron Feathers, a Cree woman living in what is now Northern Ontario, in 1835.

  Because Lollie’s mother didn’t know who the original Cree ancestor of the family was, Lollie feels free to make up both the person and the events.

  In this sequence, Heron Feathers meets Jean Dumont, a young French-Canadian coureur de bois, and leaves with him for the west.

  Under the Infinite Ceiling

  (Why must the gods come inside?)

  Jowls swinging

  Crow-on-the-Ground did her four times

  Around the Mide tent

  Her arthritis slowing the others of

  The Ultimate Mystery Society

  They disappeared inside

  Seven men, one old woman clutching

  Clan totems

  I know that the drumming

  And the songs

  Had everything to do with

  A small girl playing

  With the warm wind

  With the first berries

  This is the trick

  Of all priests

  To build a place small enough

  For the human mind

  To know it all

  And keep out of the rains

  That fall from

  The unknowable sky

  More Hills, More Trees

  (Heron Feathers in her teens)

  Long dreams and short days, dark tipi

  Dark, in the winter camp with my mother

  Chewing moccasins with my sister

  My father, two brothers, gone three days on the hunt

  “I want,” I said

  “To go beyond the high hill

  By the Lake of the Broken Pine.”

  “Nothing there,” said my mother

  Working the bone needle

  “More hills, more trees.”

  But she’d never been there

  “The men go. Maybe they’re there, now.”

  “Maybe cold,” mother said. “Wait.

  Someday in your children’s souls

  You will find further lands than any man

  Could ever know.”

  In my life, I thought

  I may know the taste of a thousand moccasins

  And not the view

  From one high stone hill.

  Sister Talk

  (Heron Feathers and her sister talk)

  “He’s a good hunter,” my sister said

  We sat on smooth rock by the reeds

  Sunlight on the lake

  Hurting our eyes

  “Strong, but sometimes too quick to anger.”

  What could I say

  He strode the forest like he owned it

  He paddles the water like the lake spirit

  Was his grandfather

  “You are foolish,” my sister said

  “You don’t want him, but

  You don’t know why.”

  What god ever made a woman

  Wise enough to know why?

  Maybe

  I wanted to go just one step

  Past the furthest place

  He’d ever go.

  Only Because

  (Why women leave their homes to go with passing strangers.)

  Only because he had a red sash

  And looked me in the eye with laughter

  Or so I said

  Actually he had

  Horizons in his eye

  The Touch

  (Jean tries to convert his new bride)

  He touched the cross and

  When a crow called, he said

  "That is just a crow:

  We should be glad

  God permits it"

  I forgave him; he was born

  Where beaver were pelts and

  Trees were lumber

  I touched the small silver thing

  But the cold metal