The Minor Odyssey of Lollie Heronfeathers Singer Read online

  (Sometimes an outsider has a different view)

  “When they hanged him,” he told me

  “They constipated our history

  Now it’s stuck.”

  “Welcome to the turd world,” he said

  “It’s the shits.”

  I was there to learn, so

  I nodded, but I saw only

  A people milling around a corral

  Trampling each other

  Waiting for a door

  The Unpeople

  (The people at the margins)

  There is no place to go

  So we have become the unpeople

  A pair of brown eyes in a kindergarten class

  A trace of blonde hair on the trapline

  We have built a fortress

  In our golden hearts

  And we mock the ladders

  Loving priests throw against our walls

  And the dollar coins the pure whites

  Pile against our doors

  To make sure they don’t open.

  George’s Lament

  (George has a few things he want to get said )

  Casually spawned by

  Frankenwhite and Igor Indian

  We shamble through the

  Damp halls of time.

  We were the created people

  Not the numbered red people,

  Boiling on the reserves, nor

  The carefully measured white

  Displaying their lawns.

  We were rulers of the plains

  Now we measure the meters of our lives

  In the resonance

  Of an old guitar

  We are the loaders of trucks the

  Diggers of ditches the

  Collectors of beer bottles

  From roadsides. from

  Cars going by

  Without stopping to know us

  We were golden, once, but

  Have drifted down like

  Fallen leaves beneath the oak

  Pray for us

  Some days we find it hard

  To pray for ourselves

  Lucy’s Reply to George

  (For those who bear children, the future is always ahead)

  Remember this:

  Always

  Roots heave pavement

  Now we are the people at the edges, the shadows

  In the April sunshine, the image at the corner of your eye, the weeds

  At the edges of the cornfield, the underbrush they never cleared out

  Behind the old barn

  You’ll find us where you least expect us

  Where the red river meets the unfeeling white ice

  Where the forest meets the pavement

  Find us walking along the edges of all this

  Weeds beside the railway

  Someday, while others are

  Dreaming of Saturday

  We will again gather stars to us

  Someday, old, you’ll be moving

  Slowly down the stairs

  Only to meet our Young Ones

  Eyes wide, coming up

  Remember this:

  In this long, hard, winter;

  This woman winter:

  Incrementally, patiently

  Roots heave pavement.

  But the Weeds Come Back

  (Tenacious things, they are)

  The statue of General Middleton

  Grows no weeds around it

  Thistle and dandelion

  Poisoned in the spring

  By the parks’ man

  I suspect

  The General would have liked that

  Around the gray statue

  Grass is neat

  Every week, the green blades

  Reach up

  And the parks’ man comes by

  And lops their heads off

  I imagine

  The General would have approved

  I’ve often thought

  If the statue of the General

  Were lopped off

  The process

  Would not have to be repeated.

  At the Legion on Bleeker Street

  (Lollie finds some odd places to inspire her writings.)

  Once and soon

  These will not be ordinary men, but

  Old eagles

  Whispering down to feed

  High among the mountains

  Far above the streets

  But for now

  They come to cages

  Only half here

  Their inner eyes

  Knowing what it was

  To call out thunder

  And put mountains

  Under gold wings

  Nails on Sale Today

  (Lollie’s getting a little too carried away with the plight of the Métis.)

  Formerly

  We were eagles

  Formerly

  We had horizons

  Without end

  Formerly

  You might have

  Come to the hills

  To ask advice

  Of the eagles

  But now, even when

  The sun shines

  Are all you’ll find are

  A web of streets and

  A people still struggling

  To pull nails from their hands.

  Bridge

  (A bit of Métis history, according to George.)

  We were the bridge

  Between the east and the west

  The dark forest and the big skies

  We were the bridge between

  Red and white

  Using the Métis bridge

  Canada carried itself

  Onto the plains

  And up to the highest mountains

  So what happened?

  We were the bridge to the prairies

  The road to the mountains

  And they walked

  All

  Over

  Us

  Partly

  (Lollie wonders about being of mixed lineage)

  Part-moon in the sky

  Part nature in my blood

  Partway home

  I hope

  Sometimes there’s a train riding me

  And I am pounding granite

  With my feet

  Sometimes I am my great grandmother

  Smelling smoke on the forest wind

  Sometimes I am only part of me

  A mouse afraid behind

  A fallen leaf

  By the Red River

  (Just a thought)

  A small red dragonfly

  Sunning its wings

  On a willow trunk

  By the river

  Dozens of new shoots

  From the deftly-sawed stump

  Some of us need roots in a storm

  Some need wings in the sunlight

  If you try to have both

  You must lift the world

  Afternoons

  (A good visitor knows when it’s time to leave.)

  These are the several ways of Sunday afternoons:

  That the increase in time is less than you feared;

  The weather outside less frightful;

  That the many modes of

  Hunger

  Become evident

  (please continue)

  That men and women roll forward on the train

  Of today, scattering tomorrows like chickens

  On rusty old tracks

  And all the bears of yesterday

  Fall behind, their tongues so long

  They trip on them

  (so finally)

  Afternoons should be spent

  Elsewhere.

  Lucy is knitting guillotines:

  It’s time to go back into the jungle

  And find my lost son, who has been abducted

  By the Cookie Monster.

  Part 7: Heron Feathers Poems 3

  Lollie wrote these poems about Heron Feathers in her later years.
<
br />   Remembering the Songs

  (Heron Feathers & Jean share memories)

  Many years later, I told Jean

  “You were the first white men

  Around the village campfire.

  They sang a song designed

  To frighten very ugly wendigos.

  It was a calculated insult.

  “I remember,” Jean said.

  “The priest sang a Latin hymn

  And, not knowing what to do

  We sang ‘Aupres de ma Blonde’”

  We laughed, but in all our decades together

  I never hated a wendigo

  As much as

  That imaginary blonde.

  Home is Where the Hugs Were

  (Heron Feather’s brother comes to visit the Red River settlement)

  My brother, High-Backed Wolf came by

  When my oldest daughter was eight

  And Jean was west on the hunt.

  We talked of the family, birth and death, and

  Not at all of deep woods nor distances

  Between sister and brother

  He came to trade in beaver skins

  There was a growing demand

  Better payments, and not many left back home

  Home. I looked at the village on the edge of the plains

  A woman always has one home in her heart

  Where her father told her stories

  Were it not for stories told by fathers

  Girls might become women without seeing in men

  A funny story, a deep laugh, a warm hug

  On a cold night.

  Voices

  (Heron Feathers at 35)

  When our child left

  One spring

  As the wild raspberries ripened

  I whispered her name in the

  Shortening of days

  I killed the grasshoppers, only because

  They couldn’t live long enough

  To miss their children

  At midnight I wake up

  Thinking I hear my own mother’s voice

  In the wind through the wild raspberries

  Bones

  (Jean does some trading with the Cheyenne.)

  “Leave those bones alone!”

  Jean would yell

  But the kids never listened.

  While he hunted buffalo

  They played make-the-man on the floor

  With the earthly remains of Old Dog Howling

  Till Belle (the hound) stole the bundled right hand.

  She cried when we caught her, but

  We never found those bones.

  In the spring, Two Buffaloes came again

  To trade beaver pelts

  (From mountains far to the west)

  And to see his kin.

  I placed the bones on the prairie

  On the red velvet blanket,

  Two Buffaloes silent at the sight

  Of his white remaindered uncle.

  Jean put sweetgrass in each eye socket

  And a rosary on his chest.

  He said the old man would go to both heavens.

  When Two Buffaloes pointed at the missing hand

  Jean explained that the White God

  Had finally taken part of Old Dog Howling.

  Two Buffaloes traded only with us.

  Coming back each year to watch

  The bones disappear

  One by one

  Mud and Stars

  (Heron Feathers in old age)

  Silent as moonbeams pelicans fly past the old woman although you should know that they are white with black wingtips keeping them up and she is brown and so old even her great grandchildren stay away, perhaps aware that she knows too much or nothing at all, even about the pelicans circling back to the prairie slough and landing by the bulrushes, their wings folding lifetimes and crytimes and even lost husbands against their warm chests as they paddle straight towards her muddy feet under a turning sky stretching up past the blue and out to the infinite stars.

  Part 8: The Journey Home

  Lollie leaves the bright lights of Notre dame du Portage for the streetlights of Etobicoke.

  Woman of the Wind

  (Migration of the Lollie to the deep woods of Etobicoke from the open plains of infinite questioning)

  I, finally, became a woman

  Of the quest

  A Plymouth brought me

  To the floodplain of my life

  Following some river

  Of sweetgrass smoke

  And frankincense.

  Now I am silent

  Listening for footsteps

  On the wind

  Or meaning in the brown earth

  Finding only

  My own breathing

  My own footprints.

  God! I would sell my soul

  Just to know

  I actually had one

  And that

  The wrinkled old men

  Who dreamed gods

  Could also dream

  A free woman

  Holding even one small angel

  To her breasts.

  Exile

  (If they made jack handles eight inches longer, the additional leverage would allow a woman to change a tire)

  My feet sore from jumping on the goddam jack handle

  Trying to sunder two nuts from the right rear tire

  Trans-Canada highway west of Terrace Bay

  Tractor-trailer rigs dissolving my proximity barrier before

  A severance of distance and fading sound

  A distant view of Lake Superiority

  Leaves leaving forever their one summer

  Running around my knees like lost cats.

  I think the ice-gutted winds from Creeplaces have

  Pried my cold fingers from six things more than I really knew

  I just wish a severance of cold metal was as neatly done.

  I appeared like a tramp at a church door

  Offering the poor-box my golden opinions

  But after the borrowed, the hand-me-downs

  The seashell-gathered oddities were politely refused

  I found myself holding out an empty purse

  To which they added some curious coins.

  Disassociated at that birth, I am separated in the fall

  Haunted by leaves, annoyed by nuts,

  Just a bit divorced from whatever place someone told me

  Was my home.

  Dawn

  (Lollie puts a positive spin on her odyssey)

  When they ask, “Did she truly live?”

  Say she found some footprints, however faint

  To follow

  Say she learned then how the morning shone

  When there were good things to do

  Say she learned that days

  Could be too short

  And the nights

  No longer

  Infinite

  Tell the world she laughed at the shadow of her car

  Stretching before her

  At dawn

  Say that maybe a wound or two

  Got left behind.

  Ashes

  (It’s not as bad as she feared)

  I always fled flames

  Till they caught me, now I know

  I really feared ashes

  Where Do the Gods Go

  (More questions.)

  Where do the gods go

  When they die?

  Does no-one chant for

  Mizoupishou of the rocks

  Is there no drum for

  Grandfather Northwind

  In our kitchens

  We believe in Jesus

  But the church needs repairs

  And the organ is off-key

  We believe in God but

  It was too cold last winter

  We are prodigal children

  Wondering how to get home

  Or if the stove is still lit

  The River

  (Three haikus)
<
br />   I have gone downstream

  On the rivers of old time

  In a leaking boat

  I have come upstream

  On a fresh wind over pines

  On gold-feathered wings

  I have turned in circles

  The world spinning giddy by

  Learning the river

  The Clowns

  (You can tell she’s back in Toronto)

  This world, she said

  is a madhouse

  where a group of clowns

  have been mistakenly

  incarcerated

  and even when they stand on their heads

  and juggle with their feet

  no-one will let them go

  Prove you’re crazy

  and we’ll let you in

  I’ve been looking for God, I said

  You know the rest.

  Why We Write Poems

  (My explanation. Lollie says it’s close enough.)

  When we were born, there were ten of us

  Nine were me

  The other, last born, was not

  When we die, there will be ten of us

  Nine will be me

  The last to die will not

  All our life we've sat at the table

  Waiting for the tenth to start

  And nine of us are hungry

  ***END OF POEMS***

  Note on This Book

  The Minor Odyssey of Lollie Heronfeathers Singer was published in 2000 by Penumbra Press as a 128-page book. You can order a handsome copy from https://www.penumbrapress.com/, or order it from your bookstore; ISBN 1-894131-12-6.

  Questions about Lollie

  Who's the Chick on the Cover of the Penumbra Edition?

  Not Lollie, but Heron Feathers, Lollie's mythical ancestor. Lollie invented her and she's a genuine kitsch white-person's idea of an Indian. Lollie knows Heron Feathers is too good to be real, and says so to Lucy, in "Let There be Pencil".

  The ceramic Indian Maid with the discount sticker seemed like a good symbol for the story.

  When Does Lollie's Search for Community Begin and End?

  It begins with "When the Words Stopped". When a relationship starts to die, a man's most feared weapon is silence. The silences start small, and grow like a cancer, and there's so little a woman can do.

  It ends with "I Guess I’m a Métis", in which Lollie gets what may be the first sincere and warm hug she's had in a decade or so. Hugs are highly underrated in this life.

  When Does Lollie's Search for Whatever Gods Might Be Begin and End?

  Ah, the heart of the book! Starts before the book opens, and continues well past the last poem.

  Is This a Real Odyssey?

  The opposite, really. Odysseus wanted to go home, and get away from the gods that hounded him. Lollie leaves her home in the hope of finding some gods.

  Is This an Accurate Depiction of First Nations or Métis Culture?

  There's a line in the movie, Sixth Sense, that goes, "they only see what they want to see". Lollie's like that; she tends to pick and remember those views that she finds colourful or those that match her expectations. And it's been a while since her Odyssey; things have changed a lot for both groups, mostly for the better. I told Lollie about all these things, but she told me what I could do with myself, adding that she's "a poet, not a freakin' sociologist".

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  ***END***