Living the Dream

The landscape is full of women
Tattered dresses fluttering
At the hem of errors
Blossoms, nodding the dry heads
After the balls we have attended
Wine stains and gravy
Spotting the silks
Once we were young. Once.

No longer do the seeds drop
To fertile ground. Our feet
Are blood rust.
But, Lord, do we tower. We tower.

But, Lord don’t we reach. Reach
For sun and moon and stars
Things we had no time to notice then
When we were too close too earth
And Father Sun was out of reach
Because of the shadowing mother’s skirts.

Our new greening welcomes the sky
And the touch of the moon moves us.

Tags: Poems by Shewolf
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He walked as if the wind blew against his back,
head down, an almost running walk,
shoulders humped and feet wide apart to keep balance
with weight shifting the balance of owness.

What he carried was heavy. The burden-carrier
of the community. The laughing stock,
the Boogity man, sorrow slumped
against the bridge pylons, was his designated
role.

“Here Louis, have a swig!” Pee in a bottle
and a pack of kids tormenting the thirster.

Parents kept their kids in line,
“Hush, or I will give you to Louis!”

“Hey, Louis, who’s yer Daddy?”
and they were all related.

Mothers giving a non-present parent
a face and name to her single-parented child.
“Look, there’s yer Daddy!”
At two, the child was grateful
before he knew the joke.

Louis was hit and run. Mother says,
“Oh, my god, finally. I knew it was going to happen.”
Child on the floor, wept, “Is my Daddy going to live?”

There was no consolation for the grieving child
when she tried to explain.

How much we owe this man,
bent to the baggage of a benign community.
If Louis had been my Daddy,
I’d have walked the metered main street
to fend off the flurry of jests.
Instead, I write him poetry
for I am a foreigner in this strange land
where even the least of these are prophets
carrying our crosses, like good fathers would.

Tags: Poems, Riverside Louis by Shewolf
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My Grandmother gave birth, the hard way,
Alone, in the house, on Reserve B. She labored
long and hard, too hard, and Louis,
born with a wine stain on his face, they said,
and he danced when he walked, sideways.
He faltered for five years before he taught the ground
to weave with him.
The nuns said, she did something wrong,
or maybe, she was to give this child back to them
to raise in Godly ways. She refused. She knew the lash
of Residential School nuns. She would have none of it.
She moved out into the bush, took a rabbit, skinned it,
Wrapped it in her baby’s blanket and took it to town.
Said he died. Even took flowers and buried him
In the rain, in the courtyard of the old Church,
That sits behind the old school.
She cried.
“Lord T’underin’ Jeesus” but she cried. Not for show,
either. She buried the child she had been.

Tags: Poems, Riverside Louis by Shewolf
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Sometimes Louis walks like fluid-filled,
Seeping around the corners of downtown Desmarais,
KFC, Riverside Bar, Riverside Gas, Northern store,
Home Hardware, Burger Baron-Pizza Place,
Northern Store, Northern other store,
and the Band Liquor Store. That is where
his shadow seeps around the corners.
Sometimes Louis goes to church,
but only for funerals or free meals or rides.

Funerals almost sobered Louis and he walked woodenly
past his usual haunts to the big blue community hall
on the last night of the wake, he called “Awake!”
Here, he took in shapes of flowers and the heavy
smell of carnations, never the cards or the letters
golden in the care for the moment. He scuffed
to the front and peered into the next box
that held the next new release from the cells of life.
A man, a mother, a child never failed to bring Louis out
and he could look really sad because sadness was kin to him.

“Doesn’t he look good, cleaned up?” the crowd would titter.
They waited for Louis to topple over in grief, pull his hair,
cut off his finger, spill the flask of courage from his coat pocket.

After the viewing, Louis let the crowd shoulder him
to the white building at the edge of South Wabasca Lake
where hymns and chants skittered across the water
landing on things that needed them.

Louis must have always been a dying old man.
The man in the bottle was his father, his grandfather, his child.
He swigged the swill of a million tears held back
just to feel. “Don’t he look good?” No, he looks dead.
He can not get out of there fast enough
to drown that feeling of almost crying
for anything that has died. Riverside Louis
never misses a funeral for the chance to grieve.

Tags: Poems, Riverside Louis by Shewolf
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Louis went to Residential School in Desmarais.
Boy’s beds lined up against the frost covered wall.
Sometimes boys cried. He heard them, stuff the bedding
into their mouths and take big breathes of air.
That’s all. Big breathes of air and a silent moan. Oh, yes,
there were sighs that you could not scrape off the walls
come spring, or wash off the sheets with lye.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God!”

Little rectangle windows, etched with cold,
could be scraped with a fingernail,
like notes to God, because he figured
God could read backwards and B’s
could be D’s without the crack of a ruler
and the slate is wiped clean
with a bright winter’s sun.

“Pray for us sinners!”

Louis knew sins by the bruises
on the palm of his hand, and the backs
of his legs and the stripes on his back.
Who else would have told him praying in Cree
was evil? He made the tongue
move these words. Not babble
rolled easily from his pursed lips.

“Wekâwimisk ayamihestamâwinân,
piyâstâhuyâk, anotch mina wi nipiyâki. Pitane ekusi ikkik.”

He gets things mixed up, even yet,
forgetting that he’s not the only one
labeled as sinner. The fruit of his vine
dribbles down the front of his shirt
falling onto the earth that will suck him dry
and empty as the prayer that folds
in English across his breath Sometimes
The Father is a Cree Chief. Sometimes
Mary is his mother, Bertha. Sometimes
he cries in Cree.

Kit’atamiskâtin Marie, siyâkaskineskâkuyan Manito o sâkihituwin, kitehîk ayâw Kise-Manito. Ispitchi kakkiyaw iskwewok kiya ayiwâk kit’iteyittâkusin ayiwâk mina iteyittâkusin Jesus ka ki kikiskawat.
Kitchitwa Marie Kise-Manito Wekâwimisk ayamihestamâwinân, piyâstâhuyâk, anotch mina wi nipiyâki. Pitane ekusi ikkik.
Amen

Hail Mary, full of grace.
Our Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.

Tags: Poems, Riverside Louis by Shewolf
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