Pima Road Notebook
Keith Ekiss’s first book of poems, Pima Road Notebook, has been published by New Issues. Here is a series of poems from the collection selected by the author.
Bullet-Riddled Saguaro
The body appears diseased. Green
limbs amputated, like photographs
of children in war, mutilated,
burned alive. A body wants to die
but can’t: the roots still draw water.
The shotgun holes could house birds:
elf owl, cactus wren. An easy target,
the man can’t miss. Where one
stops to shoot another shoots,
fingering the trigger, surprised
each time how deeply it stands.
*
Field Trip
Outside the tribal museum, the raised flag
of a nation buried within a nation.
Our hand-me-down history book said,
They were like children, naked and afraid.
The timeline revealed when horses arrived,
a wooden cross stood for God
and soldiers. Stone clubs, worn, obsolete,
shaved from mesquite root, resembling
the potato mashers of New England kitchens.
Mulberry bows and arrow quivers tanned
from bobcat skin. Two feathers: hunting,
three feathers: war. The teacher clutched
my fingers in hers, pointed to the signs
I clearly hadn’t thought enough to read:
Hands are not allowed to touch the glass.
Photographs of women crafting baskets,
deeply-wrinkled, patient, smiling faces.
Human figures woven into each, a boy
trapped deep within the spiral of a maze,
lost or at home, I couldn’t say.
*
Picnic, Scottsdale
In this spot where sandstone buttes
erode into caves, city founders
laid their picnic. Men and women
overdressed, bowties and bustles,
jars of marmalade, tablecloths
cover the barrenness foretold in scripture,
desert where St. Jerome fasted
from all temptation and tested
his love of God. These were the years
when the Pima began to starve.
The river dammed and drained.
In times of famine, they ate seeds
of roasted quail brush, called edam,
catclaw, pickleweed, saltbush.
Settlers observed the children never begged,
no matter how destitute. Rattlesnakes
were never eaten, even in times
of greatest hunger. Plates of beef,
pickled cabbage, days without work
so rare they photographed the bounty
of fruits that ripened into belief:
God meant what they planted to grow.
Home before nightfall, a woman pities
the Pima girl she hires to sweep the house,
the mistress insisting with Christian effort
you could remove every speck of that dust.
*
The Mercy Patrols
Mormon pilgrims borrowed the river
and never gave it back. There was rain
for winter wheat, nothing in summer
for cotton or melon. New needs: sugar,
currency. Men cut trees to sell—
mesquite forest, once horse-thick
along the Gila, disappeared. If neighbors
only fed their own family, a widow
starved. It wasn’t that long ago.
Children forced east to boarding school
died of winter. The Pima carried
gourd water freely to travelers,
migrants heady with the California rush,
whose children pulled the water out
beneath the Pima’s feet.
*
Calendar Stick
Owl Ear slashed a stick to record events—
comet, solstice, railroad, birth.
Armies never burned these houses.
No infection blankets, no Gatlings, no treaties.
Bored soldiers ticked off days.
Playing games with the natives, corporals
won the sprints, the Pima the long distance races.
As fast as boys run, they never catch the river.
What’s lost, netting fish with bare hands,
river reeds braided into combs.
What remains, sayings for grief at parting—
Ravens have overwhelmed us.
*
Staying Sickness
If you cause the wrong owl suffering, or disturb
jackrabbit tracks while your wife lies pregnant,
if you eat berries claimed by coyote, a sickness
might take years to surface, blisters swelling
in your child’s mouth. You must hear the songs
while the shaman swings a coyote tail
about the child.
Thus, soft talk before a hunt,
speak obliquely of the quarry. The badger causes
throat sores. Field mouse makes a baby not shit.
The quail hunter uses caution, the eggs
and meat are eaten, but the head’s torn off,
preventing blindness. You can track cottontail,
relishing the boiled ears, even if your wife carries
another child. Surround the rabbit on horseback,
drive it by fire from the brush before a feast.
Settlers will mistake the hollow bones for birds,
so obviously designed for flight.
*
Reclamation
The landscape needs fewer words—
lexicon of birds dispersed.
Toxic slurry, spoil piles, chloride pools.
There’s a rawness to it, like beaten flesh.
When it’s been filled in and over
a tentative forest takes hold
one unsure of its roots.
